While no one believes the pipeline had vanished, by late 2025 most people involved with the infrastructure sector were describing the year in a similar vein. Work felt tight. Tender lists were crowded. Confidence was low — particularly among small and medium businesses (SME). Against this backdrop, the Government’s reboot of the Government Procurement Rules matters. This article is a practical guide to doing business in 2026, particularly if you are a supplier with between 25 and 50 Full Time Equivalent (FTE) employees or a council project team trying to do more with less.
Survey data shows that confidence in the infrastructure sector has been dropping in the last four years, with ‘lack of work’ a dominant concern –- a compressed rather than collapsed market.
On the other hand, consents, cranes and early pipeline signals suggest the sector is starting to turn the corner.
Lower interest rates, a steady long-term infrastructure pipeline and modernised transport funding settings all point to more work flowing from 2026 onwards.
Tendering is in transition.
The fifth edition of Government Procurement Rules took effect on December 1 and is pitched as a simpler, more focused framework with a stronger emphasis on economic outcomes, transparency and contract management.
For buyers, that demands more discipline. For suppliers, it means the story you tell in the tender about safety, quality, economic benefits, and the environment is more likely to be reflected in the contract rather than left in the bid response.
For both suppliers and council buyers, three aspects stand out:
First, economic benefits to New Zealand are now a mandatory evaluated criterion for covered procurements, with a minimum weighting. In practice, agencies must ask how your offer supports local jobs, skills, supply chains and investment and they must score your answer in a meaningful way.
Generic statements about “supporting local communities” will not cut it. You will need to talk about the proportion of labour hours delivered locally, apprenticeships and trainees, spend with local subcontractors and the investments you make in the region.
Second, transparency expectations have increased. Agencies are expected to publish procurement policies and contract award information more consistently and there are tighter expectations on how supplier panels are set up and used. For smaller suppliers, that should translate into better visibility of opportunities and a clearer understanding of how panel work is accessed.
Third, there is a firm nudge on contract management. Proportionate but real contract management plans, a proper contract register and a clearer line of sight from early promises to measured performance are all emphasised.
Plan A has seen these themes emerging over several years in our work on measurable commitments and promises registers. The new rules make them unavoidable.
For smaller contractors and consultants, this is an opportunity as much as an obligation. Their local footprint is often more substantial than the large national players.
The difference in 2026 will be whether you can express that in numbers and commitments rather than slogans.
More work, more scrutiny
So what does all of this add up to if you are a smaller supplier or a council project team planning for 2026?
There is every reason to expect the workload to improve. Interest rates are trending down, housing indicators are stabilising, and crane activity is beginning to lift again. Long-term infrastructure pipelines still show substantial programmes of transport, water and social infrastructure work coming through the system from the second half of this decade.
At the Future Roads conference, speakers across asset management, funding and contracting sent a consistent message. Councils manage large, ageing asset bases relative to their revenue. Communities are not asking for perfection; they are asking over time for reliability, transparency and good stewardship.
That means aligning asset management plans, long-term financial strategies and procurement decisions more tightly, and using new revenue tools to smooth out the stop-start pattern that has characterised the last few years.
The result is not a return to pre-COVID conditions. The procurement reboot, modernised road funding, evolving contract forms and a sharper focus on resilience and climate will make work more complex and more scrutinised.
There will be better opportunities for capable smaller firms, but there will also be more expectations that you can prove what you claim, both at the tender stage and in delivery.
AI, expertise and disciplined innovation
This has been the year when generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) moved from curiosity to a tool that has presence in the tender room. Done well, it has helped busy teams by summarising long Request For Proposals (RFP) into short briefings, extracting key compliance requirements into checklists, and suggesting logical structures for answers that writers then refine.
Done badly, it has produced bids that read like everyone else’s and, more importantly, fail to answer the question.
The 2025 Future Roads conference gave a glimpse of where this is heading. International speakers demonstrated tools that pre-analyse tender documents in seconds, flag key risks and estimate order-of-magnitude pricing to inform go/no-go decisions. Others demonstrated AI-enabled condition surveys and predictive maintenance tools that feed directly into asset management and investment planning.
The theme was consistent; AI is becoming the co-engineer and co-analyst, not the project manager. Humans still make the decisions.
The approach at Plan A has been to treat AI as a junior analyst, not as a replacement for a bid writer. We have built a PlanAI toolbox of prompts and workflows that help consultants and clients interrogate documents, benchmark responses, and generate options faster.
We do not use AI to write the final response. That is still where experience, judgement, strategy and client voice matter most.
