About the data
Where it comes from
Federal contracts: the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat’s Proactive Publication of Contracts, where every federal department and agency reports each contract over $10,000 and each amendment. This site uses the file published October 13, 2026, rebuilt on October 14, 2026.
Tenders and awards: Public Services and Procurement Canada’s CanadaBuys open data: tender notices and award notices published since Aug 2022, when CanadaBuys replaced Buyandsell.gc.ca.
Alberta: the Government of Alberta’s sole-source contract disclosure: service contracts of $10,000 or more given without competition, from April 2015. Alberta’s competitive contracts are published separately and are not here yet.
All three are published under open government licences. The records are the governments’ own.
How contracts are counted
1,087,847 federal contracts worth $448B: contracts dated Jan 2004 to Sep 2026. When a contract is amended, the department reports it again with the amended total, and departments re-reported older contracts when their systems changed. So each contract (a department’s procurement number) counts once, at its latest reported value; reports are never added together. A contract reported without a procurement number counts as its own contract.
Contracts whose latest value is $0 or less (cancelled contracts, and standing offers with nothing called up yet) are left out: 12,339 of them. So are 79 dated before 2004 or in the future. Values are what the contract commits, including options exercised and amendments, not what has been paid.
A standing offer or supply arrangement is reported by the call-ups against it, so a vendor’s total includes the call-ups departments reported. Contracts under $10,000 are reported only as quarterly totals and are not here.
CanadaBuys award notices cover many of the same contracts, so they are never added to any total: they show who won a given tender and what similar tenders went for. Alberta’s file lists each contract or renewal; exact duplicates count once.
Categories and places
Categories are the Treasury Board economic object codes departments file contracts under (management consulting, IT consultants, ships and boats). Older contracts filed without a code are placed by their standard description where it maps to one code; the rest count only in overall totals.
Places are where the vendor is, not where the work was done: the postal code on the contract or, where the contract gives none, the vendor’s usual one (when at least four in five of its coded contracts agree). Departments give a postal code on fewer than half of contracts, so 685,322 of 1,087,847 federal contracts can be placed in a province and place totals understate what went to each. Cities come from urban postal codes; rural ones cover many towns, so those contracts count in their province only. Contracts with vendors outside Canada are shown as such.
Why some vendors are not named
This site never names an individual. Departments contract with people as well as companies (consultants, sole proprietors, doctors, interpreters), and the contracts data doesn’t say which vendors are people. So a vendor is named only when its name reads as an organization’s, judged with the same rules as this site’s sister site GrantTrail, plus a few for contracts:
- A name that reads as a person’s, in any of its spellings, is not shown, whatever its size.
- A professional corporation (a doctor’s, lawyer’s or realtor’s) is not shown.
- A company that carries a person’s name is shown only once its contracts reach $1 million; below that it is usually that person’s own business. A firm whose name merely begins like a given name (Bell Canada, Johnson Controls) is shown from $5 million.
- Vendors mostly reported as former public servants are not shown.
- Contact names, attention lines and vendor numbers are removed from names, and placeholders (“Redacted”, “NULL”) name no one.
Contracts with vendors who are not named still count in every total, with their department, category and place. In all, 922,130 of 1,087,847 federal contracts ($422B of $448B) are shown under a vendor’s name. Some organizations are left unnamed as a result. That is deliberate.
Tenders and alerts
Tender pages show what CanadaBuys publishes about a federal tender, without contact names or details, and link to the official notice, where bids go. “Who won the last ones like it” lists CanadaBuys award notices with the same UNSPSC commodity code (or, failing enough of those, the same class or family).
CanadaBuys offers its own free email alerts for saved searches. This site’s alerts add the award history, and are planned to add provincial and municipal tenders, which CanadaBuys’ open data does not include.
Corrections
The records are the departments’ own. To correct one, contact the department that published it; the fix reaches this site with the next update. Federal contract data is refreshed when Treasury Board publishes a new file, tenders every week. Data status