How to find public tenders in Czechia (VVZ and NEN)

Here's something we learned the hard way building our Czech pipeline: if you naively aggregate the Czech national journal, you count most above-threshold tenders twice — once there, once on TED. The Czech system is genuinely two-layered, and knowing which layer holds what saves you from both double-counting and blind spots.

Where Czech tenders are published

The VVZ (Věstník veřejných zakázek, vvz.nipez.cz) is the national procurement journal — the formal publication point under the Czech procurement act (ZZVZ, Act No. 134/2016). Above the EU thresholds, notices go from VVZ to TED as well; below them, the "podlimitní" regime publishes nationally.

The NEN (Národní elektronický nástroj, nen.nipez.cz) is the state's e-procurement platform where procedures actually run, and where buyer profiles (profily zadavatelů) live. One Czech specialty worth knowing: the smallest contracts — zakázky malého rozsahu — don't have to appear in VVZ at all. They surface only on individual buyer profiles, which is why no single Czech list is ever complete.

What Czech law forces open

Czechia is unusually generous with documents: under § 96 of the ZZVZ, tender documentation must be freely and openly downloadable from the buyer's profile from the day of publication — no registration, no login. Compared to Hungary (where documents sit behind a government identity login), the Czech below-threshold market is remarkably researchable once you've found the tender.

The TED overlap, and why counts mislead

Because VVZ mirrors above-threshold notices to TED, we run every VVZ notice through a deduplication check against TED before it enters our database — with a grace window, since the twin can arrive days later. What survives is the genuinely Czech-only remainder: mostly below-threshold calls that TED will never carry. Practical consequence for you: any tool (or spreadsheet) that counts "Czech tenders" without deduplicating against TED is inflating the number, and any TED-only workflow is missing the national layer entirely.

What BidScout covers

We pull VVZ twice a day, deduplicate against TED, machine-translate Czech titles to English, and match the remainder against your profile alongside the TED stream. Czech coverage is part of BidScout Pro (€49/month); the free plan's TED layer already includes every above-threshold Czech tender.

The practical route

Selling into Czechia occasionally: watch TED for the big contracts and check NEN's search weekly for the rest. Selling seriously: track VVZ plus the buyer profiles of the ten or so public bodies most likely to buy what you sell — that's where the small, low-competition contracts appear first. And if that sounds like a part-time job, it is; it's the one we automated.