GSTGovernment contracts
Read this first
- Contract value is not money spent this year. It is the maximum the agency expects to pay over the whole life of the contract, which can run for many years. Some contracts are never paid out in full.
- Defence is the largest buyer by a wide margin. It buys ships, aircraft, weapons, fuel and long base-support contracts, so a handful of Defence contracts can move the total. The supplier “FMS Account Reserve Bank of Australia” is the account Defence uses to pay the United States Government for equipment bought through the US Foreign Military Sales program.
- Publication comes after signing. Agencies must report a contract on AusTender within 42 days of entering into it, so the latest weeks are incomplete and the total rises as notices arrive.
- These are the agencies’ own figures, as reported on AusTender. We add them up but do not change them. Errors and late changes in the source flow through here.
- Only contracts of $10,000 or more (including GST) must be reported. Smaller purchases are not included.
How amendments are counted: each amendment is published as its own notice with the contract’s new total value. We keep one row per contract ID and use the value in its latest notice, so nothing is counted twice. A contract counts in the financial year it was first published; amendments later on stay with that year.
Largest contract notices
Biggest suppliers by total value
Contract value by agency
Management advisory contracts
AusTender records whether a contract is a consultancy, but that flag is not included in its public data feed (the OCDS API). As the closest published measure, this section uses the goods and services category agencies choose for each notice: UNSPSC 8010 “Management advisory services”. It will not match the consultancy totals in agencies’ annual reports exactly.
The Big 4 accounting firms
Deloitte, EY (Ernst & Young), KPMG and PwC, matched by supplier name. “All contracts” includes audit, IT, legal and other work as well as advice. PwC Australia sold its government consulting business in 2023; that business now trades as Scyne Advisory and is not counted as PwC here.
Biggest management advisory suppliers
Open and limited tender
Open tender means the agency publicly invited anyone to bid. Limited tender means the agency approached one or more suppliers directly. Limited tender is allowed under the Commonwealth Procurement Rules, for example for contracts under $80,000 (most agencies), when only one supplier can do the work, in an emergency, for additional deliveries from an existing supplier, or when an exemption applies (such as some defence purchases). Prequalified tender means bids were invited only from suppliers already on a qualified list or panel. Using limited tender does not by itself mean any rule was broken.
Agencies ranked by total contract value. Shares are of each agency’s own value.
Where these figures come from
Other figures on this site: Assumptions · Data.