Buyer profile
How Education Procurement Service (EPS) buys
Based on 1,489 recorded award notices in the OGP data (2024–2026). Procedure type is recorded for every award; bid-count and SME figures are shown only where the underlying counts are published. All figures are recorded facts from the award data.
Competitive-procedure mix
Share of Education Procurement Service (EPS)'s 1,478 contract awards placed through each procurement route, by award count and by awarded value. Value-weighting covers 54% of these awards (the share that disclosed a usable value); 11 qualification-system admissions (DPS / UQS) are reported separately and excluded from this mix.
1,472 awards, €1770.6M of disclosed value
6 awards, €3.2M of disclosed value
0 awards
Bids & SME access
Average bids per award
3.3
Average across 1,240 of 1,489 awards with a published bid count.
SME-access ratio
0.55
Pooled SME wins ÷ SME bids, across 1,188 of 1,489 awards with published SME bid counts.
The SME-access ratio is a pooled rate (total SME awards divided by total SME bids), not an average of per-award rates. A higher ratio means a larger share of SME bids resulted in an award.
Year-by-year trend
Computed across the 1,260 of 1,489 awards that carry a published date. The open-market share here therefore rests on this dated subset.
| Year | Open-market (count) | Avg bids | SME access | Dated awards |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 100.0% | 11.3 | 0.50 | 3 |
| 2015 | 100.0% | 5.2 | 0.50 | 13 |
| 2016 | 100.0% | 3.5 | 0.43 | 45 |
| 2017 | 100.0% | 3.5 | 0.47 | 124 |
| 2018 | 100.0% | 2.5 | 0.43 | 81 |
| 2019 | 100.0% | 2.7 | 0.42 | 119 |
| 2020 | 100.0% | 3.8 | 0.60 | 126 |
| 2021 | 100.0% | 3.6 | 0.61 | 150 |
| 2022 | 100.0% | 2.8 | 0.58 | 175 |
| 2023 | 100.0% | 2.7 | 0.55 | 123 |
| 2024 | 98.2% | 3.4 | 0.61 | 108 |
| 2025 | 100.0% | 4.1 | 0.57 | 139 |
| 2026 | 98.2% | 3.8 | 0.54 | 54 |
By sector
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Data & licence
Contains Irish Public Sector Data licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence. Computed deterministically from the Office of Government Procurement contract-award records published ondata.gov.ie. Open-market routes are the Open, Restricted, Simplified, Competitive Dialogue and Competitive-with-Negotiation procedures; limited-competition routes are mini-competitions and quick quotes; single-tender is the negotiated procedure without prior publication. Generated 2026-08-02.