TED EU tenders

Status: not published. 0.1.5, 2026-10-04. The source is allow-with-conditions in docs/compliance/sources.md and was approved by Petre on 2026-10-04 (DECISIONS D1). Operator: PPFTEC S.R.L. (https://ppftec.com). First live health check passed on 2026-10-04 (docs/qa/ted-tenders-live-2026-10-04.md); no Apify run yet (D2b). Prices below are hypotheses (D4).

Search public tenders published in TED (Tenders Electronic Daily), the EU's official procurement journal, through the official, anonymous TED Search API v3. Each run returns clean, flat notice records (title in your language, buyer, country, CPV codes, estimated value, deadlines, links) with full provenance on every record.

For: bid and sales teams watching tenders in their sector, procurement consultancies and agencies, data teams, and AI agents that need EU tender data as JSON.

Quick start

RO IT tenders from the last 7 days:

{
  "countries": ["ROU"],
  "cpvCodes": ["72000000"],
  "publishedFrom": "7 days",
  "language": "ron",
  "maxResults": 200
}

Daily Romanian tenders above the EU threshold. TED publishes the Romanian notices that are above the EU thresholds (below-threshold Romanian procedures are only in SEAP). Run this once a day with an Apify schedule (e.g. 07:00 Europe/Bucharest); each run returns only the notices published since the previous one, marked is_new: true:

{
  "countries": ["ROU"],
  "noticeTypes": ["cn-standard", "cn-social"],
  "publishedFrom": "3 days",
  "incremental": true,
  "stateKey": "daily-ted-ro",
  "language": "ron",
  "maxResults": 500
}

Construction (CPV 45000000) in Germany and Austria, only notices that are new since the last run (schedule it daily):

{
  "countries": ["DEU", "AUT"],
  "cpvCodes": ["45000000"],
  "noticeTypes": ["cn-standard"],
  "incremental": true,
  "stateKey": "construction-de-at"
}

Expert query (TED syntax, overrides every filter above, dates included; cannot be combined with incremental):

{
  "expertQuery": "buyer-country IN (FRA) AND FT ~ (cybersecurity) AND publication-date >= 20260901 SORT BY publication-date DESC",
  "maxResults": 100
}

Validate an input without calling TED (no request, nothing emitted, nothing charged; the built query is stored under key DRY_RUN):

{ "keywords": ["cloud", "software"], "countries": ["ROU"], "dryRun": true }

Output example

One record (from a recorded TED response, 2026-10-03). Every record validates against src/schemas/ted-notice.schema.json before it is pushed; a record that fails is a bug and fails the run.

{
  "record_type": "ted-notice",
  "publication_number": "678144-2026",
  "notice_version": 1,
  "notice_type": "cn-standard",
  "procedure_type": "open",
  "contract_nature": "supplies",
  "publication_date": "2026-10-02",
  "source_publication_date": "2026-10-02+02:00",
  "buyer_names": ["COMPANIA NATIONALA DE ADMINISTRARE A INFRASTRUCTURII RUTIERE S.A."],
  "buyer_country": ["ROU"],
  "buyer_city": ["Bucuresti"],
  "cpv_codes": ["34992200"],
  "place_of_performance": ["RO321", "ROU"],
  "title": "Romania – Road signs – ANSAMBLU LUMINOS PENTRU CRESTEREA SIGURANTEI RUTIERE PE SECTOARELE PERICULOASE",
  "title_language": "eng",
  "estimated_value": { "amount": 74811664, "currency": "RON", "level": "procedure" },
  "tender_deadlines": ["2026-11-02+02:00"],
  "notice_url": "https://ted.europa.eu/en/notice/-/detail/678144-2026",
  "xml_url": "https://ted.europa.eu/en/notice/678144-2026/xml",
  "matched_keywords": ["road signs"],
  "provenance": {
    "envelope_version": "1.0.0",
    "source_id": "ted-search-api-v3",
    "source_url": "https://api.ted.europa.eu/v3/notices/search",
    "source_request": {
      "method": "POST",
      "body_sha256": "104903eec02e5f9ff178ada343864de9c8ac062dc2143c9219ac186eb6da918e",
      "page": "1"
    },
    "source_record_url": "https://ted.europa.eu/en/notice/-/detail/678144-2026",
    "retrieved_at": "2026-10-03T23:48:49.847Z",
    "source_version": { "api_version": "v3", "record_version": "1" },
    "producer": { "name": "ted-tenders", "version": "0.1.5", "build": null, "run_id": null, "adapter": "ted-search-v3" },
    "record_hash": "sha256:138d91e5cea81f61d1bb84dcc89308d6297431039ba953a0527b8234314c0a5e",
    "licence": {
      "id": "LicenseRef-EC-Decision-2011-833",
      "url": "https://ted.europa.eu/en/legal-notice",
      "attribution": "Source: TED — Tenders Electronic Daily, © European Union, https://ted.europa.eu"
    },
    "personal_data": "none"
  }
}

