The summer lull arrives a month late
July showed no sign of a summer slowdown. August does. Between 1 and 25 August, 48,360 notices were published; the same July period produced 58,886. That is 10,526 documents, or 17.9 percent, fewer.
Part of that is the calendar. The August window contains 17 working days, the July window 18. Per working day, 2,565 notices stand against 3,007 in July, a fall of 14.7 percent. The calendar therefore explains roughly a fifth of the gap, and no more.
That makes it the steepest fall of the year. The largest gap between two consecutive months so far was May, at 12.8 percent below April. In absolute terms August still sits above May with its 46,950 documents, in fourth place among this year's 25-day windows.
The decline runs through every document type
Open opportunities fell from 33,936 to 28,484 documents, a drop of 16.1 percent. Award notices went from 21,847 to 17,645 (-19.2 percent). Prior information notices fell hardest: 2,031 after 2,806, down 27.6 percent.
Prior information notices announce procedures still to come. That they give way most clearly suggests August is not only a shift in publication rhythm, but that the pipeline for the coming weeks is thinner too.
Construction loses most, but not everywhere
12,641 August notices carried at least one construction classification, against 18,287 in the July comparison period. That is 30.9 percent less, and considerably more than the market as a whole gives up.
Within construction the decline is very uneven. Roofing (-42.7 percent), windows and doors (-40.8 percent), building services planning (-38.6 percent), electrical installation (-37.2 percent) and architecture (-37.1 percent) fall far below average. Civil engineering holds: paving rises to 1,013 documents (+4.5 percent), earthworks give up only 6.8 percent, demolition 8.2 percent, pipeline construction 12.1 percent.
What continues through August is the work outdoors. What pauses is planning, fit-out and the building envelope.
Topic coverage fell as well and has to be read alongside this. 64.5 percent of August documents carry at least one topic, compared with 72.6 percent in the July reference period. Part of the decline is therefore classification rather than market. Measured as a share of classified documents, construction only falls from 42.8 to 40.5 percent.
Bavaria holds while the east breaks down
Regionally the decline is spread extremely unevenly. Bavaria loses 2.3 percent (4,415 after 4,518), Baden-Württemberg 2.0 percent (3,550 after 3,622). Both sit practically at their July level.
At the other end are the east and north: Brandenburg -43.6 percent (990 after 1,756), Saxony -40.9 percent (1,649 after 2,791), Thuringia -40.4 percent (514 after 863), Lower Saxony -39.6 percent (2,081 after 3,443). North Rhine-Westphalia, the largest state in the corpus, loses 28.0 percent (5,027 after 6,978).
Saxony was last month's strongest riser at plus 58.4 percent and is one of the steepest losers a month later. Monthly figures for individual states swing hard, because individual bodies move them: the Saxon state property and construction agency published 1,031 documents in the July period and 522 in August. That single body accounts for 509 of the 1,142 documents Saxony loses.
Coverage applies here too: 27,235 of the 48,360 August documents can be attributed to at least one German state, giving coverage of 56.3 percent. In the July reference period it was 59.9 percent. A notice naming places of performance in several states counts once in each of them. This is not a performance ranking of the states.
What grows in August
Three of the 25 sectors sit above their July value, and all three are services: HR & recruitment rises to 325 notices after 268 (up 21.3 percent), consulting to 630 after 536 (up 17.5 percent), legal & audit to 163 after 159 (up 2.5 percent). Within consulting the growth comes from management consulting: 545 notices after 454, up 20.0 percent.
In absolute terms these are small sectors. Together they account for 1,118 documents, against 12,641 in construction alone. August does not shift the market, it thins it unevenly.
School transport, last month's most conspicuous riser at plus 104.7 percent, falls to 130 notices after 516, down 74.8 percent. The tendering cycle for the coming school year ran in July, which explains the swing plausibly; this corpus cannot confirm it, because the prior-year data are too thin for a seasonal comparison.
Methodology and limits
The figures are a historical snapshot taken on 28 August 2026 and cover publications from 1 through 25 August. Comparisons use the same calendar period in July. Month boundaries and publication days are read in the Europe/Berlin time zone.
The July reference value was re-read for this report and stands at 58,886 documents. The previous edition reported 58,361, measured at the snapshot of 26 July; the difference is documents that arrived later. Both snapshots stay as they are, and neither is adjusted retroactively.
The analysis counts notice documents, not procedures or contract values. Tenders are notices inviting bids, awards are notices reporting a concluded contract, and prior information notices announce a procedure that has not yet opened.
Two checks support the decline. It is spread across the whole corpus: the largest publisher accounts for 1.75 percent of the July period, and the strongest single movement by one body explains 509 of the 10,526 missing documents. And it is not a lag in collection: 26 and 27 August, at 2,822 and 2,620 documents, sit at a normal working-day level.
Missing topic and location data are not estimated. Topics and places of performance can overlap, and one notice can carry several topics. The snapshot remains unchanged even if additional documents carrying an August publication date enter the corpus later.