TSPS, in plain words

Task and Solutions Professional Services Supply Arrangements

What it gates

Professional services that are not informatics - human resources, business consulting and change management, project management, real property project management, technical engineering and maintenance, health, learning - for federal departments and agencies. Two mandatory arrangements: task-based, for requirements at or above the Canada–Korea Free Trade Agreement threshold for services (CA$100,000 for 2026 and 2027; below it, ProServices is mandatory), and solutions-based, at any dollar value, for work where the department wants the supplier to shape the team and deliver a whole solution.

How it is divided

By stream, category, level, tier and region. The task-based arrangement has seven streams and 67 categories, each with Junior, Intermediate and Senior levels scored on a points grid for education, certification and years of experience; the solutions-based arrangement has five streams. Tier 1 runs from the threshold to $3.75 million and Tier 2 above it. Regions are the National Capital Region, Atlantic, Quebec, Ontario, Western and Pacific, each with metropolitan areas, plus remote access. A supplier qualifies for the categories, levels, tiers and regions it can evidence, and adds more at any later refresh.

How you get on it

1. Decide which streams, categories, tiers and regions your firm can evidence, from your own contract history. The categories decide which requests for proposals you are invited to, and Canada reserves the right to ask for client references for each one claimed.
2. Enrol in the Centralized Professional Services System with your SAP Business Network ID and CRA business number, and check the mandatory criteria in the current amendment - years in business and revenue minimums per tier are where first submissions most often fall short. No security clearance is needed to hold the arrangement; each request for proposals sets its own.
3. Meet the insurance minimums where they apply: commercial general liability of $2,000,000 for streams 4 to 7 and for all of Tier 2, with $1,000,000 in errors and omissions for streams 4 and 5. In Tier 1, streams 1 to 3 leave insurance to the supplier's judgment.
4. Submit online through the CPSS data collection component against the open request - E60ZT-18TSPS for task-based, E60ZT-16TSSB for solutions-based. Paper is asked for during evaluation only if needed, and the evaluation takes the quarter that follows the close.

When it reopens

Quarterly, on the fiscal calendar: submissions close at the end of June, September, December and March, and PSPC has the following three months to evaluate, so an arrangement follows a close by three to six months. Both requests stay open to 4 July 2028 and the arrangements run to that date. Canada may cancel a stream or category on 30 days' notice.

Task or solution: pick the one your revenue shows

Task-based buys named people for defined work with a start, an end and set deliverables. Solutions-based buys an outcome and lets the supplier decide the team. Most firms’ contract history points clearly at one of them. Qualifying for both doubles the evidence and the upkeep, and a firm that has never sold a fixed-outcome engagement to a department will not be invited to one because it holds the paper.

Why firms get this wrong

Claiming a level the grid cannot score. Each level is a points grid - education, certification, years - and a category claimed at Senior needs resources that reach the points, not a history of senior-sounding work.

Ignoring the region. Requests go to holders qualified in the region and metropolitan area the requirement names. A firm qualified only in the National Capital Region is invisible to a Halifax requirement, however good its categories.

What we can see, and what we cannot

PSPC does not publish the TSPS holder list as a whole. It does publish each supply arrangement it awards, one record at a time, in the CanadaBuys contract-history dataset - a row titled “TSPS SA (Task-Based) – firm” with the date, and the solutions-based awards under their own solicitation number. So when a report of ours says your firm does not hold TSPS, two things have been checked: no arrangement award under either request names your firm, and no contract under an arrangement in the category names it either. The record begins in 2019; a firm qualified before that may not appear in it. If you already hold the arrangement, tell us and the report is wrong.