Below-threshold tenders: the contracts TED never shows you

Five of the six national procurement portals we monitor publish about 340 tender notices between them every working day (Czechia's count fluctuates, because we deduplicate it against TED first). The overwhelming majority of those notices never appear on TED. Not because anyone hides them — because below the EU thresholds, nobody is required to put them there.

Why these tenders are invisible on TED

EU law draws value lines — €140,000 to €5.4 million depending on the contract type — and only contracts above them must be advertised EU-wide on TED. Below the line, the publication duty ends at the national portal, in the national language, under national procedure rules.

The result is a two-tier visibility system. A €3 million road contract in Poland is on TED where a Spanish contractor can find it. A €150,000 IT contract from a Polish city is on BZP, in Polish, and nowhere else. Both are real, public, winnable contracts. Only one of them is findable without knowing where to look.

What below-threshold looks like, country by country

Hungary — EKR. Around 17 new tenders a day. Titles are Hungarian-only (we machine-translate them before matching). One quirk worth knowing: browsing and monitoring EKR is open, but downloading tender documents requires an ügyfélkapu (Hungarian government ID) login.

Czechia — VVZ. The Czech national journal mirrors its above-threshold notices to TED, so a naive aggregator would count everything twice. We check each VVZ notice against TED and keep only the ones that never show up there — the genuinely Czech-only remainder. Documents usually sit on buyer profiles in NEN, and Czech law (§ 96 ZZVZ) requires them to be openly downloadable.

Poland — BZP. Around 178 tenders a day — the highest-volume national source we run, and nearly all of it below the EU thresholds. Polish-only, published through the e-Zamówienia platform's public data interface.

Austria — USP. Around 30 a day via the federal business portal's tender list. It's a listing feed: the notice points you onward to the buyer's own platform for details.

Germany — DOE. Around 85 open competitions a day once we filter the raw feed down to live calls. Germany publishes through a bulk daily export rather than a live API — and that single feed is the practical shortcut around monitoring sixteen federal-state platforms separately.

Finland — Hilma. Around 25–30 a day, in Finnish and Swedish. Credit where due: Hilma's free public search API is one of the best-built we've integrated.

Who actually wins these

Below-threshold contracts are smaller — that's definitional — and they attract fewer bidders, because most cross-border suppliers never see them. If you're a 20-person company, a €120,000 contract you can actually win beats a €5 million framework you can't. The honest trade-off: values run smaller, and the data is thinner. Four of the six portals don't even publish a usable estimated value on most notices — you learn the budget by reading the tender, not the listing.

How to see them without losing your mornings

If you sell into one country, learn its portal properly — our country guides for Hungary, Czechia, Poland, Austria, Germany, and Finland each walk through the official source. If you sell into several, checking six portals in six languages daily stops being realistic, which is exactly the job we built BidScout Pro for: all six national portals plus TED, machine-translated, matched against your company profile, delivered as one digest. The free plan covers the TED layer; the below-threshold layer is the part that took months of portal-by-portal integration work to build.