The flood, as the ledger 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.
Half 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
28% of all open-tender deadlines fall on a Monday — twice the rate of midweek days — and three-quarters of those before 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.