Public contracts awarded to esPublico, from official data

• Records: 3,255. All the rows we hold from the Platform.
• Awards with an amount: 3,217. We count only those with an amount greater than zero^{source 3}.
• Contracting bodies (in the awards with an amount): 1,225. Each distinct combination of the body's identifier and name counts once, and names that differ only in spacing count as one^{source 4}. By identifier alone, there are 1,038, and 85 awards come from a body with no identifier. The same public authority may count more than once if it awards contracts through different bodies.
• Contracts other than minor contracts, with an amount and with the number of bids published: 1,123. Of these, with only one bid received (‘single bidder’): 1,035^{source 5}. This figure may include procedures in which the law allows the contracting authority to invite a single company, for example when only one can do the work for technical reasons or because of exclusive rights^{source 6}. On its own, it does not indicate a lack of competition.
• By year (awards with an amount): 3 in 2015, 6 in 2016, 10 in 2017, 98 in 2018, 177 in 2019, 269 in 2020, 336 in 2021, 326 in 2022, 468 in 2023, 530 in 2024, 568 in 2025 and 426 in 2026. The year is that of the date of publication on the Platform, as stored in its data, which is not always the day the contract was signed^{source 7}. In 648 records the publication date is later than the last modification, so their year may not be the year of the award^{source 8}.

The fact that a contract appears here does not mean that there is anything irregular about it.

We leave minor contracts out of the ‘single bidder’ count because the law allows them to be awarded directly^{source 9}. We count as minor the contracts that the Platform publishes in its minor contracts dataset^{source 10}. Until 8 March 2018, the law defined minor contracts as those worth less than €18,000, or less than €50,000 for works^{source 11}. Since 9 March 2018, they have been those worth less than €15,000 for services and supplies, or less than €40,000 for works^{source 12}.

In addition, subscriptions to publications and access to specialised databases may be contracted under the minor-contract rules whatever their value, provided they are not subject to harmonised EU rules^{source 13}. For this reason, and because of the higher limits for works and under the previous law, some minor contracts in this list exceed those amounts: in the search tool and in the files they carry a data quality warning.

• Records with no amount or a zero amount: 38. They are not counted among the awards with an amount.
• Data quality warnings: in the search tool and in the files, a column flags the records whose figures should be checked on the official entry: esPublico's tax ID (NIF) with another company's name, the same contract counted twice, a framework agreement listed alongside the contracts based on it, a publication date later than the last modification, among others. They remain in the dataset and in the figures on this page^{source 8}.
• Without the records that are probably not esPublico's or are duplicates: 3,211 awards with an amount, leaving out those in the name of another company or of several, and the second copy of a repeated link^{source 8}.

Some awards to esPublico are not in this data:

• Minor contracts that the autonomous communities publish on their own platforms: the aggregated platforms dataset comes without minor contracts^{source 14}. That is why hardly any minor contracts appear for communities such as Catalonia, Navarre or the Basque Country.
• Minor contracts that the law does not require to be published: those with an estimated value below €5,000 paid through petty cash or a similar system^{source 15}.
• Awards to a temporary joint venture (UTE) or with the tax ID (NIF) mistyped: we search by the digits of esPublico's NIF, and a joint venture has its own^{source 16}.

Twice a day, a program downloads the Platform's monthly open data files: tenders from buyer profiles, tenders aggregated from other platforms and minor contracts^{source 14}. It keeps only the results whose successful bidder has a tax ID (NIF) with the digits of esPublico's (50878842), with any letter or none; company names are not used to select them^{source 16}. If the Platform corrects a record, we update it, and no record is ever deleted^{source 17}. In some records the company appears as Auloce, its former name^{source 18}.

For council contracts, we show the party of the mayor on the date of publication on the Platform^{source 19,source 7}, as it appears in the official register of mayors of the Ministry of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory and in the Red SARA search service for local elected representatives^{source 20,source 21}. The municipality is identified by the INE code (the municipality code assigned by Spain's National Statistics Institute) contained in the public body's identifier or, failing that, by its name^{source 19}.

• Provincial councils, autonomous communities and other public bodies have no mayor: their contracts show no party^{source 22}.
• Minor local entities have their own local mayor (alcalde pedáneo), who is not in that register: we do not assign them a party either^{source 23}.
• If the register does not give the date the mayor took office, we count from the start of the term of office and say so. If there is no record of who was in office, we show ‘No data’^{source 24}.
• The date of publication on the Platform may be later than the award^{source 7}. If the local government changed in between, the party we show is not that of the mayor who awarded the contract.

The party shown is the mayor's party on that date. It does not show who decided on the contract, who the mayor governed with in a coalition, or whether there is anything irregular about the contract.

We do not label contracts or sort them to single anyone out. We do not write the contract figures by hand: they are calculated by a program with automated tests^{source 25}.

Other date cut-offs and other criteria produce other figures: with or without minor contracts, by public body or by contracting body, including or excluding tax. The figures on this page come only from the Platform's open data and the rules above.

In the public procurement section of its Single Market Scoreboard, the European Commission measures the share of contracts awarded with only one bid (the ‘single bidder’ indicator)^{source 26}. It excludes framework agreements and direct awards^{source 27}, so its figure cannot simply be compared with the one on this page.