Sources and limits
Our sources
- SEAO — open data (Données Québec), under licence CC-BY 4.0: tender notices and concluded contracts in the data served; its exact period is published below.
- CanadaBuys — open data, Open Government Licence – Canada (OGL-Canada-2.0): federal notices.
- Proactive disclosure of contracts — federal contracts disclosed per quarter, by department and agency. Open Government Licence – Canada (OGL-Canada-2.0).
- CanadaBuys — award notices — federal contract awards, with their date. Open Government Licence – Canada (OGL-Canada-2.0).
- Departmental plans and Public Accounts — departmental spending and appropriations, per fiscal year. Open Government Licence – Canada (OGL-Canada-2.0).
- SOSA — standing offers — active federal standing offers and their selected suppliers. Open Government Licence – Canada (OGL-Canada-2.0).
- INFC — funded infrastructure projects — infrastructure projects funded by the federal government. Open Government Licence – Canada (OGL-Canada-2.0).
Tender documents stay on the official sites — every page links back to the source. We redistribute no document.
Not affiliated with SEAO — the official sources remain SEAO / CanadaBuys.
What we serve today
The data covers the period from May 31, 2004 to October 4, 2026.
- Quebec (SEAO) — 668,286 tender notices, 5,480 public organisations, 552,887 awards, 84,978 distinct winners.
- Federal (CanadaBuys) — 101,746 CanadaBuys notices, 4,885 public organisations.
The vocabulary of Quebec public procurement
The words below are the source's own. Knowing them is enough to read a tender notice page from end to end.
- SEAO
- The Système électronique d'appel d'offres — the Government of Quebec's electronic tendering system, and the official register where public bodies publish their tender notices and concluded contracts. It is the source of most of what Lauréo publishes, redistributed as open data by Données Québec under a CC-BY 4.0 licence.
- Public tender notice
- The publication through which a public body announces a need and invites suppliers to bid. It is Lauréo's basic unit: one page, one public tender.
- Contracting authority
- The public body that publishes the notice and concludes the contract — a ministry, a municipality, a school service centre, a health institution, a state-owned corporation. In French the source calls it donneur d'ouvrage.
- Award
- The attribution of the contract to the selected supplier. This is the fact Lauréo puts at the centre: who won, for which contracting authority, and when.
- Closing date
- The moment after which a bid is no longer receivable. It is not published for every public tender: when it is missing, Lauréo says so rather than guessing it.
- NEQ
- The Numéro d'entreprise du Québec, a unique identifier assigned by the Quebec enterprise registrar. It tells apart two companies with similar names — when the source publishes it.
- LCOP
- The Act respecting contracting by public bodies (Loi sur les contrats des organismes publics), which governs how the Quebec state buys: the thresholds, the open, by-invitation and direct-award procedures, and the notices of intention that precede certain contracts concluded without a call for tenders.
- The language of the source
- The Charter of the French Language makes French the official language of Quebec public bodies: notices, tender documents and organisation names are published in French, and remain so here.
Lauréo publishes facts drawn from a public register. It is not legal advice, not an eligibility determination, and not a guarantee that a call for tenders is still open: those questions are settled with the contracting authority and on the official source.
Official source content — French
Tender titles, organisation names and documents come from SEAO and stay in the official language in which they were published. Lauréo translates the interface and the explanations, never the content of a notice.
What the data does not say
- Values are declared for only a minority of tender notices — when a value is not declared, we display it as “not declared”, never silently estimated.
- When a contracting authority chooses not to disclose its estimate, we respect that choice.
- Aggregates over partial data are presented as median and interquartile range (the middle half of the values), with the sample size, never as totals.
- Measured on 30 August 2026: 3,327 organisations out of 3,714 appear under several distinct records, which affects 76.24% of the notices we serve. We then serve each record separately, without merging them or claiming they are distinct. In 24 cases, the identifier published by the source itself covers different organisations. These figures describe the data served today.
- Measured on 4 September 2026: 262,920 of 374,463 awarded notices (70.2%) name the bidders, and 631,020 bids carry an amount. This coverage stops at the end of 2024: among the 55,968 notices from 2025 already awarded, 1,374 (2.5%) name a bidder, against 99.5% in 2023. The open dataset stopped publishing them; awards, however, keep arriving. We do not know whether it will resume, and we do not invent the cause.
- Historical snapshot from August 15, 2026, on an earlier version of the data: 585 open notices were present in SEAO but absent from Lauréo, and 104 matched notices had a different closing date. These numbers do not describe the data served today and are not corrected from an unauthorized API.
Forecasts and uncertainty
Annual series count valid winning awards in the reliable historical period. A renewal window is published only for the same primary UNSPSC code with at least four processes and three observed intervals; it uses the median and interquartile range and remains absent without that evidence.
