Tender alerts in Europe: how TED and national portals work
Tender alerts in Europe are built on two layers: TED, which publishes contracts above the EU thresholds across all member states, and national portals, which publish everything below them. No single feed covers both, which is why alerting is harder than it looks.
This page explains the mechanism rather than ranking vendors. If you want the equivalent for funding calls rather than procurement, see how to track EU funding calls.
The two layers
TED publishes procurement notices from every EU member state for contracts above the European thresholds, in a structured format, in all official languages. It is free, official, and offers its own notification service.
National and regional portals publish everything else — and “everything else” is the larger number by volume, if not by value. In Portugal that is BASE.gov.pt and the Diário da República; Spain, France and every other member state have their own equivalents.
The thresholds that decide which layer a contract lands in are set in EU directives and revised every two years, with different values for different kinds of buyer and contract. Do not memorise a number: check the current threshold when it matters, because a figure quoted in a blog post from two years ago may no longer be correct.
The practical consequence: a supplier monitoring only TED sees the large contracts and concludes their market is quiet. A supplier monitoring only their national portal misses cross-border opportunities entirely.
What a notice actually contains
Procurement is a sequence of notices, not a single event:
- Prior information notice — an early signal that a buyer intends to procure. Often months ahead. Almost nobody acts on these, which is exactly why they are useful.
- Contract notice — the real call. Deadline, scope, selection criteria, and where the documents live.
- Contract award notice — who won, and for how much. Retrospective, and the most underrated of the three.
Award notices are where the pattern is. They tell you the real budget rather than the estimate, who the incumbent is, and roughly when the contract will come round again. Every framework agreement has an end date, and that date is a diary entry.
TED has moved to eForms, a more structured notice format designed to make notices machine-readable and consistent between countries. In practice the transition is uneven — fields that are mandatory in one country are sparsely filled in another — which matters if you rely on structured filtering.
How alerting works
Almost every alerting system, free or paid, is built on some combination of:
Keyword matching against notice titles and descriptions. Simple, and it fails in both directions: it misses procedures whose title uses different vocabulary from yours, and it floods you with matches that share a word and nothing else.
CPV code filtering. More reliable, because codes are structured — but buyers apply them loosely, sometimes tagging a broad parent code for a narrow requirement. Filtering on codes alone under-includes when the buyer chose an unexpected code and over-includes when they chose a broad one.
Buyer watching. Following specific contracting authorities regardless of what they publish. Narrow, and often the highest-signal method for suppliers with a defined territory.
Value and geography filters. Blunt but effective for excluding the obviously irrelevant.
A service adds, on top of these: deduplication across sources (the same contract can appear nationally and on TED), normalisation across languages and formats, and — the expensive part — someone deciding whether a match is actually worth your attention.
Where alerts reliably fail
Three cases defeat every keyword and code filter:
- Vocabulary mismatch. The buyer calls it something you would never search for. Public-sector procurement language is not your marketing language.
- Relevance that no keyword expresses. A framework you could join, an incumbent whose contract is ending, a scope adjacent to what you deliver. None of that is in the title.
- Timing. The alert is accurate and arrives eleven days before a deadline that needed three weeks of consortium work. Technically a success; practically a miss.
The third is the one that actually costs money, and no amount of filter tuning fixes it. Watching prior information notices and award notices does.
Choosing an approach
Start free. TED’s own notifications and your national portal’s cost nothing. If one country and one layer is your world, that may be the end of it.
Add a service when the breadth exceeds the attention available — several countries, or both layers, or a team where reading notices is nobody’s actual job. The honest test is not whether a service finds things: it is whether anyone at your end reads what it sends.
Judge any service on three things: whether it covers below-threshold national sources or only TED; whether every item links to its source record so you can verify it; and whether anything human happens between the crawl and your inbox.
Radar Europa is one option here — it reads BASE, the Diário da República, TED and the EU Funding & Tenders Portal, and sends a scored Monday shortlist for Portugal and EU-wide funding. It is the right tool if your problem is breadth with nobody watching, and the wrong one if you need deep coverage of a single country we do not yet cover.
Frequently asked questions
What is TED?
TED, Tenders Electronic Daily, is the EU's official journal supplement for public procurement. It publishes notices for contracts above the European thresholds from every member state, in a standard structured format, and it is free to search and to receive notifications from.
Does TED cover every public tender in Europe?
No, and this is the most common misunderstanding. TED covers contracts above the EU thresholds. Everything below them is published only on national or regional portals. For most SMEs the majority of winnable contracts never appear on TED at all.
What is a CPV code?
The Common Procurement Vocabulary is the EU's classification for what is being bought. Buyers tag each notice with CPV codes, and alerting systems use them to filter. They are more reliable than keywords but often applied loosely, so a code-only filter both misses and over-includes.
Do I need a paid tender alert service?
Not necessarily. TED's own notifications are free and good, and most national portals offer their own. A paid service earns its place when you need several countries or both layers covered, and when nobody's job is reading the results.
By · Last reviewed: 2026-08-12