Which countries actually publish the most public contracts

142,694 notices with a deadline still in the future, measured on 1 September 2026 via victano.com/coverage.

These figures come from our own open corpus: 142,694 notices with a deadline still in the future, measured on 1 September 2026 via victano.com/coverage. They are not a sample. Where a number below is rounded, the rounding is stated.

One thing to hold before the table: this is a snapshot of what is open today, not a history of every contract ever published. "Germany publishes the most tenders" and "Germany holds the most open notices in our corpus on 31 August 2026" are different claims, and only the second is ours.

Where the volume sits

The country ledger sums 124,015 held rows across the markets we break out on the coverage page. The full corpus is larger: it also carries EU-wide layers, grants, and rows that do not sit under a single buyer country in that table. Germany, Poland and France alone are 54% of the ledger, more than half from three states.

That pattern matches what we saw in an earlier TED-only slice (what 113,000 notices looked like): a handful of large economies dominate the headline count. Poland still publishes more open notices than Italy or Spain despite a smaller GDP, which surprises people who expect volume to track economy size.

Why a league table misleads a smaller supplier

Volume and opportunity pull in opposite directions for most SMEs.

Crowding

A roads contractor in Vilnius competing on a Lithuanian municipal lot is not bidding against every German Mittelstand firm that saw the same TED row. A firm in Munich bidding on a Bavarian framework is. The top three markets are where incumbents, consortia and price pressure concentrate.

Language

Most notices in Germany, Poland and France are written in German, Polish and French. English is a thin slice EU-wide. Chasing volume in a language your bid team does not write is not diversification; it is a second full-time job.

The below-threshold layer

TED captures above-threshold work well. Domestic portals carry smaller lots TED never publishes. On 31 August 2026, the share of new notices that arrived on a national feed rather than TED alone was:

Germany's row count is enormous, but on that day only 11% of incoming German notices were national-only. Lithuania's absolute count is smaller; 75% of what landed that day was on IUB, not duplicated on TED. For a local supplier, that skew matters more than where the league table puts the country.

We ingest fifteen national feeds today. For portal-level depth on one of them, see our short primers:

• France (BOAMP)
• Germany (Bekanntmachungsservice)
• Spain (Plataforma)
• Romania (SEAP)
• the Baltics (IUB/Riigihangete)

Others are linked from coverage. Poland's BZP feed is ingested here; we have not published a portal-name primer for it yet.

What we are not claiming

• Not "bid here, ignore there." A Polish firm with French turnover should search France. The point is that default filters weighted by population miss where national portals add value.
• Not a forecast. Day shares move with procurement calendars. The table above is one measured day, named explicitly.
• Not award history. These are open notices. Who won last year is a different dataset we do not ingest yet.

If you search through an agent

League tables are easy to copy into a slide. They are harder to act on, because your question is never "which country publishes the most" but "which open rows match our sectors, turnover and geography."

Victano is an MCP service. Connect it to the AI you already use and scope by country and CPV. Read freshness (data_as_of) in the answer rather than assuming a blog post stays current. Victano is free during the beta (victano.com/#pricing).

For the full source list and per-country depth, start at victano.com/coverage.