The edge
Five reasons relevant tenders never reach you
The structural reasons public work never reaches your alerts, and the check to run for each one this week.
In short
- From 1 January 2026 the EU thresholds are €140,000 for central government supplies and services, €216,000 for sub-central authorities, €432,000 for utilities and €5,404,000 for works. Below those, nothing has to reach TED.
- A notice carries whatever code the buyer picked. US federal contracting officers assign one NAICS code per solicitation, so a multi-disciplinary contract is flattened into a single industry.
- Framework call-offs produce no open tender notice, and a public sector framework term cannot exceed four years, so the award date tells you when it reopens.
- A dynamic purchasing system must stay open to any qualifying supplier throughout its life, so you can apply to an existing one today.
- Portals below TED publish in the local language only, and the tender documents stay local even when a notice has been translated.
Most of the public work you never see was published. It just was not published where you were looking, or it was described in a way your saved searches could not match.
There are five structural reasons for that, and each has a check you can run this week. Four of the five run against award notices, which appear whether or not you saw the tender. If you have already measured what your alerts missed last quarter, this is about what caused them.
Which of the five is your problem
One row usually accounts for most of a team's misses, and fixing the wrong one costs you a quarter.
| What you noticed | Likely cause | The check |
|---|---|---|
| A competitor announces a council win you never saw | Below threshold | Find the value, then which portal carried it |
| Clearly your work, under a code you do not watch | Classification | Compare codes on 20 in-scope awards against your alert codes |
| Your job described as another trade, or buried in a lot | Adjacent category | Re-run last quarter under three framings a buyer might use |
| The award names a framework, dynamic market or call-off | A framework you are not on | List your sector's frameworks, their award dates and terms |
| The notice is in a language your terms are not in | Language | Search one portal in English, then the local term |
Where the work goes before it reaches your alerts
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Below-threshold work that never reaches the pan-European aggregators
What it looks like: a three-year grounds maintenance contract at a district council, won by a firm you compete with, with no trace of the notice in your inbox.
Why it happens is arithmetic. EU-wide advertising is compulsory only above the thresholds. The values in force from 1 January 2026, set by Commission Delegated Regulations 2025/2150, 2025/2151 and 2025/2152, are €140,000 for central government supplies and services, €216,000 for sub-central authorities such as regions and municipalities, €432,000 for utilities, and €5,404,000 for works and concessions. Social and other specific services sit at €750,000. All figures are net of VAT, and each is lower than the value it replaced, which quietly pulled work below the line. Keep the full threshold table to hand.
Below those numbers publication is national law, and it varies more than bidders assume. A French buyer need not advertise at all below €60,000 excluding VAT for supplies and services, or €100,000 for works. From €60,000 to €90,000 the advertising is "adapted", meaning the buyer picks the medium. Only from €90,000 is publication on BOAMP or an authorised legal announcements publication compulsory.
The UK is stricter. Procurement Act 2023 thresholds from 1 January 2026 are £135,018 for central government goods and services, £207,720 for sub-central authorities and £5,193,000 for works, inclusive of VAT, and below them English authorities must still publish a below-threshold tender notice on the central digital platform from £12,000 including VAT for central government, or £30,000 for other authorities. The US is looser. FAR 5.101(a)(1) requires a SAM.gov synopsis only for proposed contract actions expected to exceed $25,000, and none of it touches state, county or city buying.
The check: take last quarter's awards, mark those below the country's threshold, and find where each notice was published. If that portal is not on your list, this is your cause.
The fix is portals, not keywords. Add the regional sources for the two or three areas where you actually deliver, starting with the smaller EU national portals and, for US work outside federal, the state and local procurement systems. Some make it easy: Spain's PLACSP carries even contratos menores, the minor contracts below €15,000 for services and €40,000 for works. Elsewhere you add them one at a time, so be deliberate about which portals earn their place.
Watch out
The cost of a portal is not finding it, it is carrying it. Add two and measure, rather than adding ten and quietly ignoring eight by March.
Notices filed under a code you do not watch
What it looks like: an award notice for exactly your work, carrying CPV 79000000 (business services) or a NAICS code you have never bid under.
Codes get assigned by a person, from a dropdown, often after the specification is finished. The CPV structure invites imprecision by design: a code runs to nine digits, the first two identifying the division and each further digit narrowing the category, so a buyer who stops at the division has still filed a valid notice. US federal buyers have less room and a worse outcome, because FAR 19.102(b) requires the contracting officer to assign one NAICS code per solicitation, chosen as the single industry that best describes the principal purpose. A contract with three components gets one code, and two of them go invisible to anyone searching by NAICS. In state and local systems the classification is usually UNSPSC, and buyers routinely stop at class level.
The check takes about forty minutes. Pull 20 award notices you know were in scope, write the primary code from each into a column, and put your alert codes beside them. Under 15 matches out of 20 and classification is a live problem.
Two fixes, applied together. Watch at division level as well as at your specific codes, because CPV divisions 45 (construction work), 50 (repair and maintenance services), 71 (architectural and engineering services), 72 (IT services), 79 (business services) and 90 (sewage, refuse, cleaning and environmental services) absorb most of the mis-filing. Then run text searches alongside code searches, because TED indexes notice text as well as structured fields. eForms has been mandatory on TED since 25 October 2023, which made those fields consistent without making the buyer's code correct. Understand how buyers actually use CPV codes before widening anything.
