European Union
How to find EU public procurement tenders (and get alerted for free)
Every public contract in the EU above certain value thresholds must, by law, be advertised on TED (Tenders Electronic Daily), the EU's official procurement portal run by the Publications Office of the European Union. It is the most complete source of cross-border EU tender data there is, and it is free to search.
What TED publishes
TED collects notices from all EU member states (and a few EEA/EFTA countries) once contracting authorities submit them for publication above the relevant EU procurement thresholds. Notices appear in the language or languages the buyer submitted them in, though many include an English title and summary. Each notice lists the buyer, the CPV classification codes (a standard EU product and service taxonomy), the estimated or awarded value, and the submission deadline.
The free alternatives
TED itself offers free saved-search email alerts once you register an account on the portal, filterable by country, CPV code and keyword. If you bid into one or two member states and can read notices in their original language, a native TED alert is a free, official option. What it doesn't do is combine EU notices with UK, US federal and Canadian opportunities, or rank them by fit to a specific business.
How BidHeron's alerts work
We query TED's public search API every two hours for new and updated contract notices, extract the CPV codes, buyer country, value and deadline, and map each notice into our 25-category taxonomy alongside UK, US and Canadian notices. We show the English title where TED provides one; otherwise the first available language. The free plan sends a weekly email. The $19 a month paid plan adds daily delivery, up to five saved alerts, and a fit score and one-line reason per match.
A note on scale
TED is big. Tens of thousands of new contract notices are published across the EU in a typical month. A saved alert with specific keywords, categories and a minimum value is what makes that volume usable. Broad, unfiltered searches return far more than anyone can read by hand.
About the data
Source: TED (Tenders Electronic Daily), Publications Office of the European Union. Reuse terms: Commission Decision 2011/833/EU permits free reuse of Official Journal Supplement procurement notices for commercial or non-commercial purposes. Update cadence: queried every two hours for new and updated contract notices; category pages regenerate hourly; the status page shows the last successful read. BidHeron does not alter notice facts. Only the summary and fit score are our own generated content.
Questions people ask
- Are TED notices only in English?
- No. Buyers publish in their own language, though many notices include an English title or summary. If you need every notice translated in full, plan for that as part of your bid process.
- Does BidHeron cover every EU member state?
- We ingest whatever TED publishes in its active contract-notice scope, which spans all participating member states. How deep the coverage is for any one country depends on how much its buyers publish through TED rather than through purely national portals below the EU threshold.
- Is there a free way to get EU alerts?
- Yes. TED's own website offers free saved-search alerts if you register directly on the portal. BidHeron adds the other three countries' data and a fit score for each notice.
Source: TED (Tenders Electronic Daily), Publications Office of the European Union.