TED tenders explained: how to find EU public procurement opportunities

TED carries above-threshold tenders from all EU and EEA countries: supplies, services, works and concessions, from local municipalities to EU institutions. Each notice includes the contracting authority, place of performance, CPV classification, estimated value in many cases, the submission deadline, and a link to the full tender documents.

Publication is free and open to any company in the world — eligibility rules are defined per notice, not per portal.

Every TED notice is classified with CPV (Common Procurement Vocabulary) codes — an eight-digit taxonomy of what is being bought. Software development, consulting, construction, laboratory equipment: each has its own codes. Searching TED well means knowing your CPV codes, because buyer language varies across 24 official languages while the codes stay constant.

A practical starting point: find three or four recent contracts you would have wanted to win, note their CPV codes, and use those codes as your standing search filter.

For triage, five fields matter most: the buyer and their country, the CPV codes, the estimated value, the deadline, and the procedure type (open, restricted, negotiated). If the country is outside where you can deliver, the value is below your minimum, or the deadline is under two weeks away for a complex procedure, the honest answer is usually no — and that answer is worth reaching fast.

TED publishes thousands of notices daily. Saved searches help, but they return everything matching a filter — the ranking, the cross-checking against your capacity, and the deadline tracking still land on you. Teams typically respond by checking the portal less often, which is precisely when the best-fit notices slip past.

Bidly's radar ingests TED notices every day. Your company profile — keywords, CPV codes, target countries, contract value range — turns that firehose into a ranked shortlist: every notice gets an explainable 0–100 fit score, an estimated win probability and an expected value net of your bid cost. Notices outside your markets or below your minimum value sink to the bottom automatically.

When a notice looks promising, the AI bid brief drafts the decision for you: bid or no-bid with confidence, strengths, risks, required documents and next steps — so your weekly review is about choosing bids, not finding them.

Before submitting anything, open the original notice on ted.europa.eu and confirm the deadline, eligibility criteria and submission channel. Tender documents — not any aggregator — are the authoritative source.