Data report · free to cite
State of SME public-sector bidding 2026
Compiled by BidSquirrel · 154,124 award notices · figures cover the 24 months to 30 June 2026 · published 5 July 2026, revised 2 August 2026
How open is UK public procurement to small firms in 2026? We looked at 154,124 Great Britain award notices — England, Scotland and Wales — published by 5,883 public bodies over two years, and pulled the findings that survive both the measurement window and the population they were measured on. It is free to cite; a link back is all we ask.
Revised 2 August 2026. The first edition’s three headline findings were withdrawn and replaced, not adjusted: one was measured on a field that the Procurement Act has since made unusable, one was an artefact of a seven-week measurement window, and one had simply stopped being true. What changed and why is set out under “What we withdrew, and why” below.
53.2%
of UK public contracts are worth under £100,000 — the market is overwhelmingly made of contracts a small firm can actually deliver
6.7%
of contracts go to the 100 most prolific suppliers — by volume there is no closed shop, whatever the headline deals suggest
77%
of transport contracts are under £100k, against 43% of construction — where the contracts are is not where the winnable ones are
Derived from 154,124 deduplicated GB award notices over the 24 months to 30 June 2026, both national registers. Shares and medians, never totals. See how we counted below.
Most public contracts are small
The public procurement that reaches the news is measured in billions. The public procurement that actually gets awarded is not. Of the 139,167 contracts in this window that state a value, 53.2% are worth less than £100,000 and 70.6% less than £250,000. The median is £88,570.
Only 5.8% of contracts exceed £5m. For a firm of five to a hundred people the practical reading is that the scale problem is mostly imagined: the typical public contract is the size of a decent private-sector job, and there are tens of thousands of them a year.
By volume, there is no winners' club
217,889 contracts went to 86,194 distinct suppliers. The 100 most prolific suppliers took 6.7% of them, and the top ten took 1.7%. The single most successful supplier in the country won 1,030 contracts in two years — out of 217,889. Counted by number of contracts, this is not a closed shop.
62.0% of those suppliers won exactly once. That figure is real but it is also window-dependent, and the first edition of this report got it wrong by not saying so. A supplier who wins once a quarter cannot be observed winning twice inside a seven-week window. The same calculation, on the same logic, over three window lengths:
7 weeks (the first edition’s window)
9,821 suppliers observed
12 months
51,943 suppliers observed
24 months (this edition)
86,194 suppliers observed
Any market looks more fragmented the less of it you look at. If you see a "proportion of one-time winners" statistic quoted anywhere — including in our own first edition — ask what window it was measured over before you believe it.
One caveat we keep stating: this is measured by volume of contracts. By value, a small number of suppliers do concentrate a very large share of the money. That is a real and different story, and we do not blend it into this one.
Where the contracts are is not where the winnable ones are
Construction awards the most contracts of any sector — and has among the fewest small ones. Transport awards fewer, and 77.3% of them are under £100,000. For a smaller firm choosing where to compete, that density matters more than the raw volume.
| Sector | Share of contracts | Median value | Under £100k |
|---|---|---|---|
| Construction | 11.2% | £140,004 | 42.5% |
| Health & social | 11.0% | £149,812 | 44.3% |
| Business services | 10.8% | £60,000 | 62.8% |
| Transport | 8.9% | £34,944 | 77.3% |
| Software | 7.2% | £95,455 | 51.5% |
| IT services | 7.0% | £129,999 | 43.6% |
| Architecture & engineering | 6.1% | £90,000 | 53.9% |
| Education | 4.6% | £53,908 | 67.5% |
Business services, education and transport are the small-contract-dense sectors; construction, health and IT services are where the typical contract is larger. Which is the right target depends on your scale and appetite, which is exactly the call our scoring is built to help you make. If you are deciding what to put on the table, our price-to-win tool and the guide on how much to bid for a government contract work through it.
What we withdrew, and why
This report was first published on 5 July 2026. All three of its headline findings have been withdrawn rather than adjusted. We are publishing what they were and why they failed, because the failures are instructive and because a correction you cannot check is just another claim.
“40.5% of GB tenders are flagged as not suitable for small firms.”
The field no longer supports any claim. 8,569 of 10,692 live notices carry no SME-suitability flag; of the 2,123 that do, Find a Tender sets it true on all 1,864 of its own and never false. The original figure was a Contracts Finder population, and Contracts Finder is now 266 live notices — 2.5% of the catalogue. A share computed over a field that is never false is not a measurement.
“89.9% of suppliers who won public contracts won only once.”
An artefact of window length. A supplier winning quarterly cannot be seen winning twice inside seven weeks. The same calculation gives 81.7% at 7 weeks, 67.3% at 12 months and 62.0% at 24 months. We now report the 24-month figure and publish the sensitivity alongside it.
“Construction is the single busiest slice of live public work, at 13% of notices.”
No longer true of the live catalogue. Health & social care leads live notices at 17.1% against construction’s 14.9%. Construction does still lead by volume of contracts awarded (11.2%), which is the more stable question, and that is what this edition reports.
“We hold no data on the number of bidders per tender.”
True when written, false now. Find a Tender publishes a bid count on 42.3% of its award notices following the Procurement Act’s transparency duties. Contracts Finder still publishes none at all. What that data does and does not show has its own report: How competitive are UK public contracts?
Two of those four are the same mistake in different clothes: a number that describes our measurement rather than the market. The single-bidder statistic has exactly the same problem, and we have taken it apart separately in How competitive are UK public contracts?
How we counted
The short version, so you can judge the figures for yourself. The fuller picture - every source we scan, what we deliberately do not, and how each notice is scored - is on our coverage & methodology page.
Drawn from BidSquirrel’s index of GB public-sector award notices — England, Scotland and Wales — over the 24 months to 30 June 2026. 154,124 awards from 5,883 buyers across Find a Tender and Contracts Finder. Not a national total.
Deduplicated to one row per procurement and award value, so a contract published on both registers is counted once. The first edition did not deduplicate across registers.
90.3% of awards in the window state a value, so the value findings rest on 139,167 real figures rather than estimates. We still report shares and medians rather than a total: award value is hyper-concentrated and its top end contains clear data-entry errors.
Supplier counts screen placeholder strings — sentences and “see notice for supplier list” text were being counted as suppliers before July 2026.
Fragmentation is measured by VOLUME of contracts. By value, a small number of suppliers do concentrate a large share of the money; that is a real and different story we do not blend into this one.
Figures that depend on the length of the measurement window are published with that sensitivity shown, not asserted at one window and left there.
Bidder and competition data is covered separately in “How competitive are UK public contracts?”, because it comes from one register only and needs its own caveats.
The tender and award notices these figures are drawn from are public information published by contracting authorities. This service contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. We aggregate and analyse it; we are not the publisher of the underlying notices.
Citing this report
Journalists and researchers are welcome to quote these figures. Please attribute them to BidSquirrel and link back to this page so readers can see the basis. Questions about the method, or a bespoke cut for a story? Email hello@bidsquirrel.co.uk.
BidSquirrel, “State of SME public-sector bidding 2026”, https://bidsquirrel.co.uk/state-of-sme-bidding. Figures cover GB (England, Scotland and Wales) public-sector award notices, the 24 months to 30 June 2026; value findings are shares and medians, not totals. Second edition, revised 2 August 2026.
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