The short version

Between 1 August 2024 and 1 August 2026, Australian Government agencies published 13,820 contract notices for personnel and ICT services. In the twelve months to August 2026 that was 7,205 contracts worth $3.6 billion.

Most of the money is ICT services. Most of the contracts are for people:

• Personnel — 4,538 contracts, 63.0% of them
• ICT services — 2,667 contracts, 37.0%

Government spend now charts that by month, across the whole window, for anyone to read.

Why contract notices are worth reading

Every other surface on this site answers "what is open right now?" — and an open opportunity has no past. You can see that a department is buying a Business Architect this week, but not that it has bought forty of them in the last two years, or from whom, or that its current arrangement expires in March.

Awarded contract notices have that history. They are published, they are public, and they are the only record of what a buyer has actually committed to.

Who wins

Ranked by awarded value since August 2024, the largest recipients of personnel and ICT services work are:

• IBM Australia — $429.6m across 45 contracts
• Accenture Australia — $298.1m across 23 contracts
• Canberra Data Centres — $243.7m across 28 contracts
• Data#3 — $221.7m across 193 contracts
• Telstra — $215.6m across 399 contracts
• Oracle Systems Australia — $210.7m across 131 contracts
• Leidos Australia — $192.5m across 58 contracts

Two patterns sit in that list. The first is concentration: IBM's 45 contracts average nearly $10m each, while Telstra's 399 average around half a million. Same order of magnitude of spend, two very different shapes of business.

The second is that a single contract can dwarf a year of activity. Datacom Connect won $175.9m in one contract — a personnel services notice at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (CN4178593). That one win would place a company in this list outright.

The largest individual notices show how differently the two slices behave:

• CN4126777 — Canberra Data Centres, Services Australia, $226.2m (ICT services)
• CN4178593 — Datacom Connect, DFAT, $175.9m (personnel)
• CN4120716 — IBM Australia, Department of Home Affairs, $165.0m (ICT services)

Suppliers is the full ranked list — 709 suppliers, each with its own page showing who it sells to and what it sells. Buyers is the same view from the other side: 111 departments and agencies, ranked by what they have awarded.

The part that is actually actionable

Award data is backward-looking. That is not why you read it. You read it for two forward-looking things.

The incumbent. If an agency has awarded $40m of labour hire to one supplier over two years and is now advertising a role, you know who you are competing with, roughly at what price, and through which panel.

The renewal window. Most of these notices carry an end date. Contracts expiring in the next 90 days are the ones about to be re-tendered — which is when a buyer is most receptive to hearing from a supplier it does not currently use. Contracts expiring lists them with the supplier, the buyer and the value.

That second list is the one to watch weekly rather than once. It is a rolling 90-day window, so the composition changes constantly.

What this data is not

The figures above come from AusTender, the Australian Government's procurement publication system, through the Department of Finance's Open Contracting Data Standard API, published under CC BY 3.0 AU. Three limits matter more than any caveat:

It is not whole-of-government spend. Only two slices are held — personnel (temporary personnel services and personnel recruitment) and ICT services (computer services, cloud, IT consulting). Hardware, software licences, leases, construction and everything else government buys are excluded. If you see a figure here, it is not the procurement total.

Amendments are excluded from counts. A variation to an existing contract is a real event, and counting it as a new award would inflate activity without adding information. 13,820 is the number of distinct notices.

Contracts are published after they are signed. A notice appears when the paperwork is done, not when the need is identified. Award data tells you what has happened, never what is coming — for that you need the open-opportunity feed.

One more: the government publishes these notices, so the data can change when a buyer amends or corrects a record. Each page states the date the figures were generated and the date of the newest notice held, so you can see how current it is. Anything you intend to act on should be confirmed against the official record at tenders.gov.au.

Where to start

If you sell labour hire into government, the useful first move is to look up the three agencies you sell to most and read what they have awarded in the last two years. That tells you who holds the work now, and how much of it there is. Then open contracts expiring and see which of it is up for renewal.

Both are free, and neither needs an account.