Germany Public Procurement Notices - OCDS, Per Release

Germany's public-procurement notices - across all government levels - as clean OCDS release records, one per release, for the month you choose. OCID, buyer, tender title/status, procurement method and category, and value. Every package is CC0; contact persons and free-text descriptions are dropped.

What one record represents

The source is the Datenservice Oeffentlicher Einkauf (oeffentlichevergabe.de), Germany's federal procurement data service, which publishes notices in the Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS). Each record is one OCDS release: its OCID, release id and date, the release tag, initiation type, the buyer organisation, the tender id, title and status, the procurement method and main category (goods/works/services), and the tender value.

Coverage and volume

For month 2026-08 the export holds 22,892 OCDS releases - measured live at build time.

Sol's Wave-4 index put this door at 22,892 EXACT for 2026-08; measured live at build time the month's export holds 22,892 releases - matching the index.

Each month is one partition: set the Publication month input (YYYY-MM) to pull that export. The Actor downloads the month's OCDS zip and delivers each release, stopping as soon as your Maximum records cap is met.

Licence and attribution

Every OCDS package embeds a CC0 1.0 licence (opendefinition.org/licenses/cc-zero/) - a public-domain dedication. The full notice travels on every record:

Datenservice Oeffentlicher Einkauf (oeffentlichevergabe.de). Every OCDS package embeds a Creative Commons Zero (CC0 1.0) licence (opendefinition.org/licenses/cc-zero/) - public-domain dedication, free to use for any purpose. The CC0 licence is asserted per package.

The CC0 licence is asserted per package: a per-record check rejects any package whose embedded licence is not CC0 (verified with a planted-row test), so no non-CC0 release is ever delivered.

Person-data policy

OCDS releases carry parties[].contactPoint blocks with contact persons, and a free-text tender.description. This Actor never reads either: the contact points and the description are not extracted, and a per-record assertion rejects any contactPoint/description/person field (verified with a planted-field test). The buyer is delivered as an organisation name. No natural-person data is processed.

Interpretation caveat

One record per OCDS release from the German federal procurement service, for the selected month: OCID, release date, buyer organisation, tender id/title/status, procurement method and category, and value. parties[].contactPoint (contact persons) and the free-text tender.description are never read. Each package's embedded CC0 licence is asserted per record.

Values are reproduced verbatim from the OCDS packages; the Actor never rewrites a field. value_amount is a real number where the release records one (many notices have no value and leave it null).

Provenance and compliance

Every run reads the door host's robots.txt at runtime; the gate result (URL, status, byte length and, where a policy is served, its SHA-256) is written to the run's RUN_RECEIPT. Where the host serves no robots.txt, the gate records that fact (flagged) and proceeds on the licence, which expressly grants re-use. The endpoint is keyless. The Actor never bypasses a block or fetches through a mirror.

Data quality and freshness

Boolean columns are delivered as real booleans and numeric columns as real numbers. Delivery is keyed on a stable id, so the dataset is safe to diff, deduplicate or upsert. Every run re-reads the live door, so the data is as fresh as the source publishes, and each record's observed_at stamp dates the snapshot. The run's RUN_RECEIPT records the source URL and how many records were delivered and charged, and confirms charge_equals_delivered.

Billing and delivery

Pricing is per record: you are billed only for records the Actor actually delivers, with the charge raised after each record is pushed (push-then-charge), so a failed or empty run costs nothing. The Maximum records cap bounds every run, so you control spend precisely - sample cheaply, then raise it. Because delivery is keyed on a stable id, re-running and upserting keeps a downstream table current without re-paying for rows you already hold; only new and changed records add cost, and every receipt reconciles delivered against charged.

Schema, typing and joins

Every record is a flat object with a fixed, typed schema: strings stay strings, numbers are parsed to real numbers, and booleans to real booleans, so the data loads into a warehouse or a dataframe without a cleaning pass. The record_id is a stable composite key, which means the dataset is safe to diff between runs, to deduplicate, and to upsert into a table you maintain over time. Because the identifiers the source uses are preserved verbatim, the dataset joins cleanly onto other sources keyed on the same identifier, and a scheduled run keeps the downstream copy current with no manual reconciliation - the new and changed rows simply upsert over the old ones, and the observed_at stamp on every record tells you when each was last seen live.

Inputs

• Publication month (month, required) - the month to pull, as YYYY-MM. Prefilled with 2026-08.
• Maximum records (maxRecords) - hard cap on releases delivered and billed within the month.

Output

Records land in the Actor's default dataset and export as JSON, CSV, Excel or via the Apify API. A tabular overview surfaces OCID, release date, buyer, tender title, status, category and value.

Fields in detail

The record leads with ocid, release_id, release_date, tag, initiation_type, buyer_name, tender_id, tender_title, tender_status, procurement_method, procurement_method_details, main_procurement_category, value_amount, value_currency, published_date and the licence_id (CC0). The provenance block closes every record.

Typical uses

German bid teams use this cell to track public tenders across all government levels - who is buying what, under which procedure and category - as a clean OCDS series keyed on the OCID. Because the buyer, category and status are first-class fields, a group-by gives the pipeline per category or per buyer without parsing OCDS JSON yourself. To build a multi-month history, run the cell once per month and concatenate on the OCID. A scheduled monthly run keeps a downstream procurement table current.

The OCDS format

OCDS (the Open Contracting Data Standard) is the international schema for procurement data, so a record from this cell has the same shape as procurement data from any OCDS publisher worldwide - the OCID is a globally unique contracting identifier, and the tender/buyer/value structure is standardised. This cell flattens the release to the fields most teams query, keeping the OCID so you can always trace back to the full package. The German service publishes across all government levels - federal, state and municipal - in one export, so a single month gives the complete national picture rather than one authority at a time.

Why the monthly partition

Procurement notices arrive continuously, and the service organises them by publication month, so the month is the natural pull unit. Making it a required input keeps each run bounded and reproducible: one month is one zip, one clean set of releases. The capacity line is the month's count (about 22,892 for 2026-08), and the archive spans many months; to build a longer series, run once per month and concatenate on the OCID, which never changes for a contracting process.

Reading the fields

main_procurement_category separates goods, works and services; procurement_method and its details name the procedure; tender_status tracks the notice's state; and value_amount/value_currency give the contract value where the notice records one. A group-by on category or buyer turns the month into a pipeline view, and because the buyer is a clean organisation name, aggregation needs no cleaning.

Sibling Actors

It sits beside the fleet-2 EU TED tender monitor (EU-level corpus, ~30% overlap) and the fleet's Netherlands TenderNed and other national procurement cells. It shares its zip/OCDS engineering with the fleet's other records Actors.