The Complete Guide to EU Public Procurement and TED Tenders
March 3, 2026 · 8 min read
The European Union publishes over 700,000 tenders per year through a single official portal: TED — Tenders Electronic Daily. For any company looking to win public contracts in Europe, understanding how TED works is essential.
What is TED?
TED is the online version of the Supplement to the Official Journal of the European Union. It is the official publication point for all public procurement notices above certain financial thresholds across all 27 EU member states, plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and several other countries.
Every working day, TED publishes around 3,000 new procurement notices covering contract opportunities, award notices, prior information notices, and various other procurement documents.
EU procurement thresholds
Not every public contract must be published on TED. The EU sets financial thresholds above which publication is mandatory:
Types of procedures
Open procedure: Any supplier can submit a bid. Most common for straightforward purchases.
Restricted procedure: Suppliers first submit an expression of interest. Only shortlisted candidates are invited to tender.
Competitive dialogue: Used for complex contracts where requirements cannot be defined in advance.
Negotiated procedure: In specific circumstances, contracting authorities negotiate directly with suppliers.
CPV codes: the key to effective searching
The Common Procurement Vocabulary is a standardised classification system for public contracts. Every tender is tagged with CPV codes. Searching by CPV code is far more reliable than keyword search — it eliminates false positives and surfaces tenders you might otherwise miss.
The volume problem
700,000 tenders per year means roughly 3,000 new tenders every working day. Manually reviewing this volume to find the handful relevant to your business is not realistic. This is why AI-powered platforms that integrate with the TED API have become essential tools for serious procurement teams.
How AI solves the TED problem
By integrating directly with the TED API — which provides structured access to all published notices — an AI system can process every new tender within hours of publication, score it against your company profile, and surface only the opportunities worth pursuing.
The result: a procurement team that previously spent two hours per day monitoring TED can now spend those two hours writing stronger bids.
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