How to find EU public tenders: a practical guide to TED

Public buyers in the European Union buy a large share of their works, goods and services through open competitions, and the larger contracts must be published in one place. The hard part is not access. It is finding the few notices that fit your company among the thousands published every week.

This guide covers where tenders are published, what TED contains, a search routine that works, and how to read a notice quickly enough to decide whether to spend more time on it.

Where EU public tenders are published

Public procurement in the EU follows a simple split.

• Above the EU thresholds, contracts must be advertised across the EU. They are published on TED (Tenders Electronic Daily), the online supplement to the Official Journal of the European Union.
• Below the thresholds, national rules apply. Smaller contracts are published on national or regional portals, and many never appear on TED.

For 2026 and 2027 the main thresholds, excluding VAT, are €5,404,000 for works and, for supplies and services, €140,000 for central government buyers and €216,000 for other public buyers such as regional and local authorities (Delegated Regulation (EU) 2025/2152). Utilities and some special categories of services have their own thresholds. The European Commission revises the figures every two years.

For a company looking beyond its home market, TED is the natural starting point: one site, one format, every EU country, plus the other countries of the European Economic Area and EU institutions.

What you will find on TED

TED is free to use at ted.europa.eu. It publishes several kinds of notices, and knowing them saves time.

• Contract notices announce a competition you can take part in. These are the ones you want.
• Prior information notices announce a planned purchase. They are an early signal, and a buyer that has published one can set a shorter deadline for the competition that follows.
• Contract award notices say who won. They are useful for research: who wins in your sector, at what price, and how many bids buyers receive.
• Change notices (formerly corrigenda) update an earlier notice, often with a new deadline or extra documents.

Since 25 October 2023 all notices published on TED use the eForms standard, so the same information sits in the same fields whatever the country or language.

What TED does not contain matters too. It does not cover most contracts below the thresholds. Since Brexit, UK buyers publish on the UK's own Find a Tender service instead. And the full tender documents usually sit on the buyer's e-procurement platform; TED links to them.

Searching TED: a routine that works

Searching by keyword alone produces a lot of noise. Notices are written in the 24 official EU languages, and buyers describe the same thing in different ways. A routine built on structure works better.

1. Start with CPV codes. Every notice on TED is classified with codes from the Common Procurement Vocabulary. Search by the codes that describe what you sell rather than by words in the title. If you are unsure which codes apply, start with our CPV code finder or read CPV codes explained.
2. Limit by country. Pick the countries where you can realistically deliver, including the language you would have to bid in.
3. Look only at open competitions. Filter to contract notices with a deadline in the future.
4. Add keywords last, to narrow a result set that is still too broad, not to build it.
5. Save the search. You will run it again tomorrow.

Expect to adjust the codes a few times. Buyers choose codes inconsistently, so some relevant tenders will sit under a broader or neighboring code.

Deciding in minutes whether a tender fits

You do not need to read a notice end to end to decide whether it deserves more time. Check these first:

• The deadline. If it is too close to prepare a serious bid, stop here.
• What is being bought. Read the short description and the list of lots. One lot may fit even when the whole contract does not.
• The estimated value and duration. Compare them with contracts you have delivered before.
• Selection criteria. Minimum turnover, references and certificates are among the most common reasons a company cannot bid at all.
• Language and place of performance. Can you write the bid, and deliver the work, where the buyer needs it?

If the answers look reasonable, open the tender documents. Our guide on how to read a tender notice goes through each field in more detail.

When to look at national portals as well

TED is the right place for cross-border work, but there are good reasons to add one or two national portals for your home market or a key target country:

• smaller contracts, which are often easier to win and a good way to build public-sector references;
• buyers that publish early market consultations nationally before a formal notice;
• frameworks and dynamic purchasing systems that run on national platforms.

Pick the portals that matter for your sector instead of trying to monitor all of them.

Making it a habit

New notices appear on TED every working day, and the minimum deadlines run from the day a notice is sent for publication. A tender you find a week late has already lost a week of preparation time. Companies that win public contracts regularly tend to look every day, keep a short list of tenders they are considering, and decide quickly which ones to drop.

Whatever tool you use, the routine is the same: a precise profile of what you sell, a fixed set of countries, a daily look at what is new, and a fast first decision on each notice.