Greek public contracts in Q3 2026: 8 in 10 direct awards

In Greek public contracts of the third quarter of 2026, direct awards, meaning contracts where the public body picks the contractor without a tender, were eight in ten: 52,529 of the 65,908 new contracts registered in KIMDIS (the Greek public contracts registry) from July to September. In money they took €575.30 million of the quarter's €3.13 billion, or 18.4%.

I pulled every contract entry of the quarter and separated the new ones from the 6,325 amendments to older contracts. That is about 1,000 new contracts every working day, over 66 working days. On Saturdays and Sundays 777 were registered.

Where direct awards stop

Greek law allows a direct award, as a rule, up to €30,000 for supplies and services and up to €60,000 for works and design studies. The 60,544 contracts up to €30,000 are 91.9% of the count and hold 18.2% of the value. Of these, 85.0% were direct awards.

At the other end, 339 contracts above €1 million, 0.5% of the count, add up to €1.82 billion, 58.1% of the value.

There are eight direct awards above €1 million. Three belong to EYDAP (the Athens water utility), EYATH (the Thessaloniki water utility) and ADMIE (the electricity transmission operator). Two are contracts between public bodies. The other three are a compensation paid by the Ministry of Infrastructure to Fraport, fire protection works of the Ministry of Environment and a pipeline on Eastern Samos. The procedure type is as declared by the public body in the registry.

Who awards

Municipalities and their companies registered 23,512 new contracts, the most of any group of public bodies, and 86.8% were direct awards. Regions have the lowest share, 60.7%.

First by value is the Region of Attica, with €307.22 million. Of that, €241.55 million is one contract, the Metropolitan Park at Faliro Bay, the largest new contract of the quarter.

By count, the Ministry of National Defence comes first with 3,888 contracts, 3,422 of them direct awards. The large hospitals follow: Evangelismos with 1,480 contracts and €14.98 million, Gennimatas with 1,263 and Ippokrateio Athens with 1,176. Evangelismos registered about 22 contracts every working day, with an average amount of €10,121.

By municipality, next to municipalities of the same size

I also measured all 332 Greek municipalities separately. Only the municipality itself counts, by its VAT number, without its water utility and its other legal entities: 18,775 new contracts, €591.87 million. 86.6% were direct awards, with 30.6% of the value. The direct award share changes with the size of the municipality, so the comparison is between municipalities with similar population, from the 2021 census.

Each cell is the median of the municipalities in the class, with the mean in brackets. The 315 municipalities with at least 20 contracts in the quarter count. The €28,000-30,000 column counts contracts in the €2,000 below the direct award limit for supplies and services. Across all new contracts in Greece it is 4,545, or 6.9%.

All municipalities, with their regional unit, population and the values of their class next to them, are in the CSV file.

Who gets the contracts

The 65,908 contracts went to 23,480 different VAT numbers. 19,747 of them, 84.1%, are businesses listed in GEMI (the General Commercial Registry). The other 3,733 are not in GEMI. They include public bodies and foreign companies, which I did not count by type.

For joint ventures KIMDIS often records the VAT number of only one member. Faliro Bay is registered under the VAT number of ILIOCHORA, while the contractor, according to the contract text, is the joint venture of the four.

Why the KIMDIS total comes to €7.64 billion

If you add up the quarter's contracts as they stand in the registry, with cancelled ones out and the latest version of each contract, you get €7.64 billion, more than double. Of that, €4.64 billion is 5,281 amendments to contracts signed earlier.

An amendment in KIMDIS records the full amount of the contract again, not the difference. The Ministry of Infrastructure and Central Greece Motorway signed in July an amendment to an agreement of June 2025, and the entry shows €160.73 million. The increase was €13.73 million.

I measured each amendment of the quarter against the entry it changes. For 6,096 the previous amount was found. 4,506 do not change the amount; they are extensions and changes of funding source. 822 raise it by €204.63 million and 768 lower it by €335.43 million. The net change in registered amounts is −€130.81 million, and it includes corrections of errors: a contract for four events had been entered as €14,516,120 and was corrected to €14,516.

Methodology

The source is KIMDIS contracts with a registration date from 1 July to 30 September 2026, from the bizlist.gr database, retrieved 15 October 2026. Values are without VAT, as declared by the public body. A new contract is an entry with no previous ADAM (the number every act carries in the registry), not cancelled, with a contractor VAT number. Re-entries of the same contract with the same amount count once. The quarter is the quarter of registration: 4,173 of the 65,908, 6.3%, were signed before July.

The automatic outlier check of bizlist.gr removed 86 new contracts, mostly amounts entered a hundred times too large, such as €552 billion for two infant classes at the 1st Municipal Nursery of Agrinio. But it also removed real contracts, Faliro Bay among them, because ILIOCHORA has revenue of €6.4 million. 11 went back in, with the same amount as the award decision, €344.37 million together. Without them the quarter would come to €2.79 billion and the direct award share of value to 20.6%. The other 75 stay out. I checked the Faliro Bay amount in the contract PDF. I also checked by eye all 81 new contracts above €5 million, and corrected one, of the Municipality of Agrinio, from €20,160,484 to the €201,604.84 of the PDF. Below €5 million the only check is the comparison with the award amount, so a smaller error may remain.

773 amendments that the public body registered as a new contract, with no previous ADAM ("first amendment", "change of funding source"), €344.32 million, were left out. I found them by title, and those with a different title stayed in. With the 773 in, the value goes to €3.45 billion and the direct award shares to 79.2% of count and 17.1% of value.

The new contracts do not come out by subtracting the amendments from the €7.64 billion. The registry total keeps only the latest version, so it lacks the 1,165 new contracts of the quarter that were amended later, and the 11 outliers that went back in. It does include the 773 amendments with no previous ADAM.

For municipalities, population is the resident population of the 2021 ELSTAT census. The municipality's VAT number comes from the body with its name, and every contract with that VAT number counts, whatever name the body writes. The Municipality of Sikinos declares 37 of its 39 contracts as "procedure of article 128 of law 4412/16", which does not count as a direct award here. I chose the population class limits: with other limits (10,000, 30,000, 100,000) too, larger municipalities have a lower direct award share and a higher share in the €28,000-30,000 band.

How close the database is to the official figures: for the whole of 2024, the register total with the same rules (latest version of each contract, re-entries once, without the outliers) gives 249,428 contracts and €15.25 billion. The Hellenic Court of Audit, with KIMDIS data, reports 246,086 contracts and €16.015 billion for 2024. The difference is 1.4% in number and 4.8% in value.

There is no comparison with the third quarter of 2025. 63% of the entries of that quarter came into the database through an older method, which did not keep the link between an amendment and the original contract, nor the procedure type. There, amendments count as new contracts, so 2025 would come out inflated. Quarter-on-quarter comparison starts with the fourth quarter of 2026.