How to read an EU public tender notice on TED: CPV codes, deadlines and award criteria

TED, Tenders Electronic Daily, is the EU's public procurement gazette. Every contract above the EU thresholds has to be advertised there, and every award has to be published there afterwards. A notice looks dense because it is a form, and the form is written by Directive 2014/24/EU. Once you know which article put each field there, the notice reads quickly. This page goes through the fields a consultancy needs, in the order they matter for a bid decision. It is Bindler's reading; the directive and the notice's own documents control.

First: which kind of notice is it

There are three notices that matter, in the order a procurement runs.

A prior information notice (Article 48) is a buyer signalling an intention. It may name a quarter and a value but has no deadline you can act on, unless it is being used as the call for competition itself, which it says. A contract notice (Article 49) is the call for competition: it has a deadline, a procedure and award criteria, and it is the one you bid against. A contract award notice (Article 50) is the result, sent no later than 30 days after the contract is concluded, and it names the winner and, usually, the value. Award notices are the ones to read for who wins what, and they are why a year of TED data can say who the buyers and the winners are in a niche.

Bindler's twelve-month dataset of sustainability and ESG consulting notices holds 168 standard contract notices and 95 standard contract award notices among its 267 rows, so a little over a third of what a search returns is a result rather than an opportunity. Filter by type before counting the market.

The CPV code: what is being bought

Every notice carries at least one Common Procurement Vocabulary code. Article 23 of the directive requires any reference to nomenclature in procurement to use the CPV, adopted by Regulation (EC) No 2195/2002 and revised by Regulation (EC) No 213/2008. The code is eight digits and a check digit, and it is a tree: the first two digits are the division, the first three the group, the first four the class, the first five the category, with the remaining digits adding precision. The wording next to the code is the official description of that node.

Two consequences for a reader. The main CPV code tells you how the buyer classified the work, which is not always how a bidder would; a GHG accounting tool for municipalities appeared on TED in September 2026 under "industry specific software package", and a GHG inventory review for the Commission under "sewage, refuse, cleaning and environmental services". Searching by the codes you would have chosen misses these. Searching the title and lot descriptions in the buyer's language is what finds them, which is how the ESG Tender Watch is built. And the directive itself uses CPV ranges to define the "social and other specific services" of Annex XIV, which carry a different threshold and lighter rules (Articles 74 to 76), so the code can change which regime a notice is under.

The value and the thresholds

The estimated value is net of VAT and includes options and renewals (Article 5(1)). The directive applies from the thresholds in Article 4, which the Commission revises every two years to track the WTO Government Procurement Agreement. For 2026 and 2027, under Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2025/2152, the thresholds are EUR 140,000 for supply and service contracts of central government authorities, EUR 216,000 for those of sub-central authorities, EUR 5,404,000 for works, and EUR 750,000 for the Annex XIV social and other specific services. Below those, national rules apply and the notice may not be on TED at all.

TED shows the value where the buyer stated one. Many notices leave it blank or carry a placeholder, and a framework agreement's value is the ceiling over its term, not a single contract. Read the value with the procedure type and the duration beside it.

The deadline, and where it comes from

For an open procedure the minimum time for receipt of tenders is 35 days from the day the contract notice was sent (Article 27(1)). It can be shortened to 15 days where a prior information notice was published between 35 days and twelve months earlier (Article 27(2)), or where the buyer substantiates a state of urgency (Article 27(3)), and by five days where tenders are submitted electronically (Article 27(4)). For a restricted procedure the request to participate has a 30-day minimum and the tender itself another 30 days from the invitation (Article 28). The date printed on the notice is the buyer's choice at or above the minimum, so a notice published on a Friday with a 35-day floor is usually open into the sixth week.

Two reading rules. The deadline is for receipt, not dispatch, and the hour and time zone are on the notice. And a notice that shows no deadline on TED's summary is often a restricted or negotiated procedure whose date sits in the procurement documents, which the notice must link to (Article 53).

Award criteria: how the buyer will choose

Article 67 requires contracts to be awarded to the most economically advantageous tender, assessed on price, on cost (which can be life-cycle costing), or on the best price-quality ratio. Where quality counts, the notice or the procurement documents must state the criteria and their relative weighting, or at least their order of importance (Article 67(5)). Member States may forbid price-only awards for some contract types (Article 67(2)). Recital 90 says the assessment "should always include a price or cost element", so a notice that lists quality criteria without a price weighting is not complete on its face and the documents will have it.

For consulting work the weightings are the bid decision. A 70/30 quality-to-price split on a GHG inventory review rewards method and team; a 30/70 split rewards a day rate. Both appear on TED for similar work.

Reading the notice in two minutes

Type first: opportunity or result. Then CPV and title to see what is being bought and how the buyer named it. Then value against the threshold and the duration. Then the deadline and the procedure, which tell you how many days you have and whether the first step is a tender or a request to participate. Then award criteria and weightings, which tell you whether the bid is won on quality or price. Then the link to the documents, which hold everything the form could not.

Where Bindler's tender products fit

The ESG Tender Watch reads TED through its public API every week, filters titles and lot descriptions in six languages for sustainability reporting, GHG, ESG, taxonomy and climate strategy work, and sends one email with buyer, deadline, value and the TED link for every open notice, $29 a month, with issue 1 attached to the listing so it can be judged before paying. The EU Sustainability Tenders Dataset ($29) is the same lane over twelve months, 267 notices with buyer and winner country, type, deadline, value, CPV and link, plus pivots by country, type and month, with the query and filter written on a Method sheet. Germany leads the twelve months with 112 notices, then Ireland with 26 and France with 22.

Sources

Last checked against the sources on 28 September 2026.

EU Sustainability Tenders Dataset267 TED notices over twelve months for sustainability, GHG, ESG and climate consulting: buyer, country, type, deadline, winner, value, link; CSV and pivots.
See the workbook, $29

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