Looking ahead, we expect AI to become normalised in procurement. Buyers will start asking how you use it to improve quality and efficiency, and they will become more adept at spotting where it has been used irresponsibly.
The teams who win will be those who combine new tools with old disciplines; reading closely, thinking clearly and editing ruthlessly.
The organisations that will win in 2026 are not necessarily the biggest or the loudest. They are the ones that learn fastest from years like 2025 and turn that learning into clearer strategies, honest bids and stronger partnerships.
The rules are changing. The funding tools are modernising. The market is beginning to lift. For smaller suppliers, council buyers, and everyone in between, 2026 is a chance to reset how you participate in the infrastructure pipeline.
Use the new procurement settings and funding tools as an excuse to sharpen your story, not as a reason to sit back and wait.
Be prepared
The election year will add noise. History suggests, however, that the significant infrastructure themes endure. Industry is already pushing for depoliticised, longer-term pipelines. Central and local government will be under pressure to move from announcements to delivery and to demonstrate value for money over the whole life of assets, not just at contract award.
In that environment, the organisations that thrive will be those that are ready early. They will know which opportunities they are targeting. They will have built relationships with the buyers and partners who matter. They will have a bid process that does not fall apart when the tempo picks up.
Smarter procurement stronger partnerships
A clear split is emerging on the buyer side. Some agencies have responded to pressure by tightening processes around the edges while leaving the fundamentals essentially unchanged. Templates have been refreshed, procurement rule references updated, but evaluation questions remain vague, and there is limited alignment between what is asked for and what is actually valued.
Others have used 2025 as an opportunity to reset. We have seen councils and central agencies run genuine early-market engagement, co-design evaluation criteria with internal stakeholders, and simplify processes for lower-risk work.
At Future Roads, the most constructive conversations were about precisely this: buyers and suppliers in the same room, talking frankly about risk, affordability, and the trade-offs between service levels, costs, and network resilience.
Industry feedback is consistent. The client’s capability to procure and manage projects effectively is both a constraint and a significant lever for growth. When buyers improve their capability, the whole system works better.
Smart agencies are now:
- Designing economic benefit questions that ask for specific numbers and commitments instead of open-ended narratives
- Matching the effort required for written responses to the size and risk of the contract
Investing in contract management so that the performance conversation starts at tender, not at the first dispute. - Piloting tools such as promises registers to track key commitments from tender through to close-out.
Smart suppliers respond in kind.
- They turn up early, share data that informs the procurement plan, and structure their offers in a way that makes evaluation easier, not harder.
- They understand that, under the new settings, partnership is not a warm word. It is a way of working that can be seen, measured and rewarded.
Transport priorities funding
Procurement does not exist in a vacuum. How projects are funded matters just as much as how they are tendered, particularly in transport.
In late 2025, the Government introduced legislation to modernise land transport revenue settings. The changes are framed as a step toward a more modern, flexible funding system and include several shifts.
They enable corridor tolling on parts of existing roads where users benefit from a new project in the same corridor. They add tools to manage diversion from toll roads, including the ability to restrict heavy vehicles from using unsuitable alternative routes and to use toll revenue to help fund maintenance of those alternatives.
They mandate regular inflation adjustments to tolls and shift liability for toll payment from the driver to the registered person.
On the revenue side, the road-user charges system is being modernised to support subscription and post-payment models and to use in-vehicle technology to record distance more accurately. Over time, this is expected to support a transition away from fuel excise as more vehicles move to electric or hybrid.
The conference discussions put these changes in context. Speakers emphasised that roads are ‘lifelines’ for communities and freight, and that local government carries a large asset base relative to its income.
The message was clear: if we want a safer, more reliable network without financial shocks, we need funding tools, asset management and procurement all pulling in the same direction.
For contractors and councils, modernised funding settings matter because they underpin the ambition to deliver a new generation of major transport projects faster. A more flexible tolling and charging framework makes it easier to bring forward projects with strong business cases but limited headroom in traditional funding.
It also means greater complexity in how projects are structured and greater scrutiny of value for money over the life of the asset. Combined with the procurement reboot, it sends a simple signal. Transport and infrastructure remain priority levers for economic growth, but there will be higher expectations for both the quality of procurement and the credibility of suppliers’ promises.
Tough year with obvious solutions
You did not need a survey to know that 2025 felt tough. Still, the numbers are worth sitting with. Industry reports show that confidence in the civil sector has dropped significantly since 2021, with only a small minority now reporting a positive outlook. Many firms have reduced staff and cite a lack of work as a key challenge.
At the same time, there is a striking consensus about what would help. A clearer pipeline of central and local government work is seen as one of the most powerful levers.
