France Public Procurement: How to Find Tenders on BOAMP and PLACE
July 8, 2026 · 7 min read
A French ministry publishes a notice for a hospital oxygen system on BOAMP at 9am. The dossier itself, the technical spec, the bid form, the deadline clock, lives on a completely different website called PLACE. A regional council two departments away runs the same kind of contract on its own buyer profile from a private operator. None of these three talk to each other, and none of them will email you. For an exporter or an SME outside France, that gap between "a notice exists" and "I can actually read and answer it" is where most of the French market quietly disappears.
France runs one of the largest public procurement markets in Europe, worth well over 100 billion euros a year across central government, the regions and departments, communes, hospitals, and state operators. The opportunity is real. The problem is purely one of plumbing: the country splits the announcement from the dossier, and spreads both across many systems. Here is how those systems actually fit together.
BOAMP: the official notice gazette
BOAMP stands for the Bulletin Officiel des Annonces des Marchés Publics, the official journal of public procurement notices. It is published by DILA (Direction de l'information légale et administrative), the same state body behind the Journal Officiel, and it lives at boamp.fr.
Think of BOAMP as the legal noticeboard, not the place you submit a bid. When a French buyer is required to publish a contract, the avis de marché (contract notice) appears here. It carries the essentials: the buyer, the object of the contract, the CPV codes (the EU Common Procurement Vocabulary that classifies what is being bought), the procedure type, the estimated value bracket, and the submission deadline. Crucially, BOAMP exposes a free, structured open data API via data.gouv.fr, which is why it is one of the few French sources a machine can read reliably rather than scrape.
What BOAMP does not give you is the actual dossier de consultation des entreprises (the DCE, or tender pack). For that, the notice points you to a profil acheteur (buyer profile), which is a separate platform. That handoff is the single most confusing thing about French procurement for newcomers.
PLACE: where the State's dossiers and bids live
For central government, the dominant buyer profile is PLACE, the Plateforme des Achats de l'État, at marches-publics.gouv.fr. It is operated by AIFE (Agence pour l'informatique financière de l'État) on behalf of the Direction des Achats de l'État.
PLACE is where the work happens. By late 2025 it carried something on the order of 4,700 buying entities and over 340,000 registered companies. On PLACE you:
To do any of this you register once as an operator, ideally with a French SIRET if you have a local entity, though foreign companies can and do bid. Registration is free.
The key mental model: BOAMP tells you a contract exists, PLACE (or another buyer profile) is where you read it and answer it. Miss the link and you have only half the picture.
The thresholds that decide where a notice appears
French publication rules are driven by value, and they changed at the start of 2026. The current EU thresholds (in force for 2026 to 2027), all excluding VAT, are:
Above these levels, a contract is a procédure formalisée and the notice is published simultaneously on BOAMP and on TED, the EU's Tenders Electronic Daily. Below the EU thresholds but above 40,000 euros HT, contracts run as a MAPA (procédure adaptée), where the buyer sets the rules but still usually publishes, very often on BOAMP and its buyer profile. Below 40,000 euros, a buyer can contract without a formal advertised procedure, though many still post these smaller marchés on their profile.
The practical takeaway: if you only watch TED, you see the large above-threshold contracts but miss the entire MAPA layer, which is where a lot of accessible, mid-sized SME work sits. BOAMP is the source that captures that middle band.
The portals beyond BOAMP and PLACE
PLACE is the State's platform, but France has no single buyer profile. Local authorities and hospitals frequently use private operators, and you will meet these names constantly:
Notices from all of these can surface on BOAMP, which is what makes BOAMP the closest thing to a national net. But the dossier always lives back on whichever profile the buyer chose, so every notice is a small navigation puzzle.
Sectors worth watching and how to stay on top
France procures heavily in areas where exporters and specialist SMEs are competitive: healthcare and medical equipment (hospital groupements de coopération sanitaire buy oxygen systems, imaging, consumables), construction and renovation, energy and the écologie transition, IT and digital services, defence and security, and transport infrastructure. Each maps to CPV families, which is how you filter signal from noise.
The honest difficulty is monitoring. Watching BOAMP, PLACE, TED, AWS, Maximilien and a handful of others by hand, every day, in French, filtering by CPV and threshold and region, is a job nobody does well for long. Searching is reactive: you only find what you remember to look for.
This is exactly the gap a daily scored tender feed closes. Instead of logging into six portals, you describe what you sell once, and matched French notices (from BOAMP and the buyer profiles, tied back to their PLACE dossier) arrive ranked by fit, with the deadline and value already surfaced. You stop searching, and start reviewing a shortlist. For a market this fragmented, turning the feed on is usually the difference between catching the right marché public and reading about who won it.
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