Construction tenders in North America: federal, state and provincial portals

Federal portals first, then the states and provinces. Cities, counties, school boards and utilities often advertise on their own sites or on a commercial service, so check where each buyer you target publishes.

SAM.gov is the federal government's single point of entry. A proposed action is synopsized there at least 15 days before the solicitation is issued, and above the simplified acquisition threshold bidders get at least 30 days to respond (FAR 5.203). Construction is governed by FAR Part 36, under which every notice states the job's magnitude in price bands, from less than $25,000 to more than $10,000,000.

Federal-aid highways are different: the Federal Highway Administration does not tender them. Under 23 U.S.C. 112, the state department of transportation awards them by competitive bidding to the lowest responsive, responsible bidder, so road and bridge work appears on state letting pages such as TxDOT's, Caltrans' and FDOT's.

CanadaBuys is the official source of federal tender and award notices, and the old Buyandsell site has been decommissioned. Viewing is free; Public Services and Procurement Canada runs its own tenders on SAP Business Network, where you need an account to see the full details. Each province publishes its own and its public sector's tenders, as the table shows.

Above set values, construction procurement is covered by trade agreements, which open it to suppliers from the other parties. The thresholds below apply from 1 January 2026 to 31 December 2027. Canada is not a party to the government procurement chapter of CUSMA: US suppliers are covered through the WTO Agreement on Government Procurement instead.

Quebec adds requirements of its own, and a bid that misses one can be rejected before it is read.

Bidligence reads the official sources below for new notices on a schedule. The list is generated from its source registry and run records, so it shows only the sources that returned tender notices recently. A portal from the table above that is missing here is one Bidligence cannot read automatically today: the Caltrans and FDOT contract pages, for example, build their listings in the browser, so there is no readable page to monitor.

New notices are matched against your watch profile (keywords, words to exclude, countries, regions, sources and a minimum value) and land in your opportunity inbox, with a daily or weekly digest e-mail. One click turns a notice into a bid, carrying the buyer, the deadline and the estimated value across; see tender alerts.

If a state, county, city or utility you bid for is not listed, add its tender page or RSS feed to your workspace's sources. Bidligence then reads it daily, extracting the notices from a web page with AI, and matches them to your watch profile like any other source.

Some tenders appear only on agency websites or behind portals that load in the browser. For the countries below, Bidligence also runs an AI web search for new tenders during the country's local night, once a workspace watches that country, and what it finds lands in the same inbox. It is a second net across 66 countries worldwide, not a promise to find every notice, so keep the official portals in your routine.

The United States and Canada are among Bidligence's 21 regional procurement profiles. Each profile sets the currency, the procurement rules, the typical buyers, the standards and the price sources that the analysis, the documents and the BOQ pricing work from: the US profile brings in the FAR, Davis-Bacon wages, Buy American and Miller Act bonds, with RSMeans for pricing; the Canadian profile brings in CCDC contracts, bid depositories, bonding and CSA standards.

When you analyse a tender, Bidligence reads the bid security it asks for, the mandatory documents, and the closing date as it stands after every amendment you upload. The Bid Score rates the tender before you commit to pricing, and the Submission Guard checks each mandatory item against your Evidence Vault before you submit. Registration in SAM, an AMP authorization or a bond stays with you, your surety and the buyer.