Fields

Field	From TED	Notes
publication_number	publication-number	Primary key, e.g. 678144-2026.
notice_version	notice-version	Integer.
notice_type	notice-type	e.g. cn-standard (contract notice), can-standard (award).
procedure_type, contract_nature	procedure-type, contract-nature-main-proc	null when absent.
publication_date	publication-date	YYYY-MM-DD; the raw value (with offset) is in source_publication_date.
buyer_names, buyer_city	buyer-name, buyer-city	All languages flattened, de-duplicated. Organisations only.
buyer_country	buyer-country	ISO 3166-1 alpha-3.
cpv_codes	classification-cpv	De-duplicated 8-digit codes.
place_of_performance	place-of-performance	NUTS / country codes, de-duplicated.
title, title_language	notice-title	Your language, else English, else the first available.
estimated_value	estimated-value-*	Procedure value if present (level: procedure); else the sum of lot values when all lots share one currency (lots-sum); else null.
tender_deadlines	deadline-receipt-tender-date-lot	Verbatim source strings.
notice_url, xml_url	links	English HTML page (else first language); multilingual XML.
matched_keywords	—	Your keywords found in any title language (TED's full-text match also covers fields we do not return, so this can be empty).
is_new	—	true in incremental mode.
provenance	—	Source, request digest, retrieval time, versions, record hash, licence. See docs/spec/provenance-schema.md.

Pricing (pay per event)

Pay per event. You pay only for notices actually pushed.

Event	Price	When
apify-actor-start	$0.00005 (Apify default)	per run
notice	$0.002 ($2 per 1,000)	per notice pushed

Examples: a daily incremental alert with ~20 new notices ≈ $0.04/day; a 1,000-notice backfill ≈ $2. Nothing is charged for dry runs, health runs, invalid input, TED errors or schema drift. Set a maximum charge per run in Apify; the actor stops cleanly when it is reached.

Incremental mode and scheduling

With incremental: true the actor keeps a small state in your named key-value store pda-ted-tenders-state (key derived from your input, or your stateKey):

• a watermark: the newest publication date of the last run that went through its whole result set;
• the publication numbers already delivered inside the current query window.

The next run starts one day before the watermark (overlap), skips notices already delivered and marks the rest is_new: true. A run that stops early (your maxResults, your max charge, the scan cap or the run time budget) does not move the watermark, so the next run re-scans the same window and delivers the older notices it did not reach; nothing is skipped and nothing is charged twice. State is saved after every page.

incremental needs the filter fields (keywords, cpvCodes, countries, noticeTypes, dates); it is rejected together with expertQuery, because an expert query is sent verbatim and cannot be narrowed by date. Do not run two incremental runs with the same state key at the same time (the last one to save wins).

Schedule a daily run and connect Apify integrations (e-mail, Slack, webhook) to get alerts.

