78 days from notice to award in Germany — and why most “average durations” you read are wrong

If you win a public contract in Germany, how long after the notice does the award arrive? The honest answer is 78 days at the median, with a spread from five weeks for general supplies to more than four months for engineering and planning services.

The ordering is intuitive once you see it. Fuels and lab equipment are bought on price from a short list; construction has a fixed statutory rhythm; software and IT services involve negotiation rounds; planning contracts under the HOAI fee scale run through two-stage procedures with design presentations. For a bidder, the number is the length of the bridge between your submission and your first invoice.

Here is the trap. A contract award notice carries its own publication date — the day the award was announced. If you subtract that from the award date, you get the administrative lag of the announcement (zero to two weeks), not the procedure. Several national portals publish awards only, with no separate contract notice at all. Feed those into a naive “publication to award” calculation and the median collapses to a fortnight. That is what our first nightly build did, across 25,000 buyers. It looked plausible. It was noise.

The corrected measure only counts awards that can be tied to a contract notice published at least seven days earlier. That shrinks the measurable set from 25,000 buyers to 4,490 German buyers and 131,348 awards — and the median moves from 14 to 78 days. Fewer numbers, all of them meaning what they say. We publish the count next to every figure for exactly this reason: a duration without its n is a guess wearing a suit.