TED — Tenders Electronic Daily

TED is the e-procurement portal that implements the EU’s transparency obligations for public spending. Its core purpose is to ensure that every contract above a certain value is advertised across all member states, giving suppliers in any EU or EEA country an equal opportunity to compete. This principle of non-discrimination and cross-border access is a cornerstone of the EU’s single market.

The platform is freely accessible at ted.europa.eu and publishes notices in all 24 official EU languages. Contracting authorities in EU member states, EEA countries (Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein), and countries with bilateral agreements are legally obligated to publish on TED when a contract’s estimated value exceeds the applicable EU procurement thresholds. TED also serves as the publication channel for contracts under the World Trade Organization’s Government Procurement Agreement (GPA), extending its relevance to signatories such as the United States, Canada, Japan, South Korea, and others.

For suppliers, TED is the single point of entry for discovering high-value public contracts across Europe. Rather than searching 27+ national portals individually, a supplier can search TED to find open tenders, framework agreements, design contests, and concession opportunities from any participating country.

TED’s mandatory publication requirements are grounded in three principal EU directives, all adopted in 2014 and transposed into national law across member states:

• Directive 2014/24/EU (the “Classic Directive”) — governs public procurement by central and sub-central government bodies for supplies, services, and works. It establishes the procedures (open, restricted, competitive dialogue, competitive with negotiation, innovation partnership) and the thresholds above which contracts must be advertised on TED.

• Directive 2014/25/EU (the “Utilities Directive”) — applies to procurement by entities operating in the water, energy, transport, and postal services sectors. These sectors have their own, generally higher, thresholds.

• Directive 2014/23/EU (the “Concessions Directive”) — covers the award of works and services concessions, where the operator assumes significant economic risk.

The thresholds are reviewed every two years by the European Commission and published in EUR-Lex. For the 2024–2025 cycle, the main thresholds are approximately €143,000 for central government supplies and services, €221,000 for sub-central government, and €5.538 million for works contracts. Below these values, contracts are published only on national portals and are not required to appear on TED.

In the United Kingdom, the Procurement Act 2023 created a separate regime post-Brexit, with opportunities now published on Find a Tender rather than TED. For details, see our Procurement Act 2023 glossary entry.

TED’s geographic reach extends well beyond the 27 EU member states. The platform publishes procurement notices from three tiers of participating countries:

1. EU member states (27 countries) — all contracting authorities above threshold must publish on TED. These include major markets such as Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and Poland. Individual country procurement systems are covered in our TED source page.

2. EEA/EFTA countries — Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein participate in the EU single market through the European Economic Area agreement and are bound by equivalent procurement rules. Switzerland has a separate bilateral agreement covering certain sectors.

3. GPA signatories — under the WTO Government Procurement Agreement, countries such as the US, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Israel, and others grant reciprocal access to their government procurement markets. GPA-covered contracts from EU member states are published on TED, and EU suppliers can bid on GPA-covered contracts published on portals like SAM.gov.

This means TED is relevant not only for European suppliers but for any company in a GPA signatory country looking to enter the European public procurement market. Conversely, EU companies can use the GPA framework to bid on opportunities published on SAM.gov and other national portals worldwide.

TED publishes several categories of procurement notices, each serving a different stage of the procurement lifecycle. Understanding these notice types is essential for bid/no-bid decisions and for timing your engagement with contracting authorities:

• Prior Information Notice (PIN) — an advance notice that a contracting authority plans to procure goods, services, or works in the coming months. PINs give suppliers early warning and can reduce the minimum tender response period when the formal contract notice follows.

• Contract Notice (CN) — the formal invitation to tender. This is the notice that triggers the procurement procedure and establishes the deadline for submitting bids. Contract notices include the full scope, eligibility criteria, CPV codes, NUTS region codes, estimated value, and submission deadline.

• Contract Award Notice (CAN) — published after a contract has been awarded. It discloses the winning bidder, the award value, and the number of tenders received. Award notices are invaluable for competitive intelligence and for understanding pricing in your sector.

• Modification Notice — published when a contract is substantially modified after award, such as a significant change in value or scope.

