Why Poland's Road Tenders Keep Attracting One Bidder

Open almost any road tender on Poland's e-Zamówienia platform and you'll notice a pattern that has become uncomfortably familiar. A stretch of national road, a bridge refurbishment, a municipal bypass — and a single envelope in the box. When only one company bids, the price stops being a negotiation and starts being a dictate. So why does this keep happening in a market that supposedly has plenty of capable contractors?

The Scale of the Problem

Poland's Public Procurement Office (UZP) has been tracking single-bid tenders for years, and the numbers are stubborn. In road construction, roughly a third of all proceedings end with just one offer, and in some regional directorates of the General Directorate for National Roads and Motorways (GDDKiA) that share climbs higher. For a country that spends tens of billions of złoty annually on transport infrastructure, that's a lot of contracts awarded without real competition.

The irony is thick. Poland built one of Europe's largest road programmes over the past two decades — over 5,000 km of motorways and expressways — largely on the back of a competitive contracting market. That market has since consolidated, and the bidding pool has shrunk.

Why fewer players, not more

The 2010s saw a wave of bankruptcies among mid-sized road builders. Firms that overbid aggressively during the 2012–2014 construction boom, then got hit by falling prices and rising costs, went under. Those that survived grew larger or got absorbed. Today, a handful of groups — Budimex, Strabag, Mirbud, Porr, Intercor — dominate the national road market.

When a tender requires specific experience (say, three motorway contracts of comparable value in the last five years), the list of qualifying firms narrows fast. Sometimes it narrows to one.

The Economics of Bidding Alone

There's a counterintuitive logic here that's worth spelling out. When many firms bid, they bid low, often too low, and then struggle to deliver. When few bid, prices rise — but projects actually get finished. Contractors know this. So do the contracting authorities, even if they can't say it out loud.

The price-quality trade-off nobody wants to admit

A single bid isn't automatically bad. If the price is reasonable and the contractor is reliable, the road gets built. The problem is that without competitive pressure, there's no benchmark to test whether the price is reasonable. The authority is left comparing the offer to its own cost estimate — a document prepared by engineers, not by the market.

When the single offer exceeds the budget by 30%, the tender gets cancelled and re-launched. That wastes months. When it exceeds the budget by 10%, the authority usually signs anyway, because cancelling means another delay and another round of single bidding.

Rising costs have made bidders cautious

Since 2021, construction costs in Poland have jumped — steel, cement, asphalt, labour. Contractors who signed fixed-price deals in 2020–2021 lost money. Many now refuse to bid on contracts with long execution windows and limited price-adjustment clauses. That fear is rational, and it's a major reason why some firms simply don't show up.

The Tender Design Problem

Here's where the contracting authorities deserve some scrutiny. Many tender specifications are written so tightly that only the incumbent or the largest players can realistically respond. Requirements for specific equipment, specific certifications, or specific past projects can be legitimate — or they can be a subtle filter.

When specifications become filters

A requirement that a bidder have completed two motorway sections worth over 200 million złoty each in the last five years sounds reasonable on paper. In practice, it excludes every firm that hasn't won a major GDDKiA contract recently. Which is, by definition, most of them. The pool shrinks to the same five or six companies, and they know it.

Some authorities have started loosening these requirements — accepting equivalent experience, allowing consortium bids, reducing the weight of past-project criteria. The results are mixed. Loosening too much invites inexperienced bidders who then fail to deliver.

Payment terms and risk allocation

Another quiet killer: risk allocation. Contracts that push all geological, weather, and price risk onto the contractor will attract only those who can absorb it. Smaller firms can't. So they don't bid. The Polish road construction market has some of the most aggressive risk-transfer clauses in Europe, and the bidding data reflects it.

A Concrete Case

In 2023, GDDKiA's Wrocław branch tendered a section of the S8 expressway near Wrocław. Two bidders were expected — three had bought the tender documents. On opening day, one offer arrived: Budimex, at 412 million złoty. The authority's estimate was 380 million. After a brief review, the contract was signed. The road will be built. But the price gap — roughly 8% above estimate — was never tested against a competitor's number.

Was that a good deal? Probably. Was it a competitive deal? No one can say, because there was no competition. Multiply that ambiguity across hundreds of tenders a year, and you get a system running on trust rather than market discipline.

What Could Actually Change

The UZP has proposed reforms: mandatory market consultations before publishing large tenders, more flexible price-adjustment clauses, and a shift toward quality-based evaluation rather than pure lowest price. These are sensible, but slow.

A faster lever is transparency. Publishing the number of bidders per tender, the price gap between the winning offer and the estimate, and the reasons for single-bid outcomes would create pressure on both sides. Contractors would see which authorities consistently attract one bid. Authorities would see which specifications scare bidders away. Sunlight, as usual, is cheaper than regulation.

The deeper fix is structural: rebuild the mid-tier of Polish road construction. That means payment terms that don't strangle smaller firms, risk clauses that are actually insurable, and a pipeline of projects stable enough that a contractor can plan five years ahead. Until then, expect more single-bid tenders — and more roads built at prices nobody can verify.