In November, many companies look for public contracts that do not exist. The pipeline empties, monitoring feels less effective, and the conclusion comes quickly: “the public sector is slowing down”. We measured 233,633 contract notices and 202,924 award notices published in Belgium between 2021 and 2025. That slowdown does not exist. What does exist is a switch: from November onwards, the public buyer barely opens any new procedure — it awards the ones from October.
1. Two curves, and they run in opposite directions
A public contract leaves two public traces. The contract notice opens the procedure: that is the one everyone watches. The award notice closes it by naming the winner. Almost nobody reads the second one — and yet it is the one that explains November.
| Month | Contract notices | Share of the year | Award notices | Share of the year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| January | 19,151 | 8.2 % | 22,128 | 10.9 % |
| February | 15,866 | 6.8 % | 14,778 | 7.3 % |
| March | 18,745 | 8.0 % | 14,823 | 7.3 % |
| April | 19,948 | 8.5 % | 16,161 | 8.0 % |
| May | 20,810 | 8.9 % | 16,476 | 8.1 % |
| June | 21,268 | 9.1 % | 15,648 | 7.7 % |
| July | 21,068 | 9.0 % | 16,894 | 8.3 % |
| August | 14,287 | 6.1 % | 11,935 | 5.9 % |
| September | 21,701 | 9.3 % | 15,281 | 7.5 % |
| October | 25,098 | 10.7 % | 18,409 | 9.1 % |
| November | 17,956 | 7.7 % | 17,128 | 8.4 % |
| December | 17,735 | 7.6 % | 23,263 | 11.5 % |
Source: 233,633 contract notices and 202,924 award notices published in Belgium between 2021 and 2025 (full calendar years), taken from our publications database.
−28 %
The drop in contract notices between October and November: 7,142 fewer notices, in four weeks. October publishes 40 % more than November.
The opposite movement is just as sharp. December is the densest month of the year for awards — 23,263 notices, 11.5 % of the annual total, ahead of January. That same month is one of the two weakest for contract notices. November and December are not empty months: they are decision months.
2. A shift, not a slowdown
Between the publication of a Belgian contract notice and the submission deadline, the median gap is 34 days — a remarkably stable figure from September to November. A notice published in October is therefore submitted in November; a notice published in December is submitted in January.
That is the whole explanation of the lull. November is not the month when you look for contracts: it is the month when you write October's bids. If your pipeline of new opportunities is empty in November, your monitoring is not the problem — the calendar is, and it applies to your competitors just the same.
December is an exception on one point: the notices published there allow 41 days to respond, against 34 for the rest of the autumn. The buyer knows your company will be closed part of the month. A December notice is therefore less urgent than it looks — but its deadline falls in January, in the week when everyone restarts at once.
3. What keeps being published during the lull
Part of the public market ignores that calendar entirely: contracts without mandatory publication. Below the legal thresholds, the buyer is not required to publish a notice — it consults whoever it wants, often by e-mail, and those contracts appear on no official portal. Their curve looks nothing like the other one.
Standard contract notices
−28 %
from October to November
Contracts without mandatory publication
+29 %
over the same four weeks
November is their third best month of the year — 10.7 % of their annual volume, behind June and September, and well ahead of October (8.3 %). In volume: 3,788 contracts in November against 2,930 in October. December stays above average, at 9.4 %.
In other words, the month when competitors let their monitoring slip is precisely the month when this source is at its busiest — and it is already, by design, the least contested: only those who know the contract exists can bid. How contracts without mandatory publication work.
Measured on 35,314 contracts without mandatory publication captured in Belgium between 2023 and 2025. The window is shorter than for the rest of the article: this source has only been collected since late 2022.
4. December: buying stops, learning starts
December's 23,263 awards are not a consolation prize. It is the best month of the year to understand your market: an award notice tells you three things nobody publishes anywhere else — who won, at what price, and on which criteria.
Most companies never read them. They read the notices that cost time to process, and ignore the ones that explain why they lost. Three questions to put to December's awards:
- 1. Who is winning the contracts you lost this year, and by what margin? It is the only honest measure of your competitiveness.
- 2. Which buyers awarded to a new supplier? A buyer who changes incumbent is a genuinely open buyer — the opposite of a renewal for form's sake.
- 3. Which contracts awarded four years ago are coming to term? A multi-year contract awarded in December 2022 is going back to the market now. That is the question that fills a January pipeline.
That is the work our competitive analysis pillar covers, and it is done in November and December — not in January, when the notices start landing again.
5. What November makes possible
November frees up monitoring time and makes it available for deeper work. Five uses, in order of return:
- 1. Submit October's bids under decent conditions. It is the only activity of the month that pays off directly, and it gets a full month with no new solicitations.
- 2. Extend your monitoring to non-published contracts. It is the only flow that rises in November; watching it during the lull costs less attention than in October.
- 3. Go through the year's award notices. Who wins with your buyers, at what price, on which criteria — an exercise that is impossible in high season.
- 4. Check your administrative deadlines. Social security certificate, tax certificate, accreditation: raising an accreditation class takes months. Started in November, it is ready for the spring wave.
- 5. Spot the contracts coming to term. December's and January's notices are largely renewals: you prepare them before they appear, not after.
How these figures are measured
All figures come from our database of Belgian notices, over the full calendar years 2021 to 2025 — contract notices and award notices counted separately, by publication date. Submission deadlines are medians, never averages: corrigenda, whose deadline sometimes precedes publication, distort any average. Contracts without mandatory publication are measured separately, over 2023-2025. Since one contract can produce several notices — corrigenda, lots, two-stage procedures — these volumes are higher than the number of distinct contracts.