How we group sectors
SEAO classifies notices with the UNSPSC standard, which has 58 families in our data — a standard's vocabulary, not a vendor's. We group them into ten sectors. This grouping is our judgement, not the source's: here it is in full.
| Sector | UNSPSC families | GSIN families (federal) |
|---|---|---|
| Construction and infrastructure | 72, 95, 30, 22, 11 | numeric families (5…) |
| Equipment and supplies | 41, 40, 27, 26, 39, 23, 31, 48, 44, 52, 21, 15, 13, 10, 73, 20, 50, 53, 54, 57, 45, 82, 90, 14 | N, except the classes listed elsewhere |
| Professional services | 80, 82, 84, 64, 93, 94 | R, T, L, A, H |
| Information technology | 43, 32, 8111, 8116 | D, N70, N58, N59, N61 |
| Engineering and architecture | 81 (except 8111 and 8116) | C |
| Environment and resources | 76, 77, 83, 70, 71, 12 | E, F, B (except B50) |
| Health and social services | 42, 85, 51 | G, B50, N65 |
| Transport and vehicles | 78, 25, 24 | V, W, N16, N19, N20, N23, N25 |
| Education and training | 86, 56, 60, 49, 55 | U |
| Security and maintenance | 92, 46, 47, 91 | K, M, J, S |
Two code lists, never both on the same notice: SEAO publishes UNSPSC codes, CanadaBuys publishes GSIN codes. The GSIN rule has no default family — a code it does not name falls into no sector rather than the wrong one. That is the case for the «X» codes, property leasing, which these ten sectors do not name.
Disclosed federal contracts publish three vocabularies in the same field. Their rule reads them in this order: an 8-digit code is UNSPSC and follows the Quebec rule above, default family included; a 5xxx code of 4 to 6 characters is construction; a 4-digit code is a goods class whose N prefix was dropped, and follows the GSIN rule once the N is restored; any other numeric code, including “0”, enters no sector; letter codes follow the GSIN rule of the notices. Federal notices do not change: none carries a 4- or 8-digit code.
A federal organisation's repurchase cadence is observed on disclosed contracts, one award per contract and amendments excluded, under the Quebec rules: four contracts under one GSIN code, three intervals, two years of history, first quartile of at least thirty days. It predicts no date. Code labels come from the notice dictionary, which does not name them all; the page counts those rows and shows the bare code.
What's ending at the federal level reads three registers, never added up: the end of period of disclosed contracts (the last published line, amendments included), the contract end of active award notices, the expiry of standing offers (one row per agreement; the 2999-01-01 sentinel is "no declared term"). The page says what is ending, never what will be published.
The federal quarterly briefing reads disclosed contracts by fiscal quarter (April to March), under their disclosure period and never their signature date. Each edition is a snapshot taken sixty days after the end of the quarter: the source may still add rows, the edition no longer changes. The sole-source share is read against contracts whose method is classified — rows with no method are counted apart, never in the denominator — and the previous fiscal year serves as reference once its four quarters are closed.
Planned vs actual reads federal departmental plans program by program, as the source publishes them: the gap is actual relative to planned, and amounts are never added together — the source publishes no total per organisation. Public accounts are read by voted appropriation, statutory items counted apart. Names and explanations are published in English by the ingested source and quoted as is. Plans share no identifier with contracts: what a department bought against what it spent cannot be measured.
Standing offers reads two federal registers that share no number: the usage report of professional services supply arrangements, quarter by quarter, and the catalogue of standing offers. They are shown side by side and never added together; the page publishes how many numbers and suppliers appear on both sides. A “nil report” declares that no order was placed that quarter, and it counts. Orders are read as counts, median and quartiles. An agreement's expiry follows the same rule as what's ending, federal.
Funded projects reads the projects funded by Infrastructure Canada. A project is “late” when its actual end follows the planned end date the source publishes today — a date that may have been revised, not necessarily the original; each rate carries its base, and it is “n/a” when no project publishes both dates. The federal contribution and the federal share of eligible cost are read as medians; amounts are never added together. The contracts that follow a project are published by provinces or cities, outside this source.
How many competitors, federal, reads the number of bids each department reports in the proactive disclosure of contracts — never the list of bidders nor their offers. A published zero is “n/a” and is not counted. Call-ups against a standing offer report one bid, the call-up: they are set aside from the share and counted; so are sole-source contracts, one bid by definition. The source publishes this count for most contracts since the year the page shows.
One exception finer than the family: family 81 mixes engineering (naval architecture, surveying) with computing (systems administration). Classes 8111 and 8116 therefore go to technology, and the rest of family 81 to engineering.
A notice can carry several classifications: it then counts in several sectors. The sum of sectors therefore exceeds the number of notices — it is not a partition of the total.
Corrections
Does a fact look wrong? Report an error — the proposal enters a review queue before any change is made to the data.
Methodology
Our transformations, editorial rules, controls and correction process are published in the methodology statement.