Where German and EU tenders are published

The Bekanntmachungsservice at oeffentlichevergabe.de is part of the Datenservice Öffentlicher Einkauf of the Procurement Office of the Federal Ministry of the Interior. Its operator describes it as the central place to find EU-wide and national notices from the Federation, the Länder and municipalities. Searching needs no registration; saving a search and getting notified need a company account (Datenservice Öffentlicher Einkauf).

Buyers send their notices in the eForms-DE format through their procurement platform, or through the service’s editorial system if they have no platform. Notices below the EU thresholds go straight to the Bekanntmachungsservice. EU-wide notices are converted, passed on to TED and also published in the Bekanntmachungsservice.

For developers, the open data API offers bulk downloads of every notice version published on a given day or in a given month, as eForms, OCDS or CSV. Notices processed before midnight of the previous day are available, and the day boundaries follow Berlin time.

The older federal portal service.bund.de also lists tenders, entered by buyers or imported from cooperating procurement platforms. The Procurement Office expects that, with the Bekanntmachungsservice, bidders may in future no longer need it.

TED (Tenders Electronic Daily) publishes the Supplement to the Official Journal of the EU, the OJ S, as EU procurement law requires (European Commission). For higher-value tenders, public authorities must publish notices there; lower-value tenders usually appear only on national portals (Your Europe).

What counts as higher-value is set by the EU thresholds. For 2026 and 2027 they are, net of VAT, €5,404,000 for works contracts and, for most supplies and services, €140,000 for central government authorities and €216,000 for other contracting authorities such as Länder and municipalities. Other values apply to social services, utilities, defence and concessions (European Commission: thresholds). The Commission checks the thresholds every two years and revises them where necessary (Directive 2014/24/EU, Article 6).

A TED notice is published in full in the language or languages the buyer chose, which are the only authentic versions, with a summary in the other official EU languages (Article 51(3)).

TED data is open for reuse: the TED Search API gives access to published notices through expert queries and needs no authentication.

The EU Funding & Tenders Portal is the Commission’s single point of entry for grants, prizes and procurement managed by the Commission and other EU services. Calls for proposals are split into topics, each with its own opening and closing date; a topic page holds the call conditions, key documents, the deadline and the link to the submission system (Online Manual). Financial instruments such as EU loans and venture capital are not covered.

The portal also lists calls for tenders of EU institutions, which are published both there and on TED (Online Manual: procurement).

Calls for proposals under direct management are published on the portal. Most EU programmes, however, are run in shared management, where national, regional and local administrations choose which projects to fund (European Commission: management modes). For German federal, Länder and EU programmes, the Förderdatenbank of the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy gives an overview.

Below the EU thresholds, national rules apply, and where the buyer is located decides where the tender is published (Your Europe). In Germany the rules for lower-value procurement take effect through federal and Länder budget law, so they can differ from one Land to the next (explanatory notes to the UVgO).

Much of a procedure runs on e-procurement platforms. On the Vergabemarktplatz NRW, for example, companies search notices, download the procurement documents, communicate with the buyer and submit electronic tenders. Berlin publishes its notices on its own Vergabeplattform. Other buyers use platforms run by private companies.

The notice travels to the central services, but the documents often stay behind: the notice links to them, and on platforms like these, questions to the buyer and updated documents are handled there as well.

• A German EU-wide notice leaves the buyer’s platform, reaches the Bekanntmachungsservice and is published on TED; the platform may show it too.
• Portals repeat notices: service.bund.de imports from about 70 cooperating procurement platforms (service.bund.de).
• Calls for tenders of EU institutions appear on the Funding & Tenders Portal and on TED.
• Every change notice is a new version with its own notice identifier, so one procedure can have several published notices.

EU law keeps the copies consistent. An EU-wide notice may not be published nationally before it is published at EU level, unless the buyer has not been notified within 48 hours of the confirmed receipt, and the national version may not contain other information than the notice sent to the Publications Office (Article 52).

To match copies, use identifiers rather than titles. eForms gives each procedure an identifier (BT-04) that is meant to appear in all published versions, on TED and on national and regional portals (Regulation (EU) 2019/1780).

• Different rules: above and below the EU thresholds, and between the Federation and the Länder.
• Different processes: grants are not tenders, and much EU funding is awarded through national and regional administrations rather than the Commission’s portal.
• Different timing: TED publishes notices no later than five days after they are sent (Article 51(2)), and the open data API covers notices processed up to the previous midnight.
• Different depth: the central services carry the notices, while the documents and later answers often stay on the buyer’s platform.

A sensible routine: search a central source, open the official notice, take the documents from the address it gives, and check the buyer’s platform for changes before you rely on anything.

Inteliwert imports the Bekanntmachungsservice every day and makes it searchable. The coverage page shows what it covers and what it does not.