Report · August 2026

EU construction procurement: Europe's most competitive public market?

We analysed every construction-works award published on TED over the last 36 months - 151,624 awarded lots across 13,712 public buyers. Construction is the largest slice of EU public procurement by tender count, and the data shows it is also one of the most contested: real competition is the default here, not the exception.

151,624

awarded lots analysed

13,712

public buyers

5.1

average bidders per tender

39%

of markets genuinely open

5.1 bidders per tender - far above the software market

Where bidder counts are disclosed, the average construction tender received 5.1 bids - compared with just 3.1 in software and IT services. For bidders that changes the game: in construction, winning is less about finding uncontested tenders and more about choosing the buyers and markets where your cost base and track record give you a genuine edge.

39% of buyer markets are wide open. Only 3% are locked.

For every buyer we build a per-market competitiveness profile - who wins their construction lots, how concentrated those wins are, and how many suppliers typically bid (the methodology is public). Among the 5,285 buyer markets with five or more awarded lots:

39% are genuinely open - fragmented awards, four or more average bidders, and outsiders winning routinely. In the software market that figure is 11%.
59% are moderately contested - a recurring set of regional players, but no stranglehold.
3% are locked - one supplier holds 70%+ of awarded lots. Rare in this sector, but real - and worth knowing about before you price a bid.

Even the most competitive market has locked corners

Two verified examples from the award record - public data any bidder could have checked before pricing a proposal:

Magyar Földgáztároló Zrt. (Hungarian gas storage operator)

VABEKO Kft. won 94% of 32 awarded lots in the last 36 months.

Fóti Közszolgáltató Nonprofit Kft. (Hungarian municipal services)

Penta Kft. won 95% of 19 awarded lots in the last 36 months.

Incumbency is not wrongdoing - repeat wins can reflect genuine specialisation or local capacity. But if you are bidding against it, you deserve to know before you start estimating.

Methodology & honest caveats

Source: award notices published on TED (CPV division 45 - construction works), trailing 36 months to August 2026, counted at lot level.
Supplier identities are entity-resolved before counting - the same company under different spellings or subsidiaries counts as one supplier.
Bidder counts are averaged over tenders that disclose them (most, not all, do).
We deliberately publish no aggregate euro totals: framework agreements are recorded at ceiling values, which inflate sums until normalised. We'd rather give you fewer numbers than wrong ones.
Incumbency examples are hand-verified; rows caused by notice-parsing artifacts (for example, procurement review bodies recorded in a winner role on some national notices) were excluded rather than published.

Check any buyer's market before you price a bid

The analysis behind this report runs on every tender in Tenderlist - incumbency, concentration, and bidding depth, one click from any notice.

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