Sources

Every data source considered for this site — what it publishes, under what licence, how much of it is here, and, where it was not used, why not. The record counts below are counted from the database itself, not copied from a report.

Counted on . The counts are refreshed by the data pipeline, so they lag a run in progress.

How sources are judged

Four criteria decide whether a source can be used here. They are shown separately rather than combined into a single score.

  1. Licence. The data must be published under an open licence. A source is not used if its licence has a non-commercial term, if its terms of use forbid automated access, or if no licence is published. A share-alike licence is noted on the source.
  2. Fields. A price comparison needs a quantity, a unit price, a classification code, and a known tax basis. Delivery terms would be needed to compare across borders properly and no public procurement publisher found so far reports them.
  3. How that was established. Figures measured on the whole published file are more reliable than figures from a sample. Each source below states which kind of check was done.
  4. Scope and volume. Considered last. A large source without the fields above cannot provide comparable prices.

Used on this site

Ordered by how many of the comparison fields each publishes. 4,084,046 prices were in the database from these sources when they were last counted.

  • Chile — Dirección de Compras y Contratación Pública (ChileCompra)

    Government

    CC0 1.0 (public domain)·Whole file measured·Source

    Tenders captured:
    960,945
    Award items ingested:
    3,159,598
    Became a usable price:
    1,761,393 (55.7%)

    Tenders by year: 2026 166,390 · 2025 794,555

    Reports 5 of 6 comparison fields: Quantity, Published unit price, Verified tax basis, Classification code, Cross-national codes (UNSPSC). Missing: Delivery terms.

    Classifies with UNSPSC, so its codes can be compared across countries. Around 56% of its awards are direct or framework-agreement purchases rather than competitive tenders, and only competitive awards enter a benchmark.

  • Paraguay — Dirección Nacional de Contrataciones Públicas (DNCP)

    Government

    CC BY 4.0·Sampled·Source

    Tenders captured:
    13,582
    Award items ingested:
    1,110,422
    Became a usable price:
    1,102,998 (99.3%)

    Tenders by year: 2026 3,605 · 2025 9,977

    Reports 4 of 6 comparison fields: Quantity, Published unit price, Verified tax basis, Classification code. Missing: Cross-national codes (UNSPSC), Delivery terms.

    Uses an extended national catalogue whose first eight digits are UNSPSC codes, so its items can be grouped with those of other countries.

  • Uruguay — Agencia Reguladora de Compras Estatales (ARCE)

    Government

    Licencia de Datos Abiertos de Uruguay v0.1·Whole file measured·Source

    Tenders captured:
    120,455
    Award items ingested:
    419,506
    Became a usable price:
    415,132 (99.0%)

    Tenders by year: 2026 43,967 · 2025 76,488

    Reports 4 of 6 comparison fields: Quantity, Published unit price, Verified tax basis, Classification code. Missing: Cross-national codes (UNSPSC), Delivery terms.

    98.2% of its award items give a usable unit price, the highest share of the sources used. Its tax basis was checked against an award document. It uses its own national catalogue, which does not correspond to UNSPSC.

  • Dominican Republic — Dirección General de Contrataciones Públicas (DGCP)

    Government

    ODbL 1.0 (share-alike)·Whole file measured·Source

    Tenders captured:
    98,537
    Award items ingested:
    564,700
    Became a usable price:
    563,105 (99.7%)

    Tenders by year: 2026 34,485 · 2025 64,052

    Reports 4 of 6 comparison fields: Quantity, Published unit price, Verified tax basis, Classification code. Missing: Cross-national codes (UNSPSC), Delivery terms.

    Every award item carries a unit price. Its licence is share-alike, so the dataset derived on this site is offered under the same terms.

  • Honduras — Oficina Normativa de Contratación y Adquisiciones del Estado (ONCAE)

    Government

    CC BY 4.0·Whole file measured·Source

    Tenders captured:
    65,593
    Award items ingested:
    59,585
    Became a usable price:
    57,945 (97.2%)

    Tenders by year: 2026 16,474 · 2025 49,119

    Reports 3 of 6 comparison fields: Quantity, Verified tax basis, Classification code. Missing: Published unit price, Cross-national codes (UNSPSC), Delivery terms.

