Unit prices
The verification of unit prices involves checking individual price items in the tender. Unrealistic or missing unit prices can make the tender irregular or give rise to a price investigation.
'Those guardrail end-pieces are already in our stock' — accepted as a price justification
The Council of State rejects the suspension request from the second-ranked bidder because Fluvius was entitled to accept that a low unit price for steel guardrail end-pieces was explained by the fact that the winning bidder already had them in stock, fully depreciated.
After the Excel formula suspension, BEP withdraws the award entirely — TEGEC wins without a fight
A year after the Council of State suspended the award to Geciroute over improper Excel error corrections (ruling 262.442), this follow-up ruling confirms BEP has definitively withdrawn the award — TEGEC recovers €1,218 in procedural costs.
Missing unit prices in bill of quantities does not constitute substantial irregularity when total prices per item are filled in
The Council of State rejects the annulment appeal against the award of a construction contract for an agri-food platform in Gambia, ruling that the failure to fill in unit prices in the bill of quantities does not constitute a substantial irregularity when total prices per item are filled in and unit prices can be derived through simple division.
A price of €0 is always suspicious, €1 usually isn't — and that difference justifies different investigations
The Council of State rejects the extreme urgency suspension: the fact that Bruxelles-Propreté excluded bailiff M.L.'s bid (with four items at €0) via the strict price investigation of Article 36 and Exelia-Alterius's bid (with €1 and €15 per file) via the lighter verification of Article 35 is not unequal treatment — €0 is, per established case law, always an apparently abnormal price, whereas €1 is not necessarily.
"Correcting" a price into a different unit than the specification prescribes is not a calculation error — it is rewriting the specification
The Council of State suspends the award to HR Groep Streetcare because the City of Antwerp recalculated the prices for the "truss frames for traffic signs" items into a price per square metre, while the specification and Standard Specification 250 expressly required a price per metre — a different unit than the one the competitor Trafiroad had used.
School Het Oogappeltje Wommelgem: annulment – abnormal price detection method unverifiable and price investigation of selected items insufficient
The Council of State annuls for the second time the award decision of the municipality of Wommelgem for the extension and renovation of primary school Het Oogappeltje, because the submitted documents do not show that the detection of apparently abnormal unit prices was carried out in accordance with the contracting authority's own methodology — using a 1% rule and 30%/50% thresholds — and because the investigation of the selected items did not meet the requirements of a normally diligent contracting authority, as abnormal unit prices were accepted based on vague and general findings without requesting price justification.
A price check that only looks at total bid amounts isn't a price check — unit prices don't quietly fall under 'all normal'
The Council of State suspends Charleroi public-health intercommunal ISPPC's award of its medical-mail contract to Postalia Belgium because the bid analysis report compared total bid amounts but contains no proof of any concrete unit-price verification — and an 'all normal' line in the observations note does not cure that.
Hide your purchase price in the rental cost, and you write your own bid into the bin
The Belgian Council of State dismisses Symobo's challenge: by openly admitting in its price justification that it had shifted part of the purchase price into the rental items 'for commercial reasons', it made its bid incomparable with the competitor's — and therefore substantially irregular.
Annulled award gives second-ranked bidder no 10% lump sum, but 50% chance × 10% margin
Three years after the Council of State annulled the award to Dillen Bouwteam because of un-investigated abnormal unit prices, VMG-De Cock receives not the 10% statutory lump sum (it was not the lowest regular bid) but 55,716.56 euros: 50% chance of being awarded × 10% profit margin × 1.1 million.
An Apple discount only meaningful when bundled with a laptop: post-factum motivation does not count
PXL university college awarded an Apple supply contract to Econocom because of an unusually high discount on one specific product; the Council suspends because the administrative file lacks any explanation — and the argument that 'this product is only ordered with a laptop' was raised only in the procedural notes.
A third cheaper than you is no proof of dumping — if you don't read what the tender precisely changes between BAFO rounds
The Belgian Council of State rejects Postalia's suspension claim against a postal services award to Mestrabel: the 33% price gap is largely explained because between BAFO rounds the tender clarified 'item 40 Genk' as 'mainly magazines' — which Mestrabel and Bpost picked up, but Postalia did not.
A price 25% below the average survives — and the winner can still ask for an extra €100,000 once the bid commitment period expires
The Council of State rejects an extreme-urgency action against the award of the Bruges artificial-turf contract to Lesuco: a total price 25% below the average can be justified by 'market leadership, turnover and expertise', and when the bid commitment period expires, the winner may request price increases due to market conditions without the other bidders getting a chance to revise their bids.
