Roughly 86% of Latvian tenders are decided by price. The official figure says 51%.

The European Commission's Single Market Scoreboard says Latvia awarded 51% of its procurement procedures to the cheapest bid in 2024 — below the EU average of 54%, comfortably inside the green band. On that number, Latvia has a mild lowest-price habit and nothing more.

We read the actual tender documents instead. Not the notice metadata — the nolikums, the technical specifications, the contract drafts and the scoring annexes, for 6,752 Latvian calls for bids published in EIS, Latvia's state e-procurement system, between 27 March and 16 August 2026. Once you read what the scoring tables actually say, the picture changes: roughly 86% of Latvian public tenders are decided by price carrying 80% or more of the score.

The gap is not a contradiction. The Scoreboard measures the label a buyer declares. We measured the weights a buyer wrote down.

1. What counts as a tender, and what the declared method looks like

One methodological note first, because it changes the answer. Latvia's procurement feed carries far more than tenders: award notices, concluded contracts, execution reports and modifications, all of which record what already happened and carry no award criteria to read. We excluded those and kept only calls for bids, the notices that invite an offer and state how it will be scored. Of those we read 98.8% of the open contract notices published in the window and 99.6% of the planned-contract notices, so this is close to the whole population rather than a sample of it.

Start with what buyers say they are doing. Well over half of the corpus does not pretend: price is the only award criterion, which is legal in Latvia and across most of the EU.

2. What "price and quality" actually means

The interesting group is the 2,819 tenders that declare both price and quality. We took the 2,105 of them where every criterion carried an explicit stated weight and the weights summed to 100 (±5), and added up how much of the score price carries.

The median is 80%. The mean is 76.1%.

3. Putting the two together

Add the tenders that award on price alone to the tenders where price carries 80% or more, and you get the headline. Of 6,752 calls for bids, 3,919 are price-only and 65.9% of the price-and-quality group clears the 80% bar — about 1,857 tenders. That is 5,776 of 6,752, or 85.6%.

If you refuse to extrapolate and count only the 1,387 tenders we measured directly, the floor is 78.6%. Either way, the answer is not 51%.

4. When price-heavy weighting is the right answer

Not all of these are failures. If you are buying brush cassettes to a fixed technical specification, the specification already carries the quality requirement and the only open question is who supplies it cheapest. Weighting price at 95% there is sound procurement. The mandatory minimum standards do the quality work.

The problem is the tenders where that logic does not hold and the weighting is applied anyway — design services, consultancy, software, anything where the gap between a good and a poor supplier cannot be written into a specification. A 10-point quality criterion in a design tender is not an evaluation. It lets the buyer describe a lowest-price award as most economically advantageous.

5. Why this matters in 2026

The EU has spent a decade trying to move procurement away from lowest price, and it has been legislating against a target it cannot see.

Article 67(2) of Directive 2014/24/EU already gives member states a direct lever: they "may provide that contracting authorities may not use price only or cost only as the sole award criterion". Latvia has pulled it, but only a little way. Article 51(3¹) of the Publisko iepirkumu likums forbids price-only awards for four things: design, combined design-and-build, electricity-consuming goods, and road vehicles. Article 51(4) leaves price-only legal everywhere else.

Look at what that produces. The ophthalmology tender's five lots of powered equipment are electricity-consuming goods, so the law required a second criterion there — and got one worth 10 points against price's 90. The 10-point quality criterion in a design tender is the same rule met at the same minimum. A mandate on the label, with no floor under the weight, is satisfied by a criterion that cannot change who wins.

That is also why widening the ban would achieve less than expected. It would move 3,919 tenders into the price-and-quality column, where the median tender already gives price 80% of the score. The label changes; the outcome does not.

That resolution called for broader use of non-price criteria and noted that more than half of EU procedures are still awarded solely on lowest price. The Commission's Public Procurement Act, the first full revision of the directives since 2014, is due on 9 September 2026 after slipping from a Q2 target, with negotiations expected to close in Q4 2027.

It will be measured, once again, by the declared award method. A rule that mandates quality criteria without mandating that they carry real weight will produce compliant paperwork and no change in who wins. The thing to regulate is the weighting floor, not the label.

6. How we measured this

Every tender was read the way a bidder reads one: open the package, read every document, find where the scoring is defined. Our agents read the nolikums, technical specifications, contract drafts, pricing forms and annexes — including files buried inside ZIP and .edoc containers — and extracted each award criterion with its weight and a citation back to the source filename. That produced 14,771 award criteria and 82,248 requirements across the corpus, with 99.3% of the tenders read at high extraction confidence.

Every corpus figure in this article can be walked back to a line in a specific published document. That is the same property a procurement decision needs when somebody challenges it.