Contention may refer to:
- The main contention, in rhetoric and logic, the main point being argued
- Resource contention, a general concept in communications and computing, is competition by users of a system for the facility at the same time:
- Contention (telecommunications), a channel access method
- The contention ratio, in computer networking, competition that applies specifically to the number of people connected to an ISP who share a set amount of bandwidth
- Lock contention, in computer science, where a mutual exclusion lock reduces the throughput by hindering the concurrency of a program
- Bus contention, in computer design, where multiple devices on a computer bus attempt to use it at the same time
- Contention City, Arizona, a ghost town also known as Contention