If you build your tender-monitoring strategy around TED, the EU's official procurement database, you are watching one layer of a two-layer system. TED publishes contract notices that contracting authorities across 33 EU and EFTA countries are legally required to advertise once a contract crosses specific value thresholds. Everything below those thresholds goes somewhere else: onto dozens of national and regional procurement portals that most suppliers outside the buyer's home country never find.
For a commercial manager at a 50-person manufacturer in Slovakia, Poland, or the Czech Republic, this matters more than most TED guidance acknowledges. The contracts most likely to match your capacity and your margins are often not the headline-grabbing framework agreements worth tens of millions of euros. They are mid-sized supply or service contracts worth 80,000 to 400,000 EUR that never appear on TED because they are never legally required to. Understanding where TED below threshold volume publishes is the starting point for any monitoring strategy that actually catches the work you can win.
What TED Is Built to Do
TED, the Tenders Electronic Daily, is the official supplement to the Official Journal of the European Union. Under the EU procurement directives, contracting authorities are obliged to publish notices on TED once a contract's estimated value crosses the relevant EU threshold. That obligation exists to open large public contracts to cross-border competition across the single market. TED fulfils that role reliably across 33 EU and EFTA member states. What it does not do, and was not designed to do, is capture the full universe of public procurement in Europe. National portals handle the rest, and that rest is considerable.
The Thresholds That Separate TED Notices from Everything Else
EU procurement law sets value thresholds by contract type and by the category of contracting authority. For central government authorities buying supplies or services, the threshold sits at roughly 143,000 EUR. Sub-central authorities, which include regional councils, municipalities, and many state-owned enterprises, face a higher threshold of roughly 221,000 EUR for supplies and services. Works contracts carry a separate and substantially higher threshold, at roughly 5.5 million EUR. These figures are reviewed and adjusted every two years by the European Commission. The critical practical point is that a large share of contracts awarded by municipal buyers and regional agencies falls below these lines, particularly in smaller CEE economies where individual contract values tend to be modest.
How Much of the Market Lives Below Threshold
Precise EU-wide figures are hard to verify because below-threshold procurement is, by definition, not centrally reported or aggregated. What procurement research and national audit bodies consistently observe is that the majority of public contracts by count, not by total value, sit below the EU thresholds. Large infrastructure projects, defence procurement, and central-government framework agreements push the value statistics upward. Routine supply contracts, maintenance services, IT support, and smaller construction jobs dominate the count. For a supplier focused on mid-market industrial products or technical services, the below-threshold segment is where most of the competitively sized, winnable work lives.
- Works contracts above roughly 5.5 million EUR: mandatory TED publication, regardless of buyer type
- Supplies and services for central government above roughly 143,000 EUR: mandatory TED publication
- Supplies and services for sub-central authorities above roughly 221,000 EUR: mandatory TED publication
- Everything below those lines: published only on national or regional portals, under each member state's own rules
National Portals: Where Below-Threshold Notices Are Published
Each EU member state operates at least one national procurement portal where below-threshold notices must be published under national law. Slovakia publishes on UVO Vestnik. Poland's central system is e-Zamówienia. The Czech Republic consolidated its significant below-threshold notices onto NEN. Romania uses SEAP. Austria, Germany, France, and others each maintain their own portals with varying degrees of openness, structured data quality, and update frequency. Several countries layer regional portals on top of the national one, particularly for works contracts awarded by municipalities or county councils.
For a supplier monitoring from outside the buyer's home country, the practical barriers are real. Portals are typically in the local language. Search logic and CPV mapping quality vary widely between systems. Some portals publish structured XML that a monitoring tool can parse reliably; others serve PDF-only notices with no machine-readable data. A tender posted on a Polish regional portal on a Monday, with a two-week submission window, is invisible to any supplier whose monitoring stops at TED. The guide to e-Zamówienia monitoring goes deeper on the structure and search logic of the Polish system specifically, including how notices are categorised below the EU thresholds.
What This Means in Practice for a CEE Supplier
Take a mid-sized Slovak fabrication company looking for metalwork supply contracts in Poland and the Czech Republic alongside its home market. TED will surface large framework agreements and works contracts above the EU thresholds. But a 180,000 EUR supply order from a Polish municipal water utility, or a 95,000 EUR fitout contract from a Czech regional hospital, will publish only on e-Zamówienia or NEN respectively. Both contracts sit within the capacity of a 50-person company, and at those values they attract less competition from large national prime contractors than a TED-listed framework would. They are completely invisible if the only source being monitored is TED.
Covering two or three national portals manually alongside your home market is a serious operational commitment. Each portal has its own update cadence, its own keyword logic, and its own notice structure. Building a bid calendar that reliably catches deadlines across multiple sources requires a systematic approach that a lean bid team cannot sustain alongside live proposal work without dedicated tooling.
Building a Monitoring Setup That Covers Both Layers
TED below threshold is not a niche concern for cross-border bidders. It is the default condition for the majority of public contracts in Europe by count, and the segment where mid-market industrial suppliers find most of their competitively sized opportunities. A monitoring setup that relies on TED alone leaves a substantial share of the addressable market invisible. The practical answer is to map which national portals publish below-threshold notices in your target markets, then build or buy a system that watches them automatically alongside the above-threshold TED feed. Tanax Edge currently monitors below-threshold sources including UVO Vestnik in Slovakia, e-Zamówienia in Poland, and NEN for Czech procurement, with TED coverage for above-threshold notices across 33 countries running in parallel. If you want to see what a live, automatically curated feed of relevant tenders looks like for your supplier profile, the 14-day free trial requires no card and takes a few minutes to configure.