How to Find Government Contracts in Canada

Let's be candid up front, because it's the whole point of this page: the official portals are genuinely free, genuinely comprehensive for what they cover, and there's no secret paid list of "better" contracts hiding behind them. If a service is charging you for access to federal tenders, you're paying for convenience, not access. So this guide does two jobs. First, it maps every official place a contract can be posted, so you're not missing anything. Second — and this is where most guides stop short — it explains the enormous share of government buying that never appears on any portal, and how a small business actually reaches it.

Most government buying happens below the waterline

Picture the whole of federal procurement as an iceberg. The part above the waterline — the openly tendered contracts that must be posted publicly — is real, and it's where you'll start. But it's the tip. Below the waterline sits a far larger mass of buying that a department can do without ever running a public competition. Understanding which layer a given dollar of spend lives in tells you exactly where to point your effort.

The scale of the hidden layer is easy to underestimate. In 2024–25 the Government of Canada awarded $66.9 billion across more than 500,000 contracts — plus close to two million credit-card transactions on top of that. The majority of those contracts were valued under $25,000. So when you search a portal and see "only" a few opportunities in your category, you're not seeing a quiet market. You're seeing the visible tip of a very large one.

"Small business wins most contracts" and "SMEs get a fifth of the dollars" are both true

This is the single most useful thing to understand about the Canadian market, and it sounds contradictory until you separate count from value. By count, small businesses win the majority of contracts. By dollar value, most of the money flows to a small number of large vendors. Both statements are correct at the same time — they're just measuring different things.

Federal: CanadaBuys is the front door

CanadaBuys (canadabuys.canada.ca) is the free, official Government of Canada portal for federal tender notices. It replaced the legacy buyandsell.gc.ca, and it's also where PSPC runs its SAP Ariba sourcing events. If a federal department is legally required to post an opportunity, it posts it here. Searching it costs nothing, and you don't need an account just to browse what's open.

Browsing is one thing; getting the right opportunities to reach you is another. That's what registration and commodity coding are for — and this is exactly where 2026 trips people up, because the plumbing underneath CanadaBuys is mid-migration.

Register on SAP Business Network — not the old SRI system

Federal supplier registration now runs through SAP Business Network (formerly SAP Ariba), accessed through CanadaBuys, with standard, joint-venture, and viewer account types depending on how you'll participate. Crucially, the old Supplier Registration Information (SRI) system is being retired: after July 3, 2026, SRI will no longer be available. Any guide — even a recent one — that tells you to "register in SRI" is pointing you at a system that's on its way out. Register on SAP Business Network instead.

One more reason to set this up now rather than later: as the trade-agreement thresholds and the new Canadian-content rules reshape federal buying in 2026, being registered and correctly coded is what puts you in line to be notified when new set-asides open. We walk the full registration path in How to sell to the Government of Canada.

Provincial & territorial portals: 13 more free front doors

CanadaBuys only covers federal opportunities. Every province and territory runs its own separate, free tendering portal for its own government's buying — and for many small businesses, provincial and municipal work is closer, more frequent, and easier to win than federal contracts. CanadaBuys itself maintains an official directory that links out to all of them, which is the safest single starting point.

Each card links through the official CanadaBuys directory of provincial and territorial tendering sites, so the destination stays current even if a province changes its portal address.

A couple of practical notes. Ontario's portal now runs on the Jaggaer eTendering platform (you may still see legacy "bravosolution" branding in the address — it's the right site). Manitoba is the odd one out: rather than a fully proprietary portal, it publishes through its own tenders listing alongside MERX. And Quebec's SEAO operates in French first, which matters if you bid there.

Winning the layer nobody posts

Here's the part that separates businesses that "check the portals sometimes" from businesses that actually build a government revenue line. A large share of public buying — the mass below the waterline — is never competitively posted. You can't find it by searching, because there's nothing to find. You reach it by being the supplier a buyer already knows to call. Three mechanisms carry most of that work.

Low-dollar-value buys: under $25K / $40K, bought on discretion

Federal rules set clear low-dollar-value thresholds: purchases under $25,000 for goods and under $40,000 for services and construction (all taxes in) don't require a formal competitive solicitation. A buyer with a small, well-defined need can simply request a few quotes from suppliers they're aware of and place the order. Multiply that by every department and you get a huge volume of small contracts awarded on relationships and visibility rather than public tenders.

Purchasing cards: the $600-million-a-year channel with no notice board

Below even the low-dollar thresholds, government buyers use procurement (purchasing) cards for routine spend. Almost all of these purchases are under $10,000, and together they total over $600 million a year in direct vendor purchases, per PSPC. None of it is tendered. If a program officer needs your product and can put it on a card, the entire "procurement process" is them finding your business and buying — which is why simply being discoverable, credentialed, and easy to buy from is itself a strategy.

Standing offers & supply arrangements: get onto the list that gets called

The third channel is the pre-qualified supplier list. Departments set up standing offers (approved suppliers at pre-set prices, ordered via call-up) and supply arrangements (pre-qualified pools that run a smaller competition for each job). Once these are in place, a great deal of recurring work is called off them directly, never re-advertised as one-off tenders. If you're not on the relevant list, that work is invisible to you no matter how often you refresh CanadaBuys. Getting listed is the single highest-leverage move for reaching the unposted layer — we break down how these two vehicles differ in the government contract types guide.

Aggregators & alert services: useful, never required

Once you realize opportunities are scattered across a federal portal plus thirteen provincial and territorial ones (plus countless municipal sites), the appeal of a single paid dashboard is obvious. That's the pitch of aggregators like MERX, a private-sector service that bundles federal, provincial, municipal, and MASH-sector notices — plus some private-sector tenders — into one subscription. MERX offers a free account to browse tender summaries, then charges for the ability to view full documents, download attachments, and set up alerts.

What's changed in 2026

The plumbing of federal procurement has moved more in the past year than in the decade before it, and several of these shifts change where you register and how the odds tilt for a Canadian small business.

The supplier front door is changing. The legacy SRI registration system will no longer be available after July 3, 2026; suppliers register on SAP Business Network through CanadaBuys instead. Guides published even months ago that say "register in SRI" are now actively wrong.

Being Canadian became a scoring advantage. The Buy Canadian Policy took effect December 16, 2025. Where it applies, Canadian suppliers receive a 10% reduction to their financial (price) proposal purely for evaluation purposes — a scoring credit, not a ban on foreign bidders — with additional weight given to Canadian value-added content. It started on procurements over $25 million and drops to $5 million on June 15, 2026, across five strategic sectors. Details in the Buy Canadian Policy guide.

A dedicated SMB on-ramp is arriving. Budget 2025 created the Small and Medium Business Procurement Program (SMBPP) — $79.9 million over five years starting in 2026–2027, delivered through ISED. It's not a cash grant; it's a market-access program of reserved contract streams, navigation support, and extra Canadian-content evaluation points, launching primarily via CanadaBuys. Another reason to register and code your profile now, so you're notified as those set-asides open.

The threshold ladder was refreshed for 2026–2027. The dollar lines that decide what must be openly competed — and which recourse body hears a complaint — were re-indexed. Here are the four figures worth knowing, lowest to highest:

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