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When must a tender be published in TED rather than only nationally?

When the estimated contract value reaches the EU threshold for its category, the contracting authority must publish the notice in TED (Tenders Electronic Daily) in addition to national publication. The thresholds are set by the European Commission and revised every two years, and they differ by contract type — works, supplies and services — and by whether the buyer is a central government authority. Below the threshold, only Portuguese or Spanish national rules govern publication.

Updated 2026-09-11

Why this matters to a smaller company

Below-threshold contracts are where most SMEs actually win, and they are precisely the ones TED never shows. A monitoring setup that watches only TED sees the large end of the market and misses the part you can win.

The inverse mistake is also common: watching only the national portal means missing the larger cross-border procedures where a Portuguese firm is a perfectly eligible bidder in Spain.

Check the current figures at source

Threshold values change on a two-year cycle and we deliberately do not restate the numbers here, because a stale figure on a web page is worse than no figure. The current values are published by the European Commission and reproduced in the national codes.

Sources