    Publishes most purchases as a whole lot — one line, quantity 1, the shopping list in the description — so nearly all of its records are stored and visible but excluded from the medians as line totals rather than unit prices.

  • Peru — Organismo Especializado para las Contrataciones Públicas Eficientes (OECE)

    Government

    CC BY 4.0·Whole file measured·Source

    Tenders captured:
    193,306
    Award items ingested:
    234,282
    Became a usable price:
    173,543 (74.1%)

    Tenders by year: 2026 94,348 · 2025 98,958

    Reports 3 of 6 comparison fields: Quantity, Verified tax basis, Classification code. Missing: Published unit price, Cross-national codes (UNSPSC), Delivery terms.

    Publishes no unit price directly — every figure is derived by dividing an award value by a quantity — and 71% of its lines carry a quantity of 1, often naming a service rather than a measure. Those are held out of the medians.

  • Zambia — Zambia Public Procurement Authority (ZPPA)

    Government

    CC BY 4.0·Whole file measured·Source

    Tenders captured:
    17,861
    Award items ingested:
    18,705
    Became a usable price:
    9,930 (53.1%)

    Tenders by year: 2026 4,925 · 2025 12,936

    Reports 3 of 6 comparison fields: Published unit price, Classification code, Cross-national codes (UNSPSC). Missing: Quantity, Verified tax basis, Delivery terms.

    The first source outside Latin America. It classifies with UNSPSC, but most of its awards are non-competitive and fewer than half of its items carry a quantity, so only a small share of its records reach a benchmark.

Consulted, never stored

These are looked up live when there are too few procurement records for an item. Nothing from them is saved or used in a benchmark, so they are listed separately from the sources above.

  • Multiple — Alibaba.com

    Commercial

    Site terms of use·Not measured·Source

    Why: Used only for a single live lookup on request, with nothing stored. Its terms do not permit building a dataset, so its prices are never saved or used in a benchmark.

    A current vendor asking price, gathered when procurement coverage for an item is too thin to answer. Never mixed with the contract-derived figures.

Evaluated and not used

Sources that were evaluated and are not included, with the reason for each.

  • European Union — Tenders Electronic Daily (TED) / OpenTender

    International organisation

    CC BY-NC-SA 4.0·Whole file measured·Source

    Why: Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 includes a non-commercial term.

    Publishes public procurement notices and contract awards for the European Union.

  • Multiple — Global Fund Price & Quality Reporting (PQR)

    International organisation

    Terms under review·Not measured·Source

    Why: No programmatic access: the data is published only as interactive dashboards, with no export or download.

    Reports prices paid by an international organisation, including delivery terms. Every source used on this site is a national government, so every price here is a domestic one.

  • Honduras — ONCAE Observatorio de Precios

    Government

    None found·Not measured·Source

    Why: No licence is published. Its scope is limited to supplies bought during the COVID-19 pandemic.

    Honduras is covered by ONCAE's main data feed, listed above.

  • Ecuador — Servicio Nacional de Contratación Pública (SERCOP)

    Government

    Open·Sampled·Source

    Why: Limited unit data: only 2.6% of its award items carry the unit information needed to compare prices.

    Its data is published under an open licence.

  • Brazil — SEGES / Compras.gov.br

    Government

    CC BY 4.0·Whole file measured·Source

    Why: Its award items carry no classification code. The code is on the tender items and has to be matched across, and only about 11% of matched items carry one.

    The largest source found, with 5.7 million award items.

  • Nigeria, South Africa, Taiwan, Rwanda, Tanzania, Peru (second publisher), Uganda — Seven publishers with no award items at all

    Government

    Various·Publisher's registry entry·Source

    Why: No award items published. This site derives prices from awarded line items, so these sources cannot provide any.

    Counted over each complete dataset in the Open Contracting registry.

  • Multiple — Five commercial vendor catalogues

    Commercial

    Site terms forbid automated access·Not measured·Source

    Why: Their terms of use forbid automated access, so they are not used, not even for a single lookup.

    This is why prices from well-known online vendors do not appear on this site.

How a price is derived from these sources, and what can make one misleading, is set out in the methodology.