The typical government IT contract is €21,000 in Italy and €1.3M in Slovakia

Every government on earth buys the same handful of things from the same handful of industries, and information technology is the purest example: a payroll system, a helpdesk, a network refresh and a licence renewal look much the same in Tallinn as in Bogotá. That makes IT services the fairest category to hold up against every market at once — the underlying purchase barely changes, so whatever differences appear in the record are differences in how the record is kept. We took every notice classified as IT services across three months and 42 markets, and the differences turned out to be enormous.

Two markets publish almost half of everything

Of 23,968 IT services notices published between 1 May and 26 July, Spain accounts for 6,134 and Italy for 4,151 — 43% of the world’s published government IT purchasing between two countries that hold under 2% of the world’s population. Colombia follows with 2,901 and Ukraine with 1,995. Meanwhile the United States shows 495 and Germany 592. Nobody believes the German public sector buys eight times less software than Spain. What the numbers describe is not purchasing volume but publication practice: Spain and Italy push small contracts through national portals that publish them, and most other countries do not.

Whether anyone can see the price

The second split is starker because it is binary. In twelve markets — Spain, Italy, Ukraine, France, Australia, Moldova, the Dominican Republic, Montenegro, Georgia, Bulgaria, Kosovo and Ghana — every single IT notice in the sample carries a value. In nine others the figure is zero: Croatia, Uruguay, Canada, South Africa, Honduras, Andorra, Tanzania, New Zealand and Brunei published IT tenders in these three months and priced not one of them. Germany prices 29%, the United States 17%, Poland 10%. A supplier trying to size the opportunity in those markets is reading a catalogue with the prices cut out.

The median says more about the threshold than the software

Among the fourteen markets with enough euro-denominated notices to compare, the median IT contract runs from €21,000 in Italy to €1,312,000 in Slovakia — a 62-fold spread for what is broadly the same shopping list. The explanation is in the volume column rather than the price column. Italy published 4,151 IT notices in three months and Slovakia 90. Italy’s portal captures small direct awards — a €7,020 firewall rental for the municipality of Cerano, a €9,500 compliance module for Pavia — while Slovakia’s record begins much further up the scale, at identity management for an ambulance service and SAP operations for the Bratislava water utility. Both medians are accurate. Neither is a price.

What this means for reading any national average

The practical consequence is that cross-border comparisons of contract size are close to meaningless unless the publication threshold is stated alongside them. A consultancy reporting that Slovak IT contracts are sixty times larger than Italian ones would be quoting arithmetic correctly and describing reality not at all. The honest version of the sentence is that Italy publishes far further down the value scale than Slovakia does. One caveat applies to Germany’s €655,000 figure in particular: it rests on the 29% of German notices that carry a value at all, which are unlikely to be a random sample of the rest.

Data: Otnox — live procurement intelligence across 56 markets. Basis: 23,968 notices classified as IT services across 42 markets; percentages are of notices carrying a stated value, and medians cover euro-denominated notices only, 2026-05-01..2026-07-26.