market intelligence
How open is public procurement in your target market? Duke's Transparency Index scores 25+ European countries across five data-driven dimensions to reveal where opportunity is visible and where it remains hidden.
published march 2026 — based on analysis of 61M+ procedures across 300+ sources
Every country is evaluated across publication rate, below-threshold coverage, data completeness, open procedure share, and single-bid rate to produce a composite transparency score.
The European average sits at 78 out of 100, reflecting strong above-threshold publication norms but persistent gaps in below-threshold coverage and data completeness.
The spread between the highest-scoring country (Norway, 94) and the lowest in the top 25 (Bulgaria, 71) reveals a two-speed procurement transparency landscape across Europe.
The Transparency Index evaluates each country across five dimensions, weighted by their practical impact on supplier opportunity discovery and competitive intelligence. Scores are normalised to a 0–100 scale. Data is drawn from Duke's monitoring of 300+ procurement sources between April 2025 and March 2026. The single-bid rate dimension is inverted (lower single-bid rate = higher transparency score) to reflect that competitive participation is a proxy for market openness.
Procurement transparency is not a single attribute. A country can publish every above-threshold tender on time yet omit award values from 80% of its notices. Another might have impeccable data completeness for the contracts it publishes while leaving the vast majority of its below-threshold spending entirely invisible. To capture this complexity, Duke's Transparency Index evaluates five distinct dimensions that together determine how much of a country's procurement market is genuinely accessible to outside analysis and competition.
Publication rate measures the breadth of coverage — what fraction of a country's estimated total public procurement activity appears on monitored digital platforms. Below-threshold coverage specifically examines whether contracts that fall under EU mandatory publication thresholds are nonetheless published voluntarily. Data completeness assesses the depth of structured information within each published notice: are award values present? Are supplier identifiers standardised? Are lot structures properly delineated? Open procedure share captures the extent to which buyers choose transparent, competitive formats over restricted or negotiated procedures. And the single-bid rate serves as a market-level indicator of whether publication actually translates into competition.
Each dimension receives a weight that reflects its practical importance for cross-border suppliers. Publication rate and data completeness are weighted highest at 25% each, because without both visibility and detail, market intelligence is incomplete. Below-threshold coverage receives 20%, reflecting the commercial significance of the sub-threshold market. Open procedure share and single-bid rate each receive 15%, as they measure the competitive environment rather than information availability.
| dimension | weight | what it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Publication rate | 25% | Share of estimated total public contracts that appear on monitored platforms |
| Below-threshold coverage | 20% | Availability and depth of data for contracts below EU publication thresholds |
| Data completeness | 25% | Structured field fill rates: award values, supplier IDs, lot breakdowns, dates |
| Open procedure share | 15% | Percentage of above-threshold procedures using open or competitive formats |
| Single-bid rate | 15% | Share of procedures receiving only one tender (lower is better) |
No single metric captures procurement transparency. Countries that score well on publication rate can still fail on data completeness, and vice versa. A multi-dimensional approach reveals the true accessibility of each market.
The Nordic countries dominate the top of the Transparency Index, a reflection of decades of administrative tradition that treats public information as a default rather than an exception. Norway leads with a score of 94, driven by Doffin's exceptionally complete structured data feeds and a culture of publishing comprehensive award information including lot-level values and supplier identifiers. Finland follows at 92, with Hilma's portal achieving near-perfect publication rates for all procedures that meet national thresholds.
The Netherlands ranks third at 91, anchored by TenderNed's high open procedure share and excellent data structure. What prevents the Netherlands from claiming the top spot is its relatively limited below-threshold coverage compared to the best-in-class Nordic portals. France at seventh place illustrates a different profile: its below-threshold dimension is among the strongest in Europe thanks to the DECP open data mandate, but higher single-bid rates in certain sectors pull its composite score down. Germany at eighth place presents another distinctive pattern. Its 14-platform landscape produces exceptional below-threshold coverage in aggregate, but data completeness suffers from inconsistent field standards across regional portals.
The most notable movers this year are Estonia, which climbed two positions thanks to improvements in its e-procurement portal's data completeness, and Spain, which entered the top 15 after expanding electronic submission mandates and improving award publication timeliness. Romania and Poland, while still in the lower third, showed the largest absolute score improvements, reflecting active reform programmes driven by EU fund conditionality requirements. For a deep dive into specific countries, see the Germany Spotlight, France Spotlight, and Netherlands Spotlight reports. Our blog analysis of procurement transparency explores the trends driving these scores. The IT procurement sector typically benefits most from transparency improvements, as structured data enables better framework positioning.