Adjacent categories your saved searches do not reach
Say you install and maintain ventilation systems. A hospital tenders "mechanical and electrical works" as part of a ward refurbishment, filed under CPV division 45, with your entire scope inside lot 3. Your searches live in divisions 50 and 71, so you never see it.
Buyers frame a procurement around how they will contract and pay for it, not around what your firm calls itself. The same job is works from a capital programme and services from revenue, a standalone tender at one buyer and a lot inside a larger contract at the next. Lots carry their own classification in eForms, but only if you search at lot level.
The check: for each of your last ten wins, write down the sector, then list three framings a buyer could plausibly have used instead. Run each as a search over last quarter. Anything that comes back which you did not see is an adjacency gap.
The fix is two searches instead of one. The first describes what you do. The second describes what the buyer wants to achieve, in the buyer's words: a software firm's capability search says "case management system", its outcome search says "reduce processing times for housing applications". Read notice titles rather than skimming codes, and check whether a large notice has lots. This is what quarterly alert hygiene exists to catch.
Frameworks and dynamic markets you are not on
What it looks like: work in your sector stops appearing as open tenders at a buyer, or across a whole buying group. They have not stopped buying. They set up a framework, and the buying now happens as call-offs that generate no open notice.
The rules make the timing predictable. Under Article 33(1) of Directive 2014/24/EU, the term of a framework agreement must not exceed four years, save in exceptional cases duly justified by its subject. Utilities get eight years under Directive 2014/25/EU. In the UK the Procurement Act 2023 holds closed frameworks to four years, allows eight for utilities and defence, and lets an open framework run for eight years, reopening at least once in the first three years and once in each five-year period thereafter. A framework awarded in March 2024 is therefore a diary entry for early 2028.
A dynamic purchasing system behaves differently, and better for you. It must stay open throughout its period of validity to any economic operator satisfying the selection criteria, and the number admitted cannot be limited. The minimum period for requests to participate is 30 days from the contract notice, and once the first invitation to tender has gone out no further time limits apply, so you can join an existing DPS on any ordinary Tuesday. The UK equivalent is a dynamic market, tracked through notice types UK13 to UK16.
The check: search contract award notices in your sector over the last four years and pick out those that established a framework. Record the buyer, the award date, the maximum term and the appointed suppliers. That table is your reopening diary and your competitor list at once.
The fix has two speeds. Now, apply to every dynamic market and DPS covering your scope. Over the longer run work the diary, watching pipeline notices and prior information notices, and read the forward pipelines big buying organisations publish: the UK's Government Commercial Agency, formerly Crown Commercial Service, lists agreements due to go live over the next three years.
Notices published only in the local language
What it looks like: zero results from Finland, Poland or Portugal, in a quarter when you demonstrably sold into all three.
TED softens this, because notices there are available in translation, including machine translation, so an English keyword can surface a Danish notice. Below TED the softening stops. National and regional portals publish and index in the national language, and the documents attached to a notice stay in that language even where the notice itself has been translated. A monolingual English search of a Polish municipal portal returns close to nothing, which is easy to misread as an empty market rather than an empty query.
The check takes twenty minutes per country. Search one national portal for last quarter using your usual English term, then repeat with two or three local-language terms for the same thing. If the local count is materially higher, you have found the cause and its size at once.
The fix is a small vocabulary, not a translation project. Build 10 to 20 terms per language from award notices you already know were in scope, rather than by translating your English terms, because the official term is frequently not the literal one. Dutch procurement uses "aanbesteding", and the statutory German term for a framework agreement is "Rahmenvereinbarung" rather than the commercially common "Rahmenvertrag". Then you need a way to triage a foreign-language tender in about twenty minutes, or the extra volume just becomes extra reading.
The order to fix them in
Fix in order of work recovered per hour spent. Language and classification are cheapest, being edits to searches you already run, and both change what arrives the same day. Portals come next, then adjacent categories, where widening carelessly floods the inbox with work you will never bid. Frameworks are slowest and worth the most, since you cannot join most until they reopen. Start that diary anyway.
Common questions
Why do I never see local council or municipal contracts?
Because most of them fall below the EU publication thresholds and so are never advertised on TED or the pan-European aggregators. A €120,000 municipal services contract sits under the €216,000 sub-central threshold applying from 1 January 2026, so it appears only on whichever national, regional or municipal portal the buyer uses. Add those portals rather than widening your keywords.
Can I search TED by keyword instead of by CPV code?
Yes. TED indexes the text of notices as well as their structured fields, so you can combine a keyword with a country and a date range and ignore codes entirely. Run keyword and code searches side by side rather than choosing between them, because each catches notices the other drops. Keyword search is the practical answer to a buyer who filed your work under a generic code.
How do I find out which frameworks cover my sector?
Search contract award notices in your sector over the last four years, pick out those that established a framework agreement, and record the buyer, the award date, the maximum term and the suppliers appointed. Because a public sector framework term cannot exceed four years under Directive 2014/24/EU, save in exceptional justified cases, the award date tells you roughly when it reopens. Large buying organisations also publish forward pipelines.