Federal awards without competition
The share of federal awards made without a competitive process, by year, 2015–2026. Denominator: awards carrying a procedure label (~871,000 records).
The series
The non-competitive share fell from 32.8% in 2015 to a 23.7% low in 2018, then climbed almost every year since — through the pandemic (30.0% in 2020) to 32.7% in 2026 to date. The last three years all sit at or above 32%, a level last seen a decade ago.
| Year | Non-competitive share |
|---|---|
| 2015 | 32.8% |
| 2016 | 28.8% |
| 2017 | 23.8% |
| 2018 | 23.7% |
| 2019 | 27.1% |
| 2020 | 30.0% |
| 2021 | 28.5% |
| 2022 | 28.9% |
| 2023 | 30.3% |
| 2024 | 32.5% |
| 2025 | 32.0% |
| 2026 partial | 32.7% |
Reading the number
"Non-competitive" here means the award record carries a procedure label indicating no competitive process — emergency and low-dollar-value thresholds, sole-source justifications, and certain set-aside streams all land in this bucket. Two cautions: roughly a third of the corpus carries no procedure label at all (1,313,281 awards vs ~871,000 labelled), and 2026 is a partial year. The Quebec series in competition intensity covers the complementary question — how many bids arrive when processes are competitive.
Citation format
pubsec/data 2026.10, https://pubsecdata.org/findings/no-tender