The European procurement market in measured figures.

On 21 August 2026, the Friedrich & Clement corpus held 93,519 public procurement procedures whose submission deadline had not yet passed. They are spread across 27 countries and come from 60 source portals. (Own collection, counted in our own corpus.)

Of these open procedures, 25,039 fall below the EU thresholds and are therefore not published on TED — 26.8 % of the open stock. They come from 16 countries in which we read below-threshold notices directly from the national source.

The historical corpus from which this snapshot is drawn holds 19.4M notices since 2002, of which 10.4M are below threshold, together with 13.7M award decisions naming a winner and 1.7M companies. It is assembled from 73 national procurement portals and TED.

In Germany, 5,472 below-threshold procurement procedures were open on 21 August 2026 that are not published on TED. They are spread across 8 portal families. That is 20.6 % of all 26,506 procedures open in Germany at that moment. (Own collection from 73 source portals.)

Breakdown of the 5,472 open below-threshold procedures in Germany by portal family on 21 August 2026:

A procedure counts as below threshold when its estimated contract value falls under the EU thresholds. Since 1 January 2026 these are, for classical contracting authorities, €5,404,000 for works contracts, €216,000 for supply and service contracts and €140,000 where a central government authority procures; for utilities €432,000, and for social and other specific services €750,000. All values are net of VAT and are reset every two years.

Below these values there is no EU-wide duty to publish. Such procedures do not appear on TED but — where they are made public at all — on national, regional or municipal portals.

Germany is therefore, on 21 August 2026, the country with the most open below-threshold procedures in the corpus. The full ranking of the 16 countries in which we read below threshold:

The time between publication and submission deadline differs more than fourfold between EU countries: the median ranges from 18 days (Poland) to 73 days (Netherlands). Measured across 82,305 open procedures carrying both a publication date and a deadline, collected on 21 August 2026.

Germany sits mid-field with a median of 33 days; half of German procedures fall between 30 and 39 days.

Median and interquartile range of the bidding window per country, in days, measured across open procedures carrying a publication date and a deadline:

Monday is the most common deadline day in European public procurement: 28.8 % of all 93,685 open procedures close on a Monday, against 20 % under an even spread across the working week. Collected on 21 August 2026.

96.9 % of all deadlines fall on a weekday from Monday to Friday; Saturday and Sunday together account for 3.1 %.

Of the 93,685 open procedures, 53,792 carry a genuine clock time in the deadline field (57.4 %); for the remainder no time of day is recorded. Among those carrying a time, 30,430 close before 12:00 — 56.6 %. The share is computed exclusively over procedures with a recorded time; without that restriction, procedures without a time would have entered the denominator as midnight and distorted the figure.

ISO 9001 is the most frequently required certificate: on 21 August 2026, 1,427 open procurement procedures in Europe demanded proof to ISO 9001, 395 of them in Germany. The reference base is the 36,768 open procedures for which structured selection criteria are available — not all open procedures.

ISO 14001 (environmental management) is required in 638 open procedures, ISO 27001 (information security) in 58. What is notable about the latter is its distribution: 40 of the 58 procedures requiring ISO 27001 are German — 69 %, against a German share of 28.3 % of the open stock overall.