How to Find Public Tenders on TED: A Step-by-Step Guide for EU Businesses

There's a free, publicly accessible database where EU governments publish over 750,000 procurement opportunities every year. It's called TED (Tenders Electronic Daily). Most businesses have never used it. Some have never heard of it.

This guide walks you through how to search TED, filter results, set up alerts, and actually find tenders relevant to your business. No procurement background required.

What is TED?

TED (Tenders Electronic Daily) is the official supplement to the Official Journal of the European Union. It's the single largest source of public procurement opportunities in Europe.

Here's what you need to know:

• It covers all 27 EU member states plus EEA countries (Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein) and some GPA signatories
• Public bodies are legally required to publish contracts above certain value thresholds on TED
• It's completely free to search — no account needed for basic browsing
• Data goes back to 1993, with thousands of new notices added every working day
• Available in all 24 official EU languages

If you sell products or services that any government, municipality, hospital, university, or state-owned company might buy, TED is where those opportunities are published.

What you'll find on TED

TED publishes several types of procurement notices:

• Contract notices — Active tenders you can bid on right now. This is what most businesses are looking for.
• Prior information notices — Advance warnings of upcoming procurement. Valuable for planning: you know a tender is coming before competitors do.
• Contract award notices — Who won what, and for how much. Excellent competitive intelligence — you can see who's winning in your sector and at what price.
• Design contests — Competitions for architectural, engineering, or creative work.
• Modification notices — Changes to existing contracts or tenders.

Since October 2023, all new notices use the eForms standard, a structured data format that makes tender information more consistent and machine-readable across all member states.

Step 1: Go to TED and start searching

Open ted.europa.eu/en/search in your browser. You'll see TED's search interface with a prominent search bar and various filter options.

Start with a broad search related to your industry. If you're an IT services company, try "software development" or "IT consulting". If you're in construction, try "building renovation" or "road construction".

Tip: Don't be too specific on your first search. Public buyers use formal procurement language that might differ from how you describe your services. Start broad, scan the results, and notice the vocabulary that contracting authorities actually use. Then refine.

Step 2: Filter by what matters

TED's search supports several powerful filters. Use them to narrow results to the tenders that are actually relevant to you:

• Country — Select the EU member states where you want to work. You can pick multiple.
• Publication date — Focus on recent notices (last 7, 30, or 90 days) to see current opportunities.
• Deadline — Filter out tenders where the submission deadline has already passed.
• Contract type — Supplies (buying goods), Services (buying expertise), or Works (construction/infrastructure).
• Procedure type — "Open procedure" means anyone can bid. "Restricted procedure" means you first submit an expression of interest, then get invited to bid.
• CPV codes — The most powerful filter. More on this below.

A good starting combination: your target countries + contract type (services/supplies/works) + recent publication date + open deadline.

Step 3: Learn CPV codes (this is crucial)

The Common Procurement Vocabulary (CPV) is a standardized classification system used across all EU procurement. Every tender is tagged with one or more CPV codes that describe what's being purchased.

CPV codes are hierarchical, with 8-digit codes going from general to specific:

• 72000000 — IT services (broad category)
• 72200000 — Software programming and consultancy
• 72212000 — Programming services of application software (specific)
• 45000000 — Construction work
• 79000000 — Business services
• 33000000 — Medical equipment and pharmaceuticals
• 48000000 — Software packages and information systems

Finding the right CPV codes for your business is one of the most important things you can do. Once you know your codes, you can set up highly targeted searches that surface exactly the tenders you're qualified for.

How to find your CPV codes: Search TED for tenders that match what you do, then look at what CPV codes those tenders use. You'll quickly identify the 3-5 codes that cover most of your relevant opportunities. Save them — you'll use them repeatedly.

Step 4: Set up search alerts

Checking TED manually every day is tedious. Instead, save your search and set up notifications:

1. Create a free TED account (click "Sign in" and register via EU Login)
2. Run your filtered search (your CPV codes + target countries + contract type)
3. Click "Save search" to bookmark your criteria
4. Enable email notifications for your saved search — TED will email you when new matching notices are published
5. You can also use RSS feeds to pipe results into your preferred feed reader or workflow tool

Set up 2-3 saved searches covering different aspects of your business. One for your primary service, one broader for adjacent opportunities, and one for contract awards in your sector (competitive intelligence).

Step 5: Read the notice carefully

When you find a promising tender, take time to read the full notice. Here's what to look for:

• Eligibility criteria — What qualifications, certifications, or experience does the buyer require? Some tenders require specific ISO certifications, minimum annual turnover, or past contract references.
• Technical requirements — What exactly does the buyer want? Read the specifications closely and assess whether you can genuinely deliver.
• Evaluation methodology — How will bids be scored? Price only? Price and quality? Knowing the scoring weights helps you calibrate your bid.
• Submission deadline — Mark it in your calendar. Late submissions are automatically rejected with no exceptions.
• Procedure type — Open procedure means you submit a full bid. Restricted means you first prove eligibility, then get invited to bid if shortlisted.
• Estimated value — Not always published, but when it is, it tells you the buyer's budget. Don't bid significantly above this.
• Lots — Large contracts are often divided into lots that smaller companies can bid on individually.

Common pitfall: Don't skip the annexes. The main notice is a summary — the detailed technical specifications, draft contract, and submission instructions are usually in attached documents. Download and read everything.

What about below-threshold tenders?

One important caveat: TED only shows tenders above EU procurement thresholds. For 2026-2027, these thresholds are:

• €140,000 for central government supplies and services
• €216,000 for sub-central government supplies and services
• €5.4 million for works contracts

Below these thresholds, tenders are published on national portals only. And this is where most SME-suitable opportunities actually are — smaller contracts that large companies don't bother bidding on.

Each country has its own portal:

• Hungary: EKR (Elektronikus Kozbeszerzesi Rendszer)
• Germany: DTVP, service.bund.de, and 16 state-level platforms
• Austria: USP (Unternehmensserviceportal), auftrag.at
• Czech Republic: VVZ (Vestnik verejnych zakazek)

Monitoring all of these manually — in addition to TED — is where things get genuinely difficult.

The limitations of manual searching

TED's search works. But let's be honest about its limitations:

• It's only one platform. If you're targeting multiple countries, you also need to monitor 5, 10, or 30+ national and regional portals.
• Language barriers are real. A German municipality publishes its tenders in German. A Czech hospital in Czech. If you don't speak the language, you're missing opportunities.
• Keyword search has blind spots. Different buyers describe the same requirement differently. A search for "cloud migration" won't find a tender titled "IT-Infrastruktur Modernisierung" even if it's the same thing.
• It's time-consuming. Checking TED daily, reading notices, assessing eligibility, tracking deadlines — done properly, it's hours per week. For smaller companies without a dedicated procurement person, those hours don't exist.
• No matching intelligence. TED shows you everything that matches your keywords. It can't tell you which tenders are the best fit for your specific company, capabilities, and track record.

This is the fundamental problem: the data is public and free, but turning it into actionable opportunities takes significant time and expertise.

Or let software do it

TED is a great starting point, and it's free. But if you're serious about public procurement as a revenue channel, manually checking TED plus national portals across multiple countries isn't sustainable. It's exactly the kind of repetitive, high-volume monitoring that software should handle.

That's what we're building with BidScout — automated monitoring across TED and national portals, AI-powered matching to your company profile, and tender summaries in your language regardless of the original. All the searching from this guide, done automatically, every day.

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If you sell to the public sector (or could), try BidScout — it's free. No credit card, no commitment.