Respondents to the survey called for more consistent programme planning across electoral cycles, faster consenting, less red tape, and a focus on longer-term sequences of work rather than stop-start funding.
Those views match what we hear in workshops and strategy sessions. Contractors are not asking for a subsidy or protection. They are asking for predictability and for procurement processes that match the risk and value of what is being bought.
The hard reality in 2025 has been that, while long-term pipelines look strong, short-term workloads have been thin in some places. That tension has driven more aggressive pricing, particularly on medium-sized packages where larger players have chased work down the value chain.
It has also forced many firms to become more selective. There is less appetite to chase marginal opportunities when margins are narrow, and teams are already stretched.
The encouraging side is that leading indicators are turning. Outlooks point to more companies hiring again, more graduates entering the industry and a healthier pipeline for 2026, backed by improving data on consents, house sales and business sentiment.
Crane activity is lifting, with civil cranes becoming a more visible part of the skyline, and the interest rate cycle has shifted. Taken together, these signals support the view that 2025 was the bottom of the cycle rather than the new normal.
From outlook to reality
At the start of 2025, the mood in procurement circles was cautiously optimistic. Economic outlooks and pipeline reports were already flagging a likely construction rebound in 2026.
Forecasts pointed to lower borrowing costs, stabilising consents and renewed business confidence. On paper, that is a healthy runway. The lived experience for many firms in the 25–60 FTE band, and for council project teams, has been harder.
Confidence has slipped, staff numbers have come down in many businesses, and cash flow has been tight. From where we sit, working in the tender room across dozens of organisations, three things have stood out.
Work has been there, but concentrated into fewer, larger, more complex programmes. Bidders have had to work much harder to differentiate themselves on non-price factors and the gap between ‘administrative tendering’ and ‘strategic tendering’ has widened.
In other words, 2025 has reminded everyone that you cannot afford to treat tendering as a compliance chore. When there are twelve or fifteen credible bidders on a programme, the teams that treat the bid as a strategic project in its own right are the ones who make the shortlist.
What to do now: a short guide for 2026
For smaller suppliers in the 25–60 FTE range:
- Get very clear on your sweet spot. Decide which types of work, locations and clients you will focus on, and build your bid library around that rather than trying to be everything to everyone.
- Turn your local story into evidence. Measure how many local people you employ, how many trainees you support, how much you spend with local businesses, and how you contribute to the resilience of regional networks. Be ready to commit to improving those numbers in specific ways.
- Lift quality, not volume. Tighten your go/no-go criteria. Aim for fewer, better bids that you can genuinely deliver if you win.
For council buyers and project teams:
- Refresh your procurement settings for the new procurement rules in substance, not just in footnotes. Revisit your policies, templates and evaluation guides so they reflect what you actually care about.
- Co-design evaluation questions. Involve delivery teams, finance and key suppliers in shaping the questions and weightings for major programmes. That will give you clearer answers and fewer surprises.
- Treat contract management as part of procurement. Build promises registers or similar tools into your processes so that what is promised in the tender is visible and tracked in delivery.
- Use early engagement deliberately. Choose the appropriate level of engagement based on the risk and complexity of each procurement.
- For advisers, trainers and others in the middle of the procurement and tendering process. Help both sides ask better questions and give better answers, using the new procurement rules and funding tools as levers rather than ends in themselves.
About the author
Carla Reinke is a Senior Consultant to Plan A who supports New Zealand Tier 1 and Tier 2 contractors in articulating their positioning and delivery of tender requirements and commitments.
Plan A is a specialist tender and procurement consultancy with more than 25 years’ experience supporting infrastructure, construction and public sector clients across New Zealand and Australia.
Led by General Manager Nick Cowan, Plan A’s 20-strong expert team specialises in bid strategy and major non-price bid delivery for complex infrastructure, professional services, maintenance and transport tenders.
The Plan A team leads and supports bid teams of all sizes in translating their offers into clear, credible, compelling commitments backed by evidence and aligned to what will be delivered in practice.
“We work with contractors and councils to make fewer better bids. This might be a short strategy session before a must-win tender, a structured review of your current responses or targeted training for your internal bid leads”, says Reinke.
Plan A turned 25 this year and has been a pivotal part of the tendering sector through booms and busts, alliances and the obsession with the lowest price and outcome-based procurement.
The tools change and the acronyms change.
“The core task does not. You still have to prove that you understand the problem, can deliver the work, and will create value that matters”, says General Manager Nick Cowan.
If you recognise some of the themes outlined in this article in your own pipeline, Plan A’s role is simple. Check it out.