Limits

• Rate: one request at a time, at least 1 s apart, and at most 500 notices per rolling 6 minutes (our reading of TED's fair-use limits: 700 requests/min and 600 views or downloads per 6 min per IP). That is about 80 notices per minute: a 1,000-notice backfill takes about 12 minutes. TED documents no rate-limit headers; we back off on 429/5xx (1, 2, 4, 8 s, Retry-After honoured, 5 attempts) and then fail.
• Paging: always TED's ITERATION mode (no 15,000-notice cap), 100 notices per page.
• Work per run: a run scans at most max(10 × maxResults, 2,000) notices (and the matching number of pages), and stops after 4 hours (or just before the Apify run timeout). At ~80 notices per minute that is roughly 19,000 notices per run; larger backfills need several incremental runs. These stops end the run with exit code 0 and a Stopped: … status.
• Retry-After: honoured in full; if TED asks us to wait longer than the remaining run time, the run stops with exit code 1 and says so.
• CPV codes match their sub-codes: cpvCodes: ["72000000"] also returns notices that only carry child codes such as 72223000 or 72268000 (live check 2026-10-04: 66 of 100 returned notices had no exact 72000000, none lacked a 72… code). Use the most specific code you want.
• Titles: TED translates titles into all EU languages; the selector offers eng, ron, deu, fra, spa, ita, pol.
• Excluded for privacy: contact-person names, e-mails, phones, fax numbers and winner details are never requested from TED.
• API only: the actor calls api.ted.europa.eu only; never the TED website or ted.europa.eu/packages/*.

Data source and licence

Source: TED — Tenders Electronic Daily, Publications Office of the European Union, via the TED Search API v3 (https://api.ted.europa.eu/v3/notices/search, anonymous; docs: https://docs.ted.europa.eu/api/latest/index.html).

Attribution (also in every record's provenance.licence and in the dataset description): Source: TED — Tenders Electronic Daily, © European Union, https://ted.europa.eu

Reuse: TED notices may be reused for commercial or non-commercial purposes under Commission Decision 2011/833/EU (https://ted.europa.eu/en/legal-notice). Modifications: this actor selects 18 fields, normalises dates, flattens multilingual names, de-duplicates lists and computes estimated_value; the original notice is always linked in notice_url. This actor is not affiliated with or endorsed by the European Union or the Publications Office. The TED logo is not used.

Reliability

• Schema drift fails loudly. Every TED response is checked against a pinned source shape (src/source-shape.schema.json). A missing or retyped field, a non-numeric value, or TED rejecting one of our fields stops the run with exit code 1, the status SCHEMA DRIFT at ted-search-api-v3: … and a DRIFT_REPORT (expected, actual, sample) in the run's key-value store. Records already pushed stay valid. New unknown keys are only warnings (DRIFT_REPORT.warnings).
• Health checks. mode: "health" (hidden) runs a canary: TED syntax check on our field list, a 10-notice search for Romanian notices of the last 7 days (shape + output schema), and the API doc hash; it pushes a record to the named dataset pda-health with p50/p95 latency. Planned schedule: daily, 06:15 UTC.
• Kill switch. The maintainer can disable all runs with PDA_KILL_SWITCH=on (status Disabled by maintainer: …, no request, no charge). It is checked at start and again before every request to TED.
• Changelog: see CHANGELOG.md.

