# How to find public tenders

> A step-by-step method for finding public tenders that fit what your company sells: identify your codes, map the portals in your markets, set a daily cadence, and read past the national portal.

Source: https://trinta.ai/guides/how-to-find-public-tenders · Format: Markdown mirror of that page · Language: en

Finding tenders is a repeatable process, not luck. These steps are the manual version of what a radar automates, and they work whether or not you ever buy software.

Setting this up takes an afternoon; running it takes twenty minutes a day, which is the part most companies underestimate.

## The steps

### 1. Write down what you actually sell

Start from your catalogue, not from a category. List the products and services you can deliver today, with the variants and capacities that distinguish you from a competitor. Every later step filters against this list, so vagueness here becomes noise later. A supplier who writes down medical gases finds less than one who writes down medical gas pipeline systems, PSA oxygen plants and their maintenance.
### 2. Find the CPV codes that match

In Europe, every notice is tagged with codes from the Common Procurement Vocabulary, and buyers file the same object under neighbouring codes. Find the codes covering your catalogue, then note the ones one branch away: those are where mis-tagged tenders hide. Outside the EU, most systems use a comparable classification, and the same neighbouring-code logic applies.

Search all 9,440 CPV codes: https://trinta.ai/cpv
### 3. Map the portals in the markets you sell to

Each country publishes on a national portal and, almost always, somewhere else too: the regulator, the official gazette, hospitals, state companies, regional buyers. Write the list per market before you automate anything, because a watch limited to the national portal misses whichever layer carries your buyers. TRINTA publishes this source map country by country.

Source maps by country: https://trinta.ai/government-tenders
### 4. Check whether your thresholds put you on TED

In the EU, contracts above the published thresholds must be advertised on TED for the whole single market, and below them publication stays national or regional. Knowing which side your typical contract sits on tells you whether TED is your main lane or a small part of it. For most SMEs the answer is that the below-threshold layer matters more.

The 2026-2027 thresholds: https://trinta.ai/eu-thresholds
### 5. Set a daily cadence, not a weekly one

Response windows are shorter than most suppliers assume: in the Portuguese notices TRINTA measures, the median is fourteen days and a third give ten or fewer. A weekly check therefore finds a meaningful share of procedures with most of their window already spent, and misses mandatory site visits entirely. Read every day, even briefly.

What the deadline data shows: https://trinta.ai/procurement-calendar
### 6. Watch for the signals that precede a notice

The best tenders are visible before they publish. Prior information notices announce intentions, framework agreements carry expiry dates that predict re-tenders, and award notices tell you who won what at roughly what price. Reading awards in your sector is the cheapest market intelligence in procurement, and almost nobody does it consistently.
### 7. Decide what to ignore, in writing

The failure mode of a working watch is volume: hundreds of notices, a handful relevant. Write down what disqualifies a tender for you, geography, value floor, missing certification, incumbent lock-in, and apply it ruthlessly. The discipline of a written no is what turns a feed into a pipeline, and it is also what makes automated scoring possible later.

The bid or no bid scorecard: https://trinta.ai/bid-no-bid

## Frequently asked questions

**Can I find public tenders for free?**

Yes, entirely. Every national procurement portal publishes its notices free of charge, and TED is free for EU-wide notices, so a company willing to spend the time can run this whole method at no cost. What costs money is the time: reading several portals daily in their own languages, chasing the layer that publishes outside the national channel, and doing it every day rather than when someone remembers.

**How long does it take to find relevant tenders manually?**

For a supplier watching four portals, a gazette and TED, realistically an hour or more a day, and most of that hour is rejection, because the overwhelming majority of published notices do not match any single company. That cost is why manual coverage tends to collapse to one portal within a few months, which is the point at which tenders start being missed rather than declined.

No rule of law is asserted in this guide: procedures vary by country and by contract, and the documents of each procedure govern.

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