Québec Public Tenders, Summer 2026: The Data

Québec public tenders in summer 2026 came from 849 buyers, peaked before the season even started, and drew fewer bidders than most contractors picture. Alliance Optima’s analysis of SEAO open data for June 1 to August 31, 2026 counts 4,565 published notices and 3,492 open public calls awarded over the same three months. The median number of bidders on those awards was three.

This is the first edition of a recurring seasonal report. The rest of this page sets out what was published, who published it, which trades it covered and how much competition each one drew, followed by the methodology.

How many Québec public tenders were published in summer 2026?

4,565 notices were published on SEAO between June 1 and August 31, 2026, according to Alliance Optima’s analysis of SEAO open data. The season started below the spring peak and settled lower still:

• May (for reference): 2,416 notices
• June: 2,036
• July: 1,260
• August: 1,269

July and August each came in at roughly 62% of June’s volume (1,260 and 1,269 against 2,036). Much of the year’s public work goes to market in late spring, so a contractor who only starts looking in July has already missed the busiest weeks.

By contract category, services led with 1,795 notices, ahead of works (1,415) and goods (1,273), with 82 unspecified. By procurement method, public calls for tenders made up 3,436 notices, about three in four. Another 735 were direct-award (gré à gré) notices, and the rest were smaller categories such as regionalised public calls (134) and contracts following an invitation-only tender (137). If the difference between these methods is new to you, our thresholds guide explains when each one applies.

Who bought: the public buyers that posted most

The busiest buyer by a wide margin was the Ministère des Transports et de la Mobilité durable (MTMD), with 205 notices. The next tier was made up of institutions and cities:

• Université McGill: 86
• Ville de Montréal (approvisionnement): 85
• Centre de services scolaire des Laurentides: 82
• Ministère des Ressources naturelles et des Forêts: 76
• Hydro-Québec: 73
• Ville de Laval: 68
• Ville de Québec: 66
• Conseil Cri de la santé et des services sociaux de la Baie James: 48
• Santé Québec Mauricie-et-Centre-du-Québec: 47
• Ville de Saguenay: 46
• Sépaq: 43

Those twelve buyers account for 925 notices, about one in five. The other four in five came from the remaining 837 buyers: school service centres, municipalities, health establishments and agencies that each publish a handful of notices a season. Those buyers publish less often, which makes them easy to miss without alerts.

Which regions had the most tenders

Montréal (791 notices) and Capitale-Nationale (704) led among notices we could place in a region, followed by Montérégie (395), Laurentides (239) and Estrie (218). Those first two regions account for about 44% of placed notices (1,495 of 3,401).

Every region had public work, including Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean (140), Chaudière-Appalaches (128), Bas-Saint-Laurent (118), Mauricie (105), Lanaudière (92), Outaouais (80), Gaspésie–Îles-de-la-Madeleine (75), Laval (67), Abitibi-Témiscamingue (66), Côte-Nord (66), Nord-du-Québec (63) and Centre-du-Québec (54). About a quarter of notices (1,164) could not be placed in a region by our classification, so treat these regional counts as a floor.

When tenders are published and how long they stay open

Thursday is the busiest publication day. It carried 1,049 notices, about 23% of the summer total, ahead of Wednesday (918), Monday (905), Tuesday (874) and Friday (790). Only 29 notices went out on a weekend.

The median public call stayed open about 31 days from publication to closing. That sounds generous until you subtract a mandatory site visit, the written-question deadline and the time it takes to get a bond. In practice, the useful window is the first week after publication. A SEAO account with alerts set up properly, checked on Thursday and Friday, catches most of each week’s new notices while there is still time to price them.

How many bidders? Competition is thinner than you think

Among open public calls awarded in June, July and August 2026 where the bidder count was published, the median was 3 bidders. 15% drew a single bid, 36% drew two or fewer and 57% drew three or fewer. The median awarded value was about $426,000.

Many contractors picture every public tender as a crowded room of ten firms cutting each other’s margins. The data doesn’t show that. On more than a third of these awards, the winner faced at most one competitor. It also doesn’t mean the work is easy, because a thin field is often thin for a reason: a tight schedule, a remote site, bonding requirements or a specialised scope. But it’s a strong argument for reading more notices before deciding a category isn’t worth the effort.

Here is how competition broke down by trade, using our classification of the notices:

Trade (our classification)	Tenders awarded	Median bidders	Drew 2 bids or fewer	Median award
General construction	917	3	29%	$659,572
Paving	488	4	22%	$653,792
Professional services	485	3	39%	$300,000
Engineering	215	4	21%	$290,898
Snow removal	214	3	45%	$545,048
IT	142	3	49%	$369,298
Cleaning	103	3	33%	$276,000
Waste management	74	3	38%	$548,533
Electrical	36	3	36%	$354,243
Excavation	35	5	26%	$216,693
Roofing	34	3	32%	$678,080
HVAC	27	3	26%	$605,961
Landscaping	26	4	27%	$113,238
Unclassified	675	2	56%	$298,570
All open public calls	3,492	3	36%	≈ $426,000

A few things stand out:

• IT and snow removal had the thinnest fields among named trades: 49% and 45% of awards went to tenders with two bids or fewer. In IT, 25% drew a single bid.
• Snow removal is a summer market. 290 snow-removal notices were published between June and August. Those contracts are won in the heat, not in November. See the snow removal tenders on SEAO Radar.
• Paving, engineering and excavation were the most contested, with medians of 4 to 5 bidders and single-bid rates of 6% to 8%.
• The unclassified bucket (notices our classifier could not assign to a trade) was the thinnest of all, with a median of 2 bidders and 56% at two or fewer. Much of it is specialised work that doesn’t fit a standard trade label, and it drew fewer bidders than any named trade.

What a Québec contractor should take from this

• Plan for spring, not summer. Volume peaked in May and dropped by about 38% from June to July. Have your documents, bonding capacity and estimating time ready before June.
• Look past the big names. Twelve buyers published a fifth of the notices. The other 837 published the rest, and they are easy to miss without alerts.
• Check the notice count in your trade before you rule it out. A median of three bidders means your realistic competition is usually two firms, not ten. A structured go/no-go decision is how you choose which of those tenders to bid.
• Read the results. The bidder counts in this report come from results published on SEAO, and the same results are open to you tender by tender. Our guide to what follows the deadline explains how to read them.

Methodology

• Source. SEAO open data, mirrored by Alliance Optima in its own database and synced weekly. Data pulled September 25, 2026; latest notice in the mirror dated September 18, 2026. For how SEAO itself works, see our explainer.
• Period. Notices published June 1 to August 31, 2026. Award figures cover awards dated June to August 2026, whatever the tender’s publication date.
• Classification. Trade and region are Alliance Optima’s own classification of each notice, based on keywords and UNSPSC codes. About 25% of notices could not be placed in a region. Counts are indicative, not official totals.
• Bidder counts. Open public calls only, one row per tender, limited to awards where the number of bidders was published. Direct awards and invitation-only tenders are excluded from the competition figures.
• Scale of awards. Across every method, including direct awards, SEAO data records 13,399 award records to 7,052 distinct suppliers for June to August 2026.

The next edition will cover fall 2026 using the same method.

To see which of these tenders match your trade and territory each week, set up your free SEAO Profile: it lists matched notices as they are published, so you are reading them on Thursday, not the week they close. The newest tenders are also open to browse.

Alliance Optima is not affiliated with SEAO or the Government of Québec. Figures are from our analysis of SEAO open data; the official notice always governs. Verify every tender at seao.gouv.qc.ca.