How many public bids are posted in the US each week?

About 9,200 a week is our best estimate for US state and local government, or about 480,000 a year. The plausible range runs from 7,700 to 11,900 a week, and our confidence is medium-low. No official number exists to check it against.

We recorded an average of about 6,400 bids due per week in the five weeks to November 1, 2026. We count by due date, since that is steadier than the date we first saw a bid, so this is a close stand-in for bids posted.

How we got the estimate

We built it two ways. The first took a September and October flow of about 5,300 bids a week and divided by measured recall, which gave 400,000 to 620,000 a year. The second took posting rates from buyers we cover and applied them, discounted, to buyers we do not, which gave 410,000 to 680,000.

The October count is higher partly because we added sources after that estimate was made, and it covers a later window. We have not refreshed the estimate yet. Do not divide the 6,400 by the 9,200 to get our coverage. They come from different dates and methods.

Why nobody has an official number

Federal agencies post to SAM.gov. State and local buying has no equivalent. A national list built from Census, education, transit and housing data shows about 100,000 public entities, and each decides where to post within its own rules.

So a count has to be built from the bottom up. We track 26,121 active sources, and 12,288 of them, or 47%, are a buyer's own website on no platform we track. At the central estimate, the average public entity posts about five bids a year, though a large city posts far more than a water district.

What this means if you sell to government

• No single portal shows the market. Registering with one or two sites covers only some of the buyers who might want your work.
• Few of these bids fit any one company. They span every trade and state, so most of the work is sorting them.
• Small buyers are easy to miss. Many post only on their own site, so they never reach a state portal. Our guide to finding public bids covers where to look.

How to read our numbers

Our weekly history is not a market trend. Our count rose from under 2,500 a week in May to about 6,400 in October mainly because we added sources. It says more about our collection than about public spending. We will report trends once the source base is stable.

The weekly figures are our rows after removing duplicates. We have not yet measured what share of those rows are not true solicitations, so some headings or archive items may be in the count. Two portals are left out of the weekly counts above because of their terms. The market estimate was measured with their rows included.