TED (Tenders Electronic Daily): How to Search and Use the EU Procurement Platform

TED (Tenders Electronic Daily) is the online supplement to the Official Journal of the European Union and the official platform for EU public procurement. It publishes high-value public contracts from all EU member states, plus notifications from EEA countries and a growing number of associate partners. On any given business day, thousands of new notices appear — making it one of the most active and consistently monitored procurement databases in the world.

What types of contracts are published on TED?

• Works: infrastructure, civil engineering, road, bridge and tunnel projects
• Supplies: medical equipment, IT hardware, vehicles, industrial goods
• Services: engineering, consultancy, supervision, training, research
• Concession contracts: public-private partnership models

Understanding the threshold values

EU law requires all procurement above certain monetary thresholds to be published on TED. These thresholds are revised every two years. For the 2026–2027 cycle, the principal levels are:

• Works contracts: EUR 5,404,000 and above
• Central government supplies and services: EUR 140,000 and above
• Sub-central contracting authorities (supplies/services): EUR 216,000 and above
• Utilities sector (supplies/services): EUR 432,000 and above

Contracts below these thresholds are published only on national platforms. If you are targeting smaller contracts, complement your TED monitoring with country-specific procurement portals.

How to search TED effectively

TED's search interface is capable but has a learning curve. The following practices significantly improve result quality.

Use CPV codes

CPV (Common Procurement Vocabulary) codes are the EU's standardised classification system for procurement. Each code maps to a product or service category. When you search by CPV code rather than keywords, you eliminate linguistic variation — an "IT consulting services" contract in Poland and a "consultancy in information technology" contract in Italy both appear under the same CPV family.

Start with a two-digit CPV division (e.g., 45 for construction works, 72 for IT services) and narrow down to five or eight-digit codes that match your actual scope. A firm that monitors only the relevant subset of the CPV tree typically reduces noise by 80% or more compared to keyword-only search.

Apply geographic filtering

TED covers 30+ countries. Monitoring all of them is rarely useful — logistics, legal complexity, language requirements and local content rules vary significantly by country. Narrowing your search to markets where you have operational capacity, past project experience, or a credible local partner makes the alert volume manageable and the leads more actionable.

Filter by notice type

Not all notices signal the same opportunity:

• Contract notice (CN): an active procurement, open for submission — this is your primary target
• Prior information notice (PIN): advance signal of an upcoming tender, useful for pipeline planning
• Contract award notice (CAN): the awarded contract — not an opportunity to bid, but valuable for competitor and pricing intelligence

Setting up separate saved searches for contract notices and prior information notices lets you act at the right moment for each.

TED's limitations

TED is a strong starting point, not a complete solution:

• Search noise: broad keyword searches return high volumes of irrelevant results; discipline with CPV codes and geographic filters is essential
• Language barrier: most notices include a brief English abstract, but the full procurement documents are often available only in the contracting authority's language
• Redirect to national platforms: TED typically links out to the contracting authority's own portal for full document packages — you will need accounts on multiple national e-procurement systems if you are targeting more than one country
• Notice volume: in active weeks, hundreds of new notices matching a broad CPV filter can appear; without a systematic qualification process, the signal is quickly buried in noise

The step between finding and deciding

Finding a TED notice is straightforward. Deciding whether it is worth the effort of a full tender response is harder. The common failure mode is not missing relevant notices — it is spending days preparing a bid for a contract that a closer read of the qualification criteria would have ruled out in 20 minutes.

A disciplined go/no-go check before any substantive document preparation saves significantly more resource than optimising the search itself.