TED - Monitor EU Public Procurement

Tenders Electronic Daily is the online version of the Supplement to the Official Journal of the EU, operated by the Publications Office of the European Union in Luxembourg. It publishes procurement notices from all 27 EU member states, EEA countries (Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein), and GPA signatory nations. Any public contract above EU directive thresholds — currently €143,000 for central government service contracts and €5,538,000 for works contracts (2024–25 values) — must be published on TED.

The platform migrated from its legacy format to the eForms standard in October 2023 under Implementing Regulation (EU) 2019/1780, restructuring how notices are submitted and classified. TED is distinct from national portals: it covers only above-threshold contracts that must be advertised EU-wide, while each member state maintains its own portal for below-threshold and domestic procurement.

TED publishes several notice types, each serving a different procurement stage. Contract notices (the primary Forms 2, 5, and 12) are active calls for competition — the opportunities you bid on. Prior information notices (PINs) signal upcoming procurement weeks or months before the formal tender, giving suppliers early warning. Contract award notices disclose who won and at what value, providing competitive intelligence for future bids.

Corrigenda correct errors in published notices, sometimes extending deadlines or changing evaluation criteria — missing a corrigendum can mean submitting a non-compliant bid. Voluntary ex-ante transparency (VEAT) notices announce direct awards without competition, which can be challenged within a 10-day standstill period.

Design contests, concession notices, and qualification system notices round out the less common types. Each notice type maps to a specific eForms subtype (since the October 2023 migration), and understanding which subtypes matter for your business is critical for effective monitoring.

TED publishes over 2,000 notices per day across 24 official EU languages. Its search interface requires knowledge of the CPV classification system (over 9,000 product and service codes across 200+ divisions) and NUTS geographic codes (1,300+ regions across Europe). A search for IT consulting might need CPV codes 72000000 through 72900000 combined with NUTS codes for your target regions.

Multi-language results mean a French municipal IT contract appears in French, a German one in German — with no unified cross-language view. Most teams either check too infrequently, miss notices published in unfamiliar languages, or abandon TED search entirely because the learning curve is too steep.

Even experienced procurement teams report spending 30–60 minutes per day on manual TED searches. Multiply that across a business development team of three, and you are spending 300+ hours per year just filtering notices — before any bid work begins.

TED publishes approximately 700,000 contract notices per year, representing over €670 billion in annual procurement value. The largest publishing countries by volume are France, Germany, Poland, Italy, and Spain. Key sectors include IT services (CPV Division 72), construction works (CPV Division 45), consulting and management services (CPV Division 79), and healthcare supplies (CPV Division 33).

Above-threshold notices represent roughly 30–40% of total EU public procurement by value — the remaining 60–70% is published only on national portals like BOAMP, DTVP, or TenderNed, which is why monitoring TED alone leaves significant coverage gaps.

Jorpex continuously ingests new TED publications via the EU's official data feeds. Your keyword, region, CPV code, and contract-value filters are applied automatically to every incoming notice. When a matching tender appears, it's formatted and posted to Slack with the title, CPV codes, NUTS region, contracting authority, estimated value, submission deadline, and a direct link to the full notice on TED.

AI-generated summaries translate procurement language into plain English (or any of 17 European languages), so your team can evaluate a French or Polish tender without translation overhead. Filters can be as broad or narrow as you need: monitor an entire CPV division, or target a specific NUTS-3 region with exact keyword phrases.

TED covers above-threshold EU contracts, but below-threshold opportunities — often 60–70% of procurement by volume — appear only on national portals. A €120,000 IT contract in the Netherlands won't appear on TED (below the €143,000 threshold) but will be published on TenderNed.

Jorpex monitors TED alongside 50+ national and regional portals including BOAMP (France), DTVP (Germany), TenderNed (Netherlands), Contracts Finder (England), PLACSP (Spain), and Acquisti in Rete (Italy), giving you complete coverage across procurement levels from a single Slack feed.

A standard TED contract notice follows a structured format divided into six sections. Section I identifies the contracting authority — the organization issuing the tender, its address, and the contact point. Section II describes the object of the contract: what's being procured, the estimated value, whether it's divided into lots, and the CPV codes classifying the work.

Section III sets out legal, economic, financial, and technical requirements for bidders — minimum turnover thresholds, required certifications, or past project experience. Section IV covers the procedure type (open, restricted, competitive dialogue, innovation partnership) and the award criteria (price only, best price-quality ratio, or lowest cost). Section V appears in award notices and lists the winning bidder. Section VI contains additional information, including appeal procedures and dates.

When evaluating a TED notice, focus on three things first: the submission deadline (Section IV), the eligibility requirements (Section III), and the estimated contract value (Section II). These three data points tell you quickly whether the opportunity is worth pursuing before you invest time reading the full tender documents.

The relationship between TED and national portals is complementary, not overlapping. TED publishes contracts that exceed EU procurement thresholds — these same contracts typically also appear on the relevant national portal, but the national version may include additional local-language detail. Below-threshold contracts appear only on national portals.

For example, the French government portal BOAMP publishes both above-threshold contracts (mirrored on TED) and below-threshold contracts (exclusive to BOAMP). Germany's DTVP works the same way, as does Spain's PLACSP and Italy's Acquisti in Rete.

A comprehensive EU procurement strategy monitors TED for cross-border above-threshold opportunities and the relevant national portals for below-threshold contracts in your target countries. Jorpex handles both from a single notification profile, deduplicating notices that appear on multiple platforms.

In October 2023, TED completed its migration from legacy notice forms to the eForms standard defined by Implementing Regulation (EU) 2019/1780. This was the largest structural change to EU procurement data in over a decade. eForms replace the old fixed-field forms with a flexible SDK-based schema that supports richer, more granular data — including structured lot information, detailed award criteria weighting, and machine-readable strategic procurement fields (green procurement, social criteria, innovation).

For suppliers, eForms mean more structured data is available for each notice, making automated filtering more accurate. Fields that were previously buried in free-text descriptions — like sustainability requirements or framework agreement details — are now tagged as discrete data elements.

The EU continues to iterate on the eForms SDK, with new versions released roughly every six months. Jorpex's data pipeline tracks these SDK updates, ensuring that new fields and notice subtypes are captured as the standard evolves. This means your monitoring stays current without manual reconfiguration as TED's data model changes.