One bidder, one winner: a fifth of Germany’s EU-wide contracts had no competition
We counted the bids behind 250,875 German contract awards published on TED. In 20.6% of them, exactly one offer was on the table. Greece is at 48%, France at 16% — and the sector matters more than the country.
78 days from notice to award in Germany — and why most “average durations” you read are wrong
We measured the time between a German contract notice and its award across 131,348 awards from 4,490 buyers. Median: 78 days. Planning contracts take 133. And the first version of our own number was 14 days — here is what went wrong.
HOW TO SEARCH“Frankfurt” appears in 46 tender titles. 434 tenders are in Frankfurt.
Public buyers write titles for themselves, not for you: “LV 327.1 carpentry works”, “Lot 14”, “26-0381 main building”. We looked at what a title actually contains — and what it takes to find the tenders that never say what they are.
THE NUMBERSThe flood, as the record saw it: Valencia’s reconstruction month by month
On 29 October 2024 the DANA floods devastated Valencia’s suburbs. In the tender record, reconstruction begins within days — and twenty-two months later, it still hasn’t returned to normal.
THE NUMBERSHalf of next year’s tenders are already predictable — we counted
We tracked 444,534 buyer-and-category pairs through six years of contracting. Between 54% and 62% of them buy the same category again the following year. Public procurement is a calendar, not a lottery.
REVEALEDEurope’s tenders die on Monday morning — the weekend tax on bidders
A quarter of all open-tender deadlines fall on a Monday — 1.6× the quietest weekday — and where a time is recorded, most expire by noon. The unpaid overtime is structural.
THE NUMBERSThe war next door, written in Poland’s purchase orders
Security tenders up eightfold since 2021. Accommodation and social-care contracting up 90% in the exact quarter four million refugees arrived. Poland’s procurement record is a war diary kept by accountants.
REVEALED66,425 contracts priced JUST below the line where competition begins — and 676 above it
Below €15,000, a Spanish public contract can be awarded directly. We counted the contracts priced within one hundred euros of that line — on both sides of it.
EXCLUSIVEThe kiosk that won 7,323 public contracts — and why every one of them is legal
One company. Ten public buyers. Seven thousand direct awards. What the most frequently awarded supplier in our Spanish corpus looks like — and why it is perfectly legal.
HOW TOThis village announced its school build TWO YEARS early — if you knew where to look
A small municipality near the Danish border is building a school. Its tender history called the construction boom a year and a half in advance — here is how to read the signal.
THE NUMBERSWarsaw gives you 18 days to bid. Amsterdam gives you 74. Same single market.
We measured the bidding window — publication to deadline — for 86,000 open tenders across 24 countries. The single market gives you four times more time in some countries than in others.
WE CHECKEDSpain’s open market is 5.5× bigger than Brussels can see — we measured it
We rechecked all 72 sources feeding our corpus and measured how much of the open market a TED-only observer misses. Spain was 5.5× bigger than it looked — and we found our own bugs too.