Practical public procurement guides
Written from operating seven tender pipelines every day — thresholds, portals, and how to actually find contracts you can win.
Fundamentals
EU public procurement thresholds 2026–2027: the full table
On 1 January 2026 the EU thresholds went down — €140,000 now puts a ministry contract on TED. Every 2026–2027 figure, taken from the official regulations, plus what the thresholds actually decide for your business.
Below-threshold tenders: the contracts TED never shows you
Five of the six national portals we monitor publish about 340 tender notices between them every working day — and the overwhelming majority never appear on TED. Here's where that volume lives, country by country, and how to actually see it.
CPV codes explained: how to use them without being misled
Every EU tender carries a CPV code — 9,454 of them, arranged in 45 divisions. We match tenders for a living, and the first thing our data taught us: trust CPV for browsing, never for completeness.
TED alternatives: easier ways to track EU tenders
TED publishes hundreds of notices every working day. Here's an honest look at your options for not reading them all yourself — from saved searches to national portals to monitoring tools like ours.
Country guides
How to find public tenders in Hungary (EKR guide)
Around 17 new Hungarian tenders appear every day on EKR — Hungarian-only, and mostly invisible on TED. Where they're published, what you can access without a government login, and what to watch out for.
How to find public tenders in Czechia (VVZ and NEN)
Czech tenders live in two connected systems — the VVZ journal and the NEN platform — and the smallest ones only on buyer profiles. How the pieces fit, what Czech law forces open, and where the TED overlap misleads aggregators.
How to find public tenders in Poland (BZP and e-Zamówienia)
Poland publishes around 178 below-threshold tenders a day — the highest-volume national stream we monitor, nearly all of it invisible on TED. How the BZP works, what changed on 1 January 2026, and how to keep up.
How to find public tenders in Austria (USP guide)
Austria publishes around 30 tenders a day through the federal USP portal — a pointer system, not a full-text archive. How Austrian publication works, why the visible stream is thinner than its neighbours', and where the details actually live.
How to find public tenders in Germany (DOE guide)
German public procurement is split across sixteen federal states and dozens of platforms — but a single federal data service now aggregates the notices. Around 85 live competitions a day, and how to tap the feed without monitoring Germany platform by platform.
How to find public tenders in Finland (Hilma guide)
Finland runs one of Europe's cleanest procurement setups: one national portal, a real legal duty to publish supplies and services from €60,000 up, and a free public API. Around 25–30 tenders a day, in Finnish and Swedish — here's how to work the stream.