Nordic countries lead not because they publish more procedures, but because they publish better data. Completeness and structure matter as much as volume for meaningful transparency.
Several patterns emerge consistently among the highest-scoring countries. First, they tend to operate a single national e-procurement platform, or a tightly integrated federation of platforms with standardised data schemas. Norway's Doffin, Finland's Hilma, and the Netherlands' TenderNed all follow this model. Centralisation reduces the fragmentation that plagues markets like Germany, where 14 separate portals each implement their own data standards, making cross-platform analysis inherently more difficult.
Second, the leaders mandate structured data publication at the lot level. This means that a single procurement procedure with five lots will produce five separate award records, each with its own value, supplier, and CPV classification. Countries that publish only procedure-level aggregates lose the granularity that enables meaningful sector and supplier analysis. Third, the top-scoring countries require or strongly encourage publication of contract modifications and framework call-offs. These downstream data points are crucial for understanding actual spending patterns, as initial award values frequently diverge from final contract amounts.
The most actionable best practice for countries seeking to improve is the adoption of standardised supplier identifiers across all procurement portals. When every notice includes a national registration number or VAT identifier for the winning supplier, it becomes possible to build reliable competitive landscapes and track market concentration over time. Countries that rely on free-text supplier names without unique identifiers effectively render their award data analytically useless for competitive intelligence purposes, even when the underlying publication rate is high.
Standardised supplier identifiers are the single most impactful transparency improvement a country can make. Without them, even comprehensive publication fails to enable competitive analysis.
The most widespread transparency deficit across Europe is the opacity of below-threshold procurement. Even among the top ten countries in the index, below-threshold coverage averages only 45% — meaning that more than half of all contracts below EU thresholds are awarded without any digital publication. For the bottom ten countries, this figure drops below 15%. Given that below-threshold contracts collectively represent an estimated 60–70% of total public procurement spending by transaction count, this is not a marginal gap. It is the majority of the market sitting in darkness.
Award value publication remains inconsistent even in otherwise strong markets. Duke's analysis shows that approximately 35% of all above-threshold award notices across the EU omit the final contract value entirely. This percentage rises sharply for below-threshold awards and for framework agreement call-offs. Without award values, it is impossible to accurately size markets, benchmark pricing, or assess competitive positioning. Countries that address this single gap would dramatically improve the utility of their procurement data for both domestic and cross-border suppliers.
Single-bid rates represent a more structural concern. The EU average of 29% masks enormous variation, from below 15% in Finland and the Netherlands to above 45% in Hungary and Croatia. While the causes are complex and not always related to transparency per se, high single-bid rates correlate strongly with lower scores on other dimensions. Countries with incomplete publication, poor data quality, or restrictive procedure preferences tend to also attract fewer bidders, creating a self-reinforcing cycle where opacity discourages competition and limited competition reduces pressure for transparency.
Below-threshold procurement is the largest transparency blind spot in Europe. An estimated 60–70% of public contracts by count fall below EU thresholds, and the majority of these remain entirely invisible to market analysis.
| # | country | score | strongest dimension | weakest dimension |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Norway | 94/100 | data completeness | below-threshold |
| 2 | Finland | 92/100 | publication rate | single-bid rate |
| 3 | Netherlands | 91/100 | open procedure % | below-threshold |
| 4 | Denmark | 90/100 | data completeness | below-threshold |
| 5 | Sweden | 89/100 | publication rate | single-bid rate |
| 6 | Estonia | 88/100 | open procedure % | data completeness |
| 7 | France | 86/100 | below-threshold | single-bid rate |
| 8 | Germany | 84/100 | below-threshold | data completeness |
| 9 | Austria | 83/100 | publication rate | below-threshold |
| 10 | Ireland | 82/100 | open procedure % | data completeness |
Duke monitors 300+ procurement sources across 25+ countries, covering 61M+ historical procedures. Our platform ingests notices daily from national portals, regional platforms, and EU-wide databases including TED. Every tender is normalised into a unified data model with standardised buyer identifiers, CPV codes, lot structures, geographic targeting, and award outcomes — enabling the cross-border analysis that powers this report.