You cannot dismiss an offer as 'abnormally priced' when that price, by your own formula, is not abnormal at all
The Council of State holds that SOFICO wrongly declared the offer of Sotraliège (€4.5 million for cleaning storm-water basins in Liège) irregular for 'abnormal price', because the contested unit prices were — by SOFICO's own mathematical criteria — not abnormal at all; but the Council nonetheless refuses suspension because of flooding risk.
Filling in 'included' for 11 lines of your bill of quantities can be lawful — if you can justify each clustering separately
The Council of State rejects the extreme-urgency suspension against the award of a kindergarten construction contract to VMG-De Cock because the contracting authority correctly accepted the eleven 'included' lines in the winner's bill of quantities after a substantiated justification was given per line and the tender documents did not require a separate price for any of those lines.
'Prices were adjusted where necessary': three words in a tender evaluation report enough to suspend De Lijn's printing framework
The Council of State suspends LijnCom's award of the framework contract for printing and adhesive advertising on De Lijn buses to 3Motion, because after the price justification round the contracting authority 'adjusted' some of the winner's unit prices — whereas article 36, § 3 of the 2017 placement royal decree offers only three options: reject the tender, reject the tender, or give reasons why the total amount is not abnormal.
'We are the largest sand trader in the Netherlands' is not a price justification
The Council of State rejects Hye-Boskalis' extreme-urgency challenge against the award of the Zandvliet waiting dock to Herbosch-Kiere–Hens: negative unit prices of -€4 and -€5 per m³ for the disposal of dredged sand cannot be substantiated with Boskalis' market position and a single comparison contract from another project — when you deviate sharply from the estimate AND from the competitors, your justification must be cost-component-by-cost-component, not story-by-company.
Repeating a price is not justifying it — the City of Kortrijk loses its four-year HVAC framework agreement
The Council of State annuls the City of Kortrijk's award to Vergote bvba because the city accepted a 'price justification' that consisted merely of a repetition of the offered price — a fixed hourly rate of 45 EUR (21.19 % below the average) was justified with the sentence 'our standard rate is 47 €/h for private clients, because we can deploy someone full-time on this project we can apply 45 €/h'.
One abnormal unit price knocks your whole bid out of the race — even if your total amount looks competitive
The Council of State rejects De Vriese's urgent suspension request against the award of bicycle-path maintenance in Ostend to Adiel Maes (€635,072.36): bidders who limit their price justification to a breakdown of activities, or to a reference to their subcontractor's offer, risk having their bid declared irregular on a single item — losing the entire contract.
A price justification rejected in a first procedure cannot be recycled in the next — not even when the price has since been 'adjusted'
The Council of State suspends the award of the urban renewal works in Charleroi (€30.1 million excl. VAT) because the city relied, for a suspiciously high unit price of the winning bid, on a price justification it had itself rejected as unacceptable in an earlier procedure — while the price had since been 'adjusted' without any new inquiry.
'Site preparation costs spread across unit prices'? Not when the specifications say 'TP' — VMG-De Cock pays €53,376 and slips to fourth place
VMG-De Cock left item 02.00 'site preparation — general' blank, arguing the cost was already spread over all unit prices, but the specifications expressly said 'TP' (total price); the gap formula pushed the bidder from third to fourth and the Council of State refused to suspend.
'Clustering' unit prices across three related items is allowed — Middelkerke keeps its €685,683 award to Penninck
Norré-Behaegel argued that the winner had priced all the labour into a single item and left the other two empty, but the Council of State accepts 'clustering' of unit prices across related items as long as the contractor backs up the productivity figures with concrete data and invoices.
Confirming is not the same as recalculating: how Bidfood lost its food deal with the best of intentions
The Council of State dismisses Bidfood Flanders's appeal against the City of Ghent: a clarification request from the contracting authority ('can you confirm your prices are per kg?') does not give the bidder the right to submit a new Excel with revised unit prices for 23 line items.
You can't 'tailor' the gap-filling formula to save your preferred bidder
The Council of State suspends the award of the Boom artificial turf contract because AGB Plus replaced the gap-filling formula of article 86, §2 of the Royal Decree on Award with its own variant — and didn't even establish that all bidders understood item 71 the same way.
Move a comma one position too far and end up €379,000 above the market — and you can't blame the contracting authority later
Renotec quoted a unit price in thousands instead of hundreds for the temporary signage on the Zelzate tunnel — €379,000, or 15% of its entire bid — and demanded that AWV correct this 'obvious material error'; the Council of State refuses, because the error was not 'apparent' and both the numeric and written-out price showed the same wrong figure.
