TED tenders explained: how EU public tendering works

Every TED notice has a type. The three you care about: a prior information notice (PIN) signals that a tender is coming, a contract notice is the actual call for bids with a deadline, and a contract award notice tells you who won and at what value. Beginners read only contract notices; experienced bidders mine award notices for market intelligence and PINs for early warning.

Every notice is also tagged with CPV codes (Common Procurement Vocabulary), a numeric taxonomy of what is being bought. CPV 72000000 is IT services, 45000000 is construction work, and so on down to fine-grained subcodes. Learning the handful of CPV codes that match your offering is the single highest-leverage step: it turns an unmanageable stream into a focused filter.

A practical TED filter has three dimensions: your CPV codes, your target countries, and a contract value range that fits your capacity. Add the notice deadline: anything closing in under two weeks is usually too late for a first-time bidder in that market.

You can build this filter with TED's own search and email alerts. The limitation is that TED matches on codes and keywords, not on whether a tender actually fits your company. That judgment normally costs you a manual read of every notice.

This is the layer AURE adds: its market scanner watches public tenders including TED data, and instead of keyword matching it scores each tender against your full company profile with AI, so the judgment call is pre-made and explained. Tender alerts are free, so the pipeline costs you nothing while you learn the market.

When a contract notice fits, work through it in this order. Check the selection criteria first: minimum turnover, references, certifications. If you fail a mandatory criterion, stop; the rest of the notice does not matter. Then check the accepted bid languages and the procedure type. Finally, download the full tender documents from the buyer's e-tendering platform linked in the notice; the TED notice itself is only a summary.

For cross-border bids, consider a consortium with a local partner. EU procurement law explicitly allows group bids, and a local partner resolves language, local presence and delivery questions in one move. Award notices from past tenders tell you which local companies win in your field; they are a ready-made partner shortlist.

Start small and deliberately. Bid on two or three well-chosen tenders, collect the award data whether you win or lose, and iterate. Public tendering rewards the systematic, and the published decisions mean you learn something concrete from every round.