Planning Intelligence Spain › Method
How we build Spain’s public works tender figures — method and sources
Every number on the Spain pages comes from Plataforma de Contratación del Sector Público (Ministerio de Hacienda)’s own published record, joined only to the official reference lists named below. This page says exactly how, and what the record does not contain.
What the national platform does not carry: Catalonia (Barcelona, Girona, Lleida, Tarragona) and the Basque Country (Araba/Álava, Bizkaia, Gipuzkoa) publish most of their public contracts on their own regional platforms. Their provinces hold only what the national platform carries and look nearly empty here; we do not load the regional platforms yet.
Each figure is counted by its own rule, so they are not the steps of a funnel: a contract is placed on the map from the province where the work is carried out, even when it gives no description.
Where this data comes from
| Source | Publisher | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| PLACSP - Licitaciones publicadas en la Plataforma, excluyendo los contratos menores (sindicación ATOM, archivos mensuales) | Ministerio de Hacienda | Reuse under Real Decreto 1495/2011 (datos.gob.es general conditions) - "Origen de los datos: Ministerio de Hacienda" |
| INE - Relación de municipios y códigos por provincias (diccionario26.xlsx) | Instituto Nacional de Estadística | Condiciones de reutilización del INE: citar la fuente |
| EU region centre points (Eurostat) | GISCO — European Commission | CC BY 4.0 |
We read what the authority publishes for bulk reuse. We do not scrape the public search interface, and we never sign in to anything.
What the register publishes
| Field | Status |
|---|---|
| Description of the works | Published |
| Contracting authority (buyer) | Published |
| Architect or designer | Not published Not from us — how you can get it yourself: A contract names the buyer, never the architect - the design is usually what is being bought. Award records name the winning firm with its NIF: 90.0% of the 24,844 construction awards in the last twelve months name a company winner with a legal-person NIF - 7,143 distinct firms - and the 10.0% won by a natural person are masked by the platform and never read. |
| Notice type and deadline for offers | Published |
| Map location | Not published How we handle it instead: No coordinates are published. Where a contract carries the NUTS3 code of the work location, it is placed at its province's official label point and labelled approximate everywhere it appears; a notice with no province is listed but not mapped. |
From a published record to a lead
- Ingest. We take the authority’s published file or API and keep the raw response, dated and unchanged, so every figure can be traced back to the exact bytes we received.
- Normalise. References, publication dates, deadlines for offers and notice types are mapped to one shared vocabulary so Spain can be compared with the other countries on this site.
- Locate. The platform publishes no coordinates, so a contract whose notice names its province is placed at that province’s official point (NUTS 3), using the European Commission’s GISCO data, and labelled as approximate everywhere it appears. A notice that names no province is listed but not mapped.
- Match to a trade. Each notice carries CPV codes, the EU’s closed vocabulary of works, and each code is mapped to the trades it needs. A notice can need several trades. A code means the same in every language, so nothing is guessed from the wording.
- Time it. A notice carries its own stage: planned (the buyer has announced the works ahead of the call for offers), open for bids, closed, or awarded. Where it publishes a deadline for offers we show it exactly as given, and mark an open notice closed once that date has passed. We add no timing of our own.
- Find who to contact. Where the published record names a party, the lead carries it directly.
What we deliberately do not collect
A notice is published by a public body, which is a legal person; its staff are not. Mailboxes that belong to named officials are discarded at ingest and never stored — only the body’s own contact point is kept. Privacy.
Known limits, stated plainly
These are the things this country’s pipeline does not yet do fully. They are tracked in public and updated as they close.
| Feature | Status | Where it stands |
|---|---|---|
| Site location | Partial | The province of the works, not the site: where a contract names a place it is a NUTS 3 area, never a plot |
| Exact address | Partial | No street address is published: we give the municipality where the published locality matches the INE register exactly (30% of contracts); the linked tender documents give the site |
| Project scale | Partial | No floor area; the estimated contract value, the CPV code and the bid deadline show the scale |
| Architect / designer | Not available | A works tender names no designer. While bidding is open the contractor is not yet chosen, which is why it is worth buying; an award notice then names the winning firm |
This table is the full list of known limits for this country.
How current is it
We check our sources every night. Each register publishes on its own schedule - some daily, some monthly - and every country page shows the date of the newest record we hold.
Source: Plataforma de Contratación del Sector Público (Ministerio de Hacienda) · Reuse under Real Decreto 1495/2011 (datos.gob.es general conditions) - "Origen de los datos: Ministerio de Hacienda" · rebuilt 2026-10-11.
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Those contract notices open in full: what is being bought, which authority is buying it, and the business contact where we hold one.
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