Coverage is the first question a contractor asks a procurement product, and it is the one most of them answer with a map graphic and a round number. Here is the actual list instead: every source behind the tender portal, what each one can and cannot tell you, and the places where the map is honestly thin. ## The federal layer, everywhere Federal solicitations come from SAM.gov, nationwide, in every sector. They are matched on the response deadline rather than the posting date, so a solicitation that has been open for two months stays listed until it actually closes instead of falling off a "recent" list while there is still time to bid. Behind the open notices sits USAspending, the federal award record. It does not say what is open; it says what was bought, from whom, for how much. That is the raw material for pricing comparables and for the win-loss tracking that runs off a firm's own UEI. Those two are the floor. A firm in a state with no feed of its own still gets federal work in its radar and federal awards behind its estimates. ## The states with their own feed Texas is covered twice, and it is the strongest single-state story we have. The Electronic State Business Daily is the board Texas law requires state agencies to post to, which pulls in every agency plus the cities, counties, school districts and colleges that buy through SmartBuy, with an NIGP classification on every notice. Alongside it sit the TxDOT lettings, which carry something almost no public buyer publishes: TxDOT's own sealed engineer's estimate, up front, before anyone bids. The lettings do one more thing. They share an identifier with TxDOT's bid tabulations, so a letting tracked while it is open later resolves into the winner and every losing bidder's price and rank. No other source in the country tells a firm where it placed. Virginia reaches us through eVA, the state's central portal, carrying state and local notices. Washington reaches us through WEBS, the Department of Enterprise Services' bid calendar. The District of Columbia reaches us through PASS. Each of those three also supplies award history, which is a second and different kind of coverage. ## The metro boards New York City is the second story worth naming after Texas. It is the largest municipal buyer in the country, its board reaches us through no aggregator, and one source — the City Record — carries both its live solicitations and its award history back to 2003. A firm covering New York gets the open work and the comparables to price it from the same place. Los Angeles reaches us through RAMP, and the honest framing is regional rather than municipal: most of what RAMP carries is LA County, the school district or the Port of Long Beach rather than the city itself. That is more work rather than less, but calling it Los Angeles city coverage would be wrong. San Francisco is on the map for breadth. Its open board carries very little construction, and we would rather say so here than have a San Francisco contractor find out after paying. California is now covered statewide as well as regionally, and on both halves. Cal eProcure carries the state's open solicitations; SCPRS, the state's contract reporting system inside FI$Cal, carries what was actually awarded. Together with the LA region's board that closes the loop this post said was open the last time it was written: a California firm can see what is open and price it against what the same buyers have paid. ## The boards that arrive without us building anything A growing share of city and agency procurement runs on OpenGov Procurement, which publishes a public API. Through it we reach Seattle, Phoenix, Orlando, Norfolk, the District's Department of General Services, Nashville's WeGo transit authority and the 1GPA purchasing cooperative — city, county and transit work in Washington, Arizona, Florida, Virginia, DC and Tennessee. This part of the map matters more than its size suggests, because city and transit work very often never reaches a state portal at all. A contractor watching only the state feed for Washington or Arizona is not seeing a slice of the market that is genuinely open to them. It is also the cheapest thing on this page. When a city adopts OpenGov, its board becomes visible to us as configuration rather than as an integration — no new parser, no release. That part of the coverage map grows on its own, and it grows faster than the part we build by hand. ## What past awards add that open notices cannot Several of the sources above appear twice, in two different roles, and running the two together is the easiest way to misread a coverage claim. Virginia's procurement ledger, Washington's L&I public works filings and agency contracts, the District's PASS contract records, New York City's award history, Oregon's ODOT highway contracts and OregonBuys, and California's SCPRS ledger are award data. They say what was bought and for how much, after the fact. They do not say what is open. They are what makes a price defensible — this agency, this kind of work, this range — and what lets a firm see its own record rather than recall it. Texas remains the exception on prices. Every other feed publishes the award: one winner, one number. Texas publishes the tabulation: everyone who bid, what they bid, in order. You will not find placing statistics anywhere on this site, and that is deliberate rather than coy. The only source that publishes losing bids alongside a winner is one where the winner is defined as the lowest bidder, so any statistic drawn from it would restate the rule and dress it up as an insight. Where the data closes the loop we use it, and where it does not we say so. ## What makes a state easy to add, and why it is not size The constraint is not population and it is not procurement volume. It is whether a state publishes machine-readable data at all. Some of the largest states in the country are among the hardest. Their bid boards are interactive applications that hold session state, or they sit behind a filter that refuses any client that is not a browser, or the whole system was outsourced to a vendor that publishes no public interface at any documented address. Meanwhile a small state with an ordinary open-data portal is a week of work, because the portal answers a plain request with a plain file. There is a second asymmetry, and it explains the shape of everything above. The states that publish easily mostly publish payments and awards — what was spent, after it was spent. Open bid boards are far more often the thing behind the wall. That is why our award coverage runs ahead of our tender coverage, and why adding a state often means adding the ability to price work there before the ability to find it there. ## Coming next California was the lead item here and the statewide half of it has landed — see above. What is left is the part that would make California genuinely comparable to Texas: Caltrans publishes per-project bid summaries listing every bidder and every amount. We are chasing that one. We have not landed it. New York State next, past the city. The state publishes construction and capital-project contract data of its own, including a broader authorities-wide procurement record, which would put statewide agency work alongside the City Record for a firm that bids both. Then Connecticut, which is the cleanest new state available on the merits rather than on appetite: an explicit public-domain licence, a nightly refresh, and real vendor identifiers rather than name strings. It is award data, so it would arrive as pricing and track-record coverage first. And more OpenGov cities, continuously, without an announcement, because that is how that part works. No dates on any of it. A roadmap with quarters on it is a roadmap that will be wrong in public, and the reason a state is not on this list yet is usually that its portal has not decided to let anyone in. The current map is browsable at [/tenders](/tenders) with no account — filter by state and see for yourself where it is deep and where it is thin. Related reading: [what the free tender portal shows, and what it does not](/blog/what-the-free-tender-portal-shows).