• Voluntary Ex-Ante Transparency (VEAT) Notice — published when a contracting authority intends to award a contract without prior publication of a contract notice, providing transparency and a legal safeguard against challenges.

• Design Contest Notice and Results — used for architectural, urban planning, and engineering design competitions.

Each notice type serves a strategic purpose. Experienced bidders monitor PINs for early intelligence, respond to contract notices for active opportunities, and analyse award notices to benchmark their competitiveness. The manual vs automated comparison illustrates why automated monitoring across all notice types is significantly more effective than periodic manual searches.

Since November 2023, TED has mandated the use of eForms — a new, standardised electronic format for procurement notices defined by Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2019/1780. eForms replace the legacy TED XML schema and represent a fundamental shift in how procurement data is structured, transmitted, and consumed.

The key benefits of eForms include:

• Machine readability — eForms use a consistent, hierarchical data model that makes it far easier for automated systems to parse and extract structured fields such as CPV codes, NUTS codes, estimated values, deadlines, and lot structures.

• Richer data — eForms capture information that the legacy format often left as unstructured free text, including sustainability criteria, lot-level details, and subcontracting provisions.

• Multilingual support — the eForms SDK supports all 24 EU official languages with standardised field labels and code lists, improving cross-border comprehension.

• Extensibility — the format is designed to accommodate future policy requirements (such as environmental and social reporting) without breaking backward compatibility.

For suppliers and monitoring platforms, eForms significantly improve the quality and consistency of the data available from TED. Jorpex’s TED integration fully supports the eForms standard, parsing structured fields to deliver more precise matching and richer opportunity summaries in your Slack, email, or Teams notifications.

TED provides a free search interface at ted.europa.eu with several filtering mechanisms. To search effectively, you should understand the key dimensions available:

• CPV codes — the Common Procurement Vocabulary classifies the subject of the contract. Searching by CPV code is the most reliable way to find opportunities in your sector because free-text descriptions vary by language and contracting authority.

• NUTS codes — the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics identifies the geographic location of contract performance. NUTS codes let you filter by country, region, or sub-region.

• Notice type — filter by contract notices (active tenders), prior information notices (upcoming opportunities), or contract award notices (competitive intelligence).

• Contracting authority — search by buyer name to track specific public bodies you want to work with.

• Value range — filter by estimated contract value to focus on opportunities that match your capacity.

• Publication date — narrow results to recent notices to avoid expired opportunities.

TED’s search works well for occasional lookups, but it has significant limitations for systematic monitoring. It does not support complex Boolean logic across fields, has no AI-driven relevance scoring, and its built-in email alerts offer only basic keyword matching without negative filters or value thresholds. For a detailed walkthrough of advanced techniques, see our guide on how to search TED tenders.

For teams that need to monitor TED continuously, the manual vs automated comparison explains why automated platforms like Jorpex deliver substantially better coverage with less effort.

Manually checking TED every day is time-consuming and error-prone — with over 2,700 new notices published each business day, it is easy to miss relevant opportunities buried in irrelevant results. Jorpex connects directly to TED’s data feeds and applies your custom notification profiles to every incoming notice in real time.

Here is how the automated monitoring workflow compares to manual searching:

• Coverage — Jorpex processes every notice published on TED, including PINs, contract notices, and award notices, across all 27 EU member states and EEA countries. Manual searches are limited by the time you have available and the search queries you remember to run.

• Precision — notification profiles in Jorpex combine CPV codes, NUTS regions, keyword matching, contract value ranges, and disqualifying terms. This multi-dimensional filtering eliminates noise and surfaces only the opportunities that genuinely fit your capabilities.

• Speed — Jorpex delivers matching opportunities to Slack, email, or Microsoft Teams within minutes of publication. Manual checking introduces delays of hours or days, which matters when tender response windows are tight.

• Intelligence — because Jorpex also monitors SAM.gov and 50+ other procurement sources worldwide, you can compare TED opportunities with similar contracts in the US, UK, and other markets from a single dashboard.

Whether you are a government contractor expanding into European markets or a European small business looking to compete across borders, automated TED monitoring ensures that no high-value tender slips through the cracks.