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Glossary

UVgO — Unterschwellenvergabeordnung

also: UVgO · German procurement rules below the EU thresholds

Definition

The Unterschwellenvergabeordnung (UVgO) is the German procedural rulebook for awarding public supply and service contracts below the EU thresholds. Published in 2017, it replaced Section 1 of the VOL/A. It does not apply of its own force: it takes effect only where the federal government or an individual federal state adopts it through budgetary law, which is why its scope within Germany is still uneven — and it does not cover works contracts at all, where Section 1 of the VOB/A continues to apply.

Source: UVgO (notice of the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs, 2 February 2017) · § 55 BHO and the state budget codes
Measured on our own corpus · as of 21 August 2026

458 open procedures name the UVgO explicitly as their procedural basis. In total 5,472 open German procedures carry a below-threshold flag — so the UVgO is applied far more often than it is named in the data.

Counts the procedure-type/legal-basis field exactly as the platform supplies it. Many portals do not supply it at all, so the first figure is a floor, not a measure of how widely the rules are used.

What it means for a bidder

The UVgO provides four routes to a contract: the Öffentliche Ausschreibung (open call, unrestricted field of bidders), the Beschränkte Ausschreibung (restricted call, with or without a prior call for competition), the Verhandlungsvergabe (negotiated award) and the Direktauftrag (direct award). The open call and the restricted call with a prior call for competition rank equally; the other routes require a stated justification. The practical consequence for bidders is uncomfortably concrete: a substantial share of below-threshold contracts is awarded without any public notice, to firms the contracting authority already knows.

That dictates the most effective preparation in this segment: become visible before the procurement starts. Register on the platforms of the regional contracting authorities, get onto their bidder lists, and learn the value limits (Wertgrenzen) of the federal state in question — they determine up to which contract value a direct award or a negotiated award is permitted at all, and they differ considerably from state to state.

Look it up in the corpus

Open German procedures →

Related terms

Below-threshold procurement (unterschwellige Vergabe)A public contract below the EU thresholds — national law applies, and it never appears on TED.VOB/AThe German award rules for construction works — Section 1 below the thresholds, Section 2 above.VgV — VergabeverordnungGermany's procedural law for supplies and services above the EU thresholds.EU thresholds (Schwellenwerte)The contract values at which EU-wide tendering becomes mandatory — reset every two years.

DEFINITION · a description of the law with a citation, not legal advice · FIGURE · from nightly-built aggregates of our own corpus · all terms: friedrich-clement.com/en/glossar

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