One in nine UK public tenders receives a single bid
Published 21 September 2026
The median UK public tender attracts five bids. But 11% receive exactly one, and the least contested band is not the small stuff: contracts worth £1m to £10m have the highest single-bid rate of any value band, at 15%.
The headline number
Everyone in this market sells you more opportunities. Alerts, feeds, daily digests, 500 sources. The assumption underneath is that finding work is the hard part.
It is not. Discovery has been free since Contracts Finder launched. The hard part is deciding which of the things you have already found are worth the two weeks of unpaid effort a serious bid costs. And on that question the published data is unusually blunt.
What the distribution actually looks like
Across 3,635 notices that published bid counts, the median is five bidders. A quarter attracted two or fewer. A quarter attracted nine or more. The most contested single procurement in the set drew 230 bids.
So the market is not uniformly crowded. It is bimodal: a large tail of procurements almost nobody bids for, and a smaller set where the whole sector turns up.
| Bids received | Share of tenders |
|---|---|
| Exactly 1 | 11% |
| 2 to 3 | 26% |
| 4 to 9 | 40% |
| 10 or more | 23% |
The counterintuitive part: value does not buy you less competition
The instinct is that big contracts attract big competition and the quiet money is in small work. The data says the opposite in the middle of the range.
Contracts over £10m attract a median of ten bidders, more than twice the rest of the market. But the £1m to £10m band, which is real money for most suppliers, has the highest single-bid rate of any band at 15%, and a median of four bidders.
That band is the answer to where to look. It is large enough to matter and small enough that the national players have not bothered.
| Contract value | Notices | Median bids | Single bid |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under £100k | 199 | 4 | 14% |
| £100k to £1m | 1,188 | 4 | 12% |
| £1m to £10m | 871 | 4 | 15% |
| Over £10m | 640 | 10 | 6% |
By what is being bought
Services are the most likely to go uncontested and works the least. Construction and civil engineering draws a reliable field: only 4% of works tenders received a single bid, against 13% of services.
If you sell services, the implication is uncomfortable but useful: the contracts you are ignoring because they look unglamorous are the ones nobody else is bidding for either.
| Category | Notices | Median bids | Single bid |
|---|---|---|---|
| Works | 379 | 6 | 4% |
| Goods | 677 | 5 | 10% |
| Services | 2,579 | 5 | 13% |
What to do with this
Published win rates for established UK bidders sit around 25% to 30%, and the standard advice for improving them is to bid less and choose better. That advice is sound and almost impossible to follow, because nobody tells you which opportunities are the crowded ones until after you have lost.
Bid counts are published after the fact, on the award notice. That is too late for the tender you just lost, but not for the next one from the same buyer, in the same category, at the same value. Competition is a property of the buyer and the category, and it persists.
Which is the argument for working from contract expiry rather than from the tender feed. If you know a contract is coming back to market in fourteen months, you know who holds it, what they charge, and how many people bid last time, you can decide whether to pursue it before you have spent anything.
Method
Computed from 3,635 UK tender notices that published aggregate bid statistics under OCDS bids.statistics, drawn from 89,472 releases on the Find a Tender Service. Buyers are not obliged to publish bid counts and only about a quarter do, so this describes the notices that report, which may skew toward better-run procurements. Figures as at 21 September 2026, Open Government Licence v3.0.
Questions
- How many bidders does a typical UK public contract attract?
- Five is the median, across 3,635 UK tender notices that published aggregate bid statistics. A quarter attracted two or fewer bids and a quarter attracted nine or more.
- Which UK public contracts get the fewest bids?
- Contracts worth between £1m and £10m have the highest single-bid rate at 15%, and services are more likely to go uncontested than works. Contracts over £10m are the most contested, with a median of ten bidders.
- Why do some public tenders receive only one bid?
- Usually because the requirement is specialised, the incumbent is entrenched, the timescale is short, or the buyer is in a location or sector few suppliers cover. A single-bid procurement is not necessarily a stitch-up, and buyers dislike them: one bid means no price tension.
- Are UK buyers required to publish how many bids they received?
- No. Aggregate bid statistics appear on roughly a quarter of notices, which is why this analysis covers 3,635 rather than all of them. Buyers that do report may run better-organised procurements than those that do not.
See it on real contracts
The expiry radar applies this to every UK public contract with a published end date: what is expiring, who holds it now, and when the window opens.