If European public procurement has a centre, it is TED - Tenders Electronic Daily. It is the online supplement to the Official Journal of the European Union (the "S series"), run by the Publications Office of the EU in Luxembourg, and it is where every larger public contract in Europe must be advertised.
Understanding what TED is - and just as importantly, what it is not - makes you a much faster tender hunter.
What gets published on TED
EU directives require buyers to publish on TED every contract at or above the EU thresholds: roughly speaking, supplies and services from €140,000-€432,000 depending on the buyer, and works from €5.4 million. That covers:
- Contract notices - the announcement that a tender is open. This is the document you bid against.
- Prior information notices (PINs) - early warnings that a purchase is coming, sometimes months ahead. Gold for pipeline planning.
- Contract award notices - who won, and usually for how much. Priceless competitive intelligence.
- Modifications and corrigenda - changed deadlines, corrected documents, extended contracts.
Beyond the mandatory notices, many buyers publish voluntarily: below-threshold contracts they want wider competition for, and notices from countries outside the EU (EEA members, candidate countries, organisations like the EIB).
The volume is enormous: TED publishes hundreds of thousands of notices per year, in a mix of all 24 official EU languages.
Who runs it and what it costs
TED is operated by the Publications Office of the European Union. Access is free - searching, reading, downloading. There are no paid tiers; anyone telling you that you must pay to see EU tenders is selling you convenience, not access.
The underlying data is open too. Notices are reusable under the Commission's open-data decision (2011/833/EU), which is what allows services like Licitop to aggregate, translate and enrich them - always linking back to the official notice, which remains the only legally authoritative version.
The eForms revolution (why old advice looks different)
Since 2023-2024, notices are submitted in a structured XML format called eForms. For bidders, the practical effects are:
- Notices are more structured - fields like CPV codes, NUTS regions (where the work happens), deadlines and values are machine-readable, so search engines and alert services have become far more precise.
- The layout changed. If you learned to read the old form templates ("Section II.2.4"), the new notices reorganise the same information; the anatomy of a contract notice guide covers the current structure.
How notices are identified
Every TED notice has a publication number like 123456-2026 - the running
number within the year. The tender itself also carries the buyer's own file
reference. When you contact a buyer with a question, quote their reference;
when you search TED or talk to other bidders, the publication number is the
universal key. On Licitop, both are shown on the tender page.
The honest limitations of TED
TED is indispensable, but it has rough edges every bidder should know:
- Language. A German hospital publishes in German. The eForms structure is multilingual, but the meat of the notice - the description, the requirements - is usually in the buyer's language only. (This is exactly why Licitop generates summaries in six languages.)
- It only starts at the threshold. The majority of European contracts by number are below-threshold and live on national portals, not TED. If you only watch TED, you are watching the top of the pyramid.
- Documents live elsewhere. TED carries the notice; the actual tender documents (specifications, draft contract, forms) sit on the buyer's own platform, linked from the notice. Getting used to the dozen or so common national platforms is part of the craft.
- Search is literal. TED's own search finds what you type, in the language you type it. Synonyms, related CPV codes and cross-language matches are on you - or on the tools you use.
A practical TED workflow
- Search by CPV, not keywords. CPV codes are language-independent, so one code finds the same need in Portugal and in Finland.
- Filter by deadline, not publication date. What matters is how much time you have left to respond - sort by closing date and work backwards.
- Read award notices in your niche. Who wins, at what price, against how many bidders? Six months of award notices tell you whether a market is worth entering.
- Set up alerts. Checking manually stops happening after week two - an automated saved search that emails you new matches is the only sustainable way to follow the flow.
TED gives Europe a single window onto its public spending. Learn its logic once, and every public market on the continent starts speaking the same language.
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