What Is TED?
Tenders Electronic Daily (TED) is the official online journal for European public procurement. Managed by the Publications Office of the European Union, it publishes contract notices, prior information notices, and contract award notices for public tenders that exceed EU threshold values.
When Do Tenders Appear on TED?
EU directives require that public contracts above certain financial thresholds be advertised on TED. The thresholds for central government are approximately €143,000 for supplies and services, and €5.5 million for works contracts. Sub-central authorities have slightly higher thresholds.
Tenders below these thresholds are typically published only on national portals — which is why relying solely on TED means missing a significant portion of available opportunities.
How TED Data Is Structured
TED notices now follow standardised eForms, which replaced the older TED XML schema in October 2023. Each notice includes fields for the contracting authority, contract type, CPV codes, estimated value, deadline, and award criteria.
CPV (Common Procurement Vocabulary) codes classify the subject of the contract. For example, 72000000 covers IT services, while 45000000 covers construction work. Understanding CPV codes is essential for setting up effective tender alerts.
Limitations of TED
While TED is comprehensive for above-threshold contracts, it has notable gaps. National below-threshold tenders, framework agreement call-offs, and dynamic purchasing system opportunities often appear only on national portals. Additionally, TED's native search interface lacks the filtering and alerting tools needed for efficient daily monitoring.
How Tender Radar Uses TED
Tender Radar ingests the full TED dataset and enriches it with data from national portals. Our AI matches TED notices against your company profile using semantic analysis rather than simple CPV code filtering, catching relevant opportunities that keyword-based approaches would miss.