Accepting an 'abnormally high' price is permitted under softer rules than rejecting an 'abnormally low' one
The Belgian Council of State dismisses the appeal against the award to Van Wellen for the structural maintenance of the E19, and explicitly establishes for the first time that an examination of abnormally HIGH prices is fundamentally different from an examination of abnormally low prices — the contracting authority may take a softer stance on accepting price justifications, and the grounds in art. 36 §3 of the Royal Decree of 18 April 2017 are not exhaustive.
Family business, simple project, lower recognition class, nearby sites — four soft arguments together suffice to justify an abnormally low price
The Council of State rejects Swinnen's suspension request against the award to the family contractor Nelis for a youth meeting centre in Zaventem, confirming that a contracting authority may accept a price justification based on non-numerical arguments — such as a family structure, a simple project and synergy through proximity — provided those elements are plausible and reasonable when read together.
A 'side note' attached to a tender is not innocuous — if the contracting authority does not examine its impact, the award falls
The Council of State suspends the award to Aannemingen Van Wellen for the structural maintenance of the E19 North motorway, because the Flemish Region did not examine in its decision whether a separate note from the winner — proposing changes to the assumed quantities of three items — undermined the certainty of its contractual commitment.
An unauthorised quantity change can't be 'corrected' — the bid must be excluded
The Council of State suspends the BIM's award to BDO because BDO had unilaterally reduced the estimated quantity in the inventory without the specifications authorising it — the contracting authority should have excluded the bid as substantially irregular instead of 'restoring' the original quantity under article 86.
Adding a correction note to your bid isn't post-opening regularisation — it's how the system is meant to work
The Council of State rejects VIABUILD's appeal: KRINKELS had attached an explanatory note 'Errors and/or omissions' to its bid from the moment of submission to correct certain items — a procedure expressly provided for in article 83, §2 of the 2011 Royal Decree, not a prohibited post-opening modification.
Claiming in a pre-litigation letter that the winner used 'wrong measurements' can backfire — unless you put it in your application
The Council reopens the debate in VMG-De Cock's challenge to the award to Himpe (€2,671,181 for the new local services centre De Mantel in Zwijnaarde) and rejects OCMW Ghent's argument that VMG's own bid would be irregular because she based her price on a different undermining width than the bill of quantities — a legal appreciation in a 26 October 2016 letter does not bind the Council.
The price on the bid form and the price in the award report differed by 60,000 euros — and nobody explained why
The Council rejects Monument Vandekerckhove's appeal against the award to PPR-Vibed (€1,752,813), but rules that the duty to state reasons was breached because the contracting authority failed to explain why PPR-Vibed's price in the award report was suddenly €59,469 lower than at the opening session — and orders the Flemish Community to pay costs.
You can't explain away unit prices that are 81% above and 68% below the average by saying 'the total price is normal'
The Council of State suspends the award of a demolition and new-build contract in Lommel because the city had not investigated unit prices ranging from 81% above to 68% below the average — a 'normal' total price and a vague reference to 'clustering' between items cannot replace that investigation.
A bidder admits its own price doesn't add up — you cannot then award 'as submitted' without a reasoned answer to the question whether that price is still normal
POM Antwerpen could not push through the award of a 7.8-million-euro infrastructure contract to Deckx after Deckx itself, one month after opening, admitted in writing that its unit prices for water-retaining sheet piling did not include the purchase or depreciation of the steel sheets — because the award report nowhere reasoned why those self-confessed low prices were nevertheless normal.
If your consulting engineer says 'request a price justification' and you don't — explain why
The Council of State suspends a EUR 4.05 million road-works award because the city of Nieuwpoort dismissed without explanation its own consulting engineer's advice to request a price justification for seven abnormally low unit prices.
Two different discount percentages for the same catalogue = irregular tender — and being right doesn't help if you can't name the law
The Council of State dismisses Centr'Auto's suspension request: its bid for carrosserie tooling was rejected because the discounts on the catalogues differed from those in the dummy order — a self-inflicted inconsistency that prevented price verification — and its plea was partly inadmissible for failing to identify which legal provisions had been breached.
'Removing' a sub-item at evaluation because it won't be executed is not allowed — even if it changes the winner
The Council of State suspends IGEMO's award to Gebroeders Van Den Bogerd because the authority simply set aside sub-item 20 (raising with imported soil) at evaluation — while article 100 of the Royal Decree on procurement requires that all sub-items count in the total sum.
Track public tenders?
Receive daily relevant tenders tailored to your business. Including AI summaries, competitive analysis and market intelligence.
This page shows all rulings of the Council of State (Belgium's supreme administrative court) on unit prices in public procurement. Each ruling is summarized by TenderWolf in plain language, with a legal lesson and a practical question to ask yourself. View all rulings →