Government web procurement threshold lookup (Canada)

Someone in your organization wants to hire a web firm, and the question lands on your desk: do we have to post this, or can we just pick someone? It is a fair question with an unfair amount of ambiguity behind it, and the honest answer depends on three things you can establish in about a minute.

The lookup below takes your buyer type, what you are actually buying, and the full contract value, and returns the lowest threshold that binds you, whether you have crossed it, and how much room is left if you have not. For the buyers the agreements group together as MASH (municipalities, academic institutions, school boards and health organizations), the figure that usually decides a web project is $139,000 for services, on the domestic thresholds in force for 2026 and 2027. That figure catches people out in both directions: some assume it is far lower and post work that never needed posting, and some assume the contract is small when the option years have quietly pushed it over.

Buyer type selects the entity class: a department, a MASH entity, or a Crown corporation. Each class has its own thresholds under the Canadian Free Trade Agreement.

What you are buying selects goods, services excluding construction, or construction. The three are not interchangeable and the gaps between them are large.

Contract value is compared against the lowest threshold that applies to you, because the lowest one is the one that binds first.

I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. It is planning information, transcribed from the published threshold tables so you can walk into the conversation with your procurement office already knowing roughly where you stand. Which thresholds actually bind a given organization depends on the agreements and annexes it is listed under, and confirming that is your procurement office’s call, not this page’s.

The mistake that puts most contracts offside

The value of a covered procurement is the estimated maximum total value over the entire duration of the contract: the base term, every option to extend, and every recurring charge, added together.

So a website contract at $50,000 a year with two one-year options is a $150,000 procurement, and a MASH buyer has just crossed the line without anyone in the room noticing. The same thing happens with hosting and support retainers attached to a build, and with content migration priced separately. The change order that arrives three months in usually belongs to the same total too. If it was part of one requirement, it counts toward one value.

The related trap is splitting. Dividing a single requirement into a series of smaller awards so that each one sits under a threshold is treated as a breach of the agreement, and it is the kind of thing that reads badly in a complaint. If you find yourself designing a procurement around the number rather than around the work, that is the signal to stop and call your procurement office.

Under the threshold is not the same as unregulated

This is the misreading I see most often, and the tool says so in the result for a reason. A trade-agreement threshold is the point at which open tendering becomes a binding obligation with a formal dispute process behind it. It is a ceiling on discretion, and the space underneath it is governed by other rules.

Below that line, your own rules still govern, and most public bodies set competition requirements well under the trade-agreement figure. Ontario’s broader public sector directive, a municipality’s own purchasing bylaw, a board policy that requires three written quotes over some modest amount: those are the rules you will actually be held to, and they are usually the ones an auditor asks about. This tool tells you where the trade-agreement rulebook starts. Your procurement office tells you which rules apply underneath it.

A website is services, and the gap matters

The agreements treat goods, services, and construction as three separate categories with three separate thresholds, and the distance between them is large enough to change your answer entirely. For a MASH buyer, services sit at $139,000 while construction sits at $347,400.

A website build, an accessibility audit, a migration, training, and an ongoing support agreement are all services. Software licences and hardware are goods. Nothing in a normal digital project is construction. I mention it because capital-projects thresholds are the ones people in municipal and institutional roles tend to have memorised, and carrying that number into a web conversation is reassuring in exactly the wrong direction.

Where these numbers come from

Every figure in the tool is transcribed from a published table rather than estimated or indexed. The domestic thresholds come from the Canadian Free Trade Agreement (CFTA) Secretariat’s own Article 504.3 threshold document for the period beginning January 1, 2026. The federal international figures come from Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat (TBS) Contracting Policy Notice 2025-8, which replaced the previous notice and set the values now in force.

Thresholds are re-indexed on a two-year cycle against the Industrial Product Price Index. The current set runs to December 31, 2027, and the next revision lands January 1, 2028. If you are reading this after that date, treat the numbers as historical and check the Secretariat before you rely on one. I would rather say that plainly than have a compliance file cite a stale figure from my site.

What the tool deliberately does not answer

For federal departments, agencies, and Crown corporations, the result lists which international agreements a given value triggers, because those thresholds are published in one place and apply uniformly.

For provincial and MASH buyers, the tool answers the domestic question only. Those organizations are also covered by international agreements, including the Canada-European Union trade agreement known as CETA, but the applicable threshold varies by province and by the annex a specific entity was listed under, and there is no single authoritative table I can transcribe without guessing. A compliance tool that guesses is worse than one that declines, so the result says so on the screen rather than presenting a domestic answer as the whole picture. For that question, your provincial procurement office has the figure for your entity.

Everything happens in your browser

The lookup runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is sent to my server, stored, or logged, which matters here because a contract value before it goes to market is not information you should be handing to a vendor’s website. You can close the tab and the numbers are gone. If it is useful, use the print button in the result panel: it prints a single sheet with your inputs, the answer, and a link that reproduces it.