Security

• Network: the actor calls only https://api.ted.europa.eu (fixed URLs; user input only reaches the JSON body). Redirects are never followed: a 3xx response fails the run.
• Personal data: contact-person, e-mail, phone, fax and winner fields are never requested. In rare cases a buyer name can be a natural person (e.g. a sole-trader contracting entity) as published by TED.
• Container: apify/actor-node:24 pinned by digest; the process runs as the non-root user myuser.
• Source gate: TED is approved (D1, 2026-10-04). The gate stays in the code: a source marked pending is refused on Apify and in local live runs unless the maintainer sets PDA_ALLOW_PENDING_SOURCES=1.
• Input limits: at most 20 keywords, 100 CPV codes, 40 countries; expertQuery at most 2,000 characters; keywords are plain words (letters, digits, spaces and . , ' & / -; no AND/OR/NOT or search operators: use expertQuery). Dates must fall between 1993-01-01 and today + 2 years.
• Health mode (mode: "health") is maintainer-only. It needs PDA_HEALTH_ENABLED=1, the secret env var PDA_HEALTH_TOKEN (≥ 32 characters, an Apify secret referenced as @pdaHealthToken in .actor/actor.json) and the same value in the secret input healthToken, compared in constant time; if PDA_MAINTAINER_USER_ID is set, APIFY_USER_ID must match it. Otherwise the run answers "Invalid input" with no request. The token is never logged or stored.
• Links: notice_url and xml_url must point at ted.europa.eu; anything else is treated as schema drift.
• Dependencies (npm audit, 2026-10-04): 0 vulnerabilities. basic-ftp is forced to 6.2.1 via overrides (GHSA-c475-qrg2-pj4r). http-cache-semantics was updated in the lockfile to 4.3.0 (fix for GHSA-ch52-4w7c-c8xp, published 2026-10-04) with a plain npm audit fix, so the accepted-risk note of 0.1.1 is closed. Never use npm audit fix --force (it would downgrade apify to 3.1.13).
• Not yet addressed (tracked in docs/security/ted-tenders-review-2026-10-04.md): the TED per-IP limit is enforced per run only, so concurrent runs on shared Apify egress IPs could exceed it (TED-SEC-04, needs a live check); concurrent incremental runs with the same state key are not locked (TED-SEC-11, documented above).

Use with AI assistants (MCP)

This actor can be called by AI assistants through Apify's MCP server (a service run by Apify; this actor is a separate, independent product of PPFTEC S.R.L., not affiliated with the EU or TED). Add it to an MCP client such as Claude, VS Code or Cursor:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "clearsource-ted-tenders": {
      "url": "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=clearsource/ted-tenders"
    }
  }
}

On first use your browser asks you to sign in to Apify (OAuth); or send your token as Authorization: Bearer <APIFY_TOKEN>. The assistant reads the input schema, runs the actor and then fetches the dataset items. Runs are billed to your Apify account at the pay-per-event prices above.

Try: "Find new construction tenders (CPV 45000000) in Germany and Austria from the last 7 days." Details of the MCP server: https://docs.apify.com/platform/integrations/mcp (checked 2026-10-10). Step-by-step guide: https://clearsource.ppftec.com/guides/ted-tenders-by-cpv

Guide

Step-by-step guide, including the free manual way: https://clearsource.ppftec.com/guides/ted-tenders-by-cpv

Terms of use

This actor is offered by PPFTEC S.R.L. under Apify's terms plus our terms of use: https://clearsource.ppftec.com/terms

Disclaimer

Data is provided "as is", as published by TED at provenance.retrieved_at. Check the official notice (notice_url) before acting. This is not legal or procurement advice.

Calling via API

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/<account>~ted-tenders/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"countries":["ROU"],"cpvCodes":["72000000"],"maxResults":50}'

<account> is pending D2. The actor can also be called by AI agents through Apify's MCP server once it is published.

Development

npm ci
npm run lint && npm run typecheck && npm test && npm run build
# Live calls (User-Agent: public-data-api/ted-tenders@<version> (+https://ppftec.com)):
PDA_LIVE=1 npm run test:contract   # max 3 requests to TED; writes test/contract/out/live-*.json
PDA_LIVE=1 node scripts/probe-cpv.mjs 72000000   # 1 request: CPV hierarchy check
PDA_HEALTH_TOKEN=<secret> npm run monitor   # health run of dist/main.js (token from your local env)
# Offline local run with recorded fixtures (ignored on Apify):
mkdir -p storage/key_value_stores/default
echo '{"countries":["ROU"],"maxResults":5}' > storage/key_value_stores/default/INPUT.json
PDA_REPLAY_FIXTURES=$PWD/test/fixtures CRAWLEE_STORAGE_DIR=./storage node dist/main.js

Environment variables: see .env.example (no secrets are needed).