The Ontario Tender Access Census · July 2026
Where Ontario’s tenders actually live
This is the first public map of how every one of Ontario’s 444 municipalities publishes its tenders, built by surveying each municipality’s own website. More than half of Ontarians live in a municipality whose tenders sit behind a single private platform, and under 1% live in one that posts its tender documents openly.
All 444 Ontario municipalities, searchable by name or county.
Weighted by population
Counting municipalities makes open publishing look more common than it is: the municipalities that post openly are overwhelmingly small townships.
Hover a segment for detail. Width is share of population, not share of municipalities — a township and Ottawa are not equal inventory.
Excludes one municipality misattributed in the provincial register (0.7% of population); see caveats.
Full distribution
| Where tenders are published | Municipalities | % of munis | Population | % of pop |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| On bids&tenders | 161 | 36.3% | 11,569,394 | 51.0% |
| No procurement page found | 74 | 16.7% | 5,613,053 | 24.7% |
| Could not be read | 39 | 8.8% | 2,203,207 | 9.7% |
| Notices visible, documents gated or absent | 79 | 17.8% | 1,889,339 | 8.3% |
| On Biddingo | 32 | 7.2% | 771,650 | 3.4% |
| Open documents on their own site † | 46 | 10.4% | 170,279 | 0.75% |
| On another platform | 6 | 1.4% | 217,701 | 1.0% |
| No website in the register | 4 | 0.9% | 95,100 | 0.4% |
| Crawling disallowed | 2 | 0.5% | 11,610 | 0.1% |
| Total | 444 | 22,703,113 |
† Excludes the County of Frontenac, for which the provincial register lists a neighbouring township's website. Including it would report 47 municipalities and 332,059 residents (1.5%) on the strength of a data error.
Methodology & caveats
Sources
- Register. Municipalities, Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing, dataset
62e83cbc-0731-4d66-abdc-2f2b31bcd76c, Open Government Licence – Ontario. Retrieved 2026-07-31. It carries each municipality’s official website, so no domain was guessed. - Population. Statistics Canada, table 98-10-0002 (2021 Census), matched for 442 of 444 municipalities. Census divisions and subdivisions are told apart by DGUID, because Ontario has six names shared by two governments.
How we crawled
- Identified as
TenderSentryBot, at least five seconds between requests to any one host. - robots.txt honoured; two municipalities disallow crawling and were recorded without being fetched.
- Procurement platforms were never contacted. We record only that a municipality uses one.
- Public pages only. No logins, and no documents downloaded.
Known limits
- One register error, excluded. The province lists a neighbouring township’s website against the County of Frontenac. It is excluded from the openly-posted figures above rather than silently repointed.
- Two cities block bots. Ottawa and Vaughan return 403 to our crawler, which says nothing about whether they publish openly. They are counted as unread, not as absent.
- JavaScript-rendered pages are undercounted. Where a municipality’s procurement page is drawn by scripts, this survey cannot see it, so “no procurement page found” is a floor rather than a finding. We did not run a headless browser.
- What open publishing is worth. A Québec civil contractor in our system sees more than four times the ranked opportunities of an Ontario firm of comparable trades and size — 586 against 130 — because Québec publishes centrally and openly. The gap is unchanged when the Québec firm is given the Ontario firm’s exact trade list, so it is the market, not the profile.