Open Contracting: What We Found Tracking 2,400 Public Procurements Across Three Countries
Q2 report: single-bid awards are falling in the UK, flat in the US, and rising in Nigeria — but disclosure speed improved everywhere. The full dataset is open.
Every quarter we ingest published contract awards above local disclosure thresholds in the US, UK and Nigeria, normalise them to the Open Contracting Data Standard, and publish what we find. This quarter: 2,412 awards totalling the equivalent of $4.1bn.
Three headline numbers
Single-bid awards: 18% of UK contracts (down from 23%), 31% in the US sample (flat), 44% in Nigeria (up 3 points)
Median disclosure lag — award to publication: 9 days UK, 14 days US, 31 days Nigeria, all improved year-on-year
Citizen flags: 312 contracts flagged on Nject this quarter; 41 received an official response
Why single-bid rates matter
Competition is the cheapest anti-corruption tool that exists. When only one bidder shows up, prices average 7–12% higher across every public study we know of. A rising single-bid rate is not proof of wrongdoing — but it is always worth a question, and questions are what this platform is for.
The full cleaned dataset, methodology notes and country annexes are linked at the end of this report. Fork it, check our work, and ring the bell on anything that looks wrong.