TED Portal Guide: How to Find and Win EU Tenders

TED, Tenders Electronic Daily, is the European Union's official public procurement notice channel. It is the supplement to the Official Journal of the EU (the S series) and is published online at ted.europa.eu. TED carries hundreds of thousands of procurement notices every year from all EU member states, with a combined value in the hundreds of billions of euros.

TED exists to open the EU single market to public procurement: every procurement above the EU thresholds must be advertised union-wide so that a company from any member state can bid. For a bidder, TED is the gateway to the public markets of 27 countries — and the channel through which foreign competitors find domestic tenders.

TED was renewed in 2023–2024 with the eForms notice structure and a new search interface. The service is free, and browsing requires no registration. Registered users additionally get saved searches, email alerts, and RSS feeds.

TED publishes procurements whose estimated value exceeds the EU threshold. From the start of 2026 the thresholds are €140,000 for central government supplies and services, €216,000 for other contracting authorities such as municipalities, and €5,404,000 for works. Social, health, and other specific services have an EU threshold of €750,000.

National procurements below the thresholds do not appear on TED — only in national channels, in Finland's case Hilma. Monitoring TED alone is therefore not enough for a bidder focused on the Finnish market, and Hilma alone shows nothing from the other EU countries.

Contracting authorities do not submit notices to TED directly but through their national channel: when a Finnish authority publishes an EU-threshold notice in Hilma, Hilma forwards it to TED automatically. The notice normally appears on TED within 48 hours of the acknowledgement of receipt.

The most important TED filters are the CPV code, the country or NUTS region, and the notice type. CPV (Common Procurement Vocabulary) is the same classification Hilma uses, so code lists built for Hilma work on TED as they are. Free-text search covers notice content, and the expert search accepts complex field-level queries.

Systematic monitoring is best built on saved searches: a registered user can save queries and subscribe to email alerts or RSS feeds for new matches. A good baseline search combines two to four CPV codes, the target countries, and contract notices as the notice type.

Prior information notices are an undervalued source on TED: they reveal upcoming competitions months in advance, giving time to prepare, find partners, and join market dialogue. Contract award notices are equally worth monitoring — they show who won and at what price, which is direct competitor intelligence.

EU procurement notices moved to the eForms structure, which replaced the old standard forms. eForms breaks a notice into fields, of which the most relevant for bidders are the description and CPV codes, the estimated value, division into lots, suitability requirements, award criteria, deadlines, and the link to the procurement documents.

Notice headline data is translated into all official EU languages, and TED offers machine translation of the full notice. Machine translation is fine for deciding whether a tender is interesting, but the bid itself must be based on the original-language notice and documents — a translation error is no defence if the tender is rejected as non-compliant.

The actual procurement documents are not hosted on TED; the notice links to the platform the contracting authority uses. Downloading the documents may require registering with that national system, for example a German or French tendering platform.

For a bidder operating in Finland the answer is both, for different purposes. Hilma covers all Finnish procurements subject to the notice obligation, starting from the national threshold. TED covers only above-EU-threshold procurements — but from the entire union.

In practice a Finnish EU-threshold tender is found in both, so Hilma is sufficient for domestic monitoring. TED earns its place when a company wants to expand to other EU countries, follow large European competitions in its field, or collect market intelligence from award notices.

Languages are another practical difference: Hilma notices are in Finnish or Swedish, TED notices in each country's own language supplemented by machine translation. Bidding abroad realistically requires the ability to work in the target country's language, or a partner who has it.

The EU procurement directives guarantee that a company may bid for any member state's public contracts on the same terms as local companies. The same ESPD form is used to demonstrate suitability in every EU country, and national registry documents — such as tax clearance certificates and trade register extracts — serve as proof that no exclusion grounds apply.

A realistic way to start is to pick one or two target countries where the language barrier is low or where the company already has a network — for Finnish companies, often Estonia and Sweden. A joint bid with a local partner, or acting as a capacity provider, lowers the barrier considerably.

Remember that cross-border interest works both ways: foreign companies use TED to monitor Finnish EU tenders. Your industry's award notices quickly show how often a foreign bidder wins in your home market.

TED's own monitoring relies on exact criteria: if the CPV code or keyword does not match, the notice goes unseen. Contracting authorities also classify procurements inconsistently, so a relevant tender may sit under a surprising code.

Haavi monitors Hilma, Tarjouspalvelu, and TED automatically and compares every new notice against your company profile — not just codes. The AI scores fit, summarises the essentials, and flags risks, so even a foreign-language TED notice can be assessed in minutes.

That makes TED's scale manageable: one view of both domestic and European opportunities without maintaining dozens of saved searches.