Data 2026-08-25 6 min read

What 113,000 EU tender notices actually look like

We hold every open EU tender notice published between 26 May and 24 August 2026. Here is what is in there, including the parts that are inconvenient for us.

Updated 25 August 2026

TED (Tenders Electronic Daily) is the online version of the 'Supplement to the Official Journal' of the EU, dedicated to European public procurement.

113,173 notices open to bidders, published between 26 May and 24 August 2026, pulled from TED.

These figures come from our own corpus: 113,173 notices open to bidders, published between 26 May and 24 August 2026, pulled from TED. Not a sample, not an estimate. Where we cannot answer something, that is said plainly rather than filled in.

One thing to hold onto before the tables: this is 90 days. "Germany publishes the most tenders" and "Germany published the most tenders in the 90 days we hold" are different claims, and only the second one is ours.

Where the notices come from

Three countries account for half of everything published. That is worth knowing if you sell across borders: the volume is not where population or GDP would put it. Poland publishes more EU-wide notices than France, and considerably more than Italy or Spain, both of which are larger economies.

The corpus touches 73 buyer countries in total, which surprises people who expect 27. TED carries notices from EEA states, candidate countries, and bodies that procure internationally.

What is being bought

Construction plus the engineering services around it is more than a quarter of everything. Public bodies build things and then maintain them, and that is the shape of the market whatever your sector.

For anyone in software: IT services at 4.4% plus software packages further down the list is a smaller slice than the sector's self-image suggests, but 4,967 notices in 90 days is still roughly 55 IT contracts a working day, EU-wide.

By contract type, services (50,599) narrowly lead supplies (42,215), with works (20,359) behind both.

Almost none of it is in English

This is the finding with the most practical consequence.

Fewer than one notice in twenty is written in English. If your process for finding opportunities is searching English keywords, you are searching about 5% of the market and calling it the market.

It also explains why keyword alerts disappoint so many suppliers. A German municipality tendering road resurfacing does not use the word "resurfacing", and no alert built on English terms will ever show it to you. The fix is not a better keyword list. It is matching on meaning across languages, which is why our search embeds notices in a multilingual model rather than indexing words alone.

What things are worth, with a caveat

44.6% of notices carry a stated value. Among those, the median is about €1.36m.

That number needs handling. It includes framework agreements, whose stated value is a ceiling across several years and several suppliers rather than a contract you would win. And more than half of all notices state no value at all, so the median describes the notices that publish a figure, not the market.

We cannot tell you the total value of the corpus, and we are not going to guess. TED stores the currency separately from the amount, and we have not yet sourced reference rates to normalise them. Summing the raw numbers would produce a large figure mixing euros with zlotys and krona, which would be worse than saying nothing. It is on our list; until it is done, this stays blank.

Of those 113,173, only 39,649 are still open

The rest have passed their deadline. That ratio is the real argument against monthly opportunity reviews: roughly two thirds of a quarter's notices have closed by the time the quarter ends. Anything you find by looking backwards, you find too late.

What we would do with this if we were selling to government

Look outside your own country. Half the volume is in three countries and it is probably not the three you assumed. If you can deliver across a border, the market is several times larger than your national portal shows.

Stop searching in English. You are seeing 5% of what exists.

Check weekly, not monthly. Two thirds close within the quarter.

Read the deadline before anything else. A perfect match with nine days left and a certification you do not hold is not an opportunity.

We publish these figures because our own coverage table is public and dated, and a company that shows its numbers should show what is in them. The awkward parts are here too: we cannot total the values, and this is 90 days rather than a year.

Both of those improve. When they do, we will say so.