The rules of the market — measured, not claimed.
Finding tenders is half the job. The other half is rhythm: when notices are published, how much time you really have, where the deadlines cluster. Every number on this page comes from 94,119 open procedures across 27 countries, measured on 18 August 2026.
1 · New tenders arrive in the morning — and on Fridays
Friday is the strongest publication day (21% of open procedures), while the weekend is nearly empty at 6%. And where the portals record a time of day, 76% of the daily inflow lands before 1 p.m. — portals publish to the beat of their overnight batches and mornings.
What follows:a morning check sees practically the whole day. If you stop looking on Fridays, you miss the strongest batch of the week and lose the weekend as preparation time. That is exactly why our morning edition arrives at 7:30 — after the portals' overnight runs, before your first meeting.
2 · How much time you have depends on the country
Between publication and submission deadline, the German median is 33 days — 18 in Poland, 74 in the Netherlands. The same single market, four times as much time. Cross-border bidders need a different reflex per country: in Poland the first week decides, in the Netherlands the more thorough preparation wins.
| Country | First quartile | Median | Third quartile | Procedures |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Greece | 9 days | 21 days | 38 days | 5,119 |
| Poland | 14 days | 18 days | 32 days | 8,482 |
| Latvia | 18 days | 29 days | 31 days | 1,138 |
| Slovakia | 19 days | 28 days | 33 days | 738 |
| Spain | 20 days | 31 days | 42 days | 8,444 |
| Hungary | 21 days | 31 days | 34 days | 668 |
| Estonia | 21 days | 32 days | 37 days | 688 |
| Croatia | 22 days | 30 days | 35 days | 519 |
| Bulgaria | 24 days | 30 days | 34 days | 1,714 |
| Ireland | 28 days | 31 days | 36 days | 529 |
| Slovenia | 28 days | 31 days | 34 days | 378 |
| Portugal | 28 days | 28 days | 32 days | 626 |
| Austria | 29 days | 33 days | 39 days | 385 |
| Czechia | 30 days | 33 days | 35 days | 1,339 |
| Finland | 30 days | 44 days | 62 days | 685 |
| Germany | 30 days | 33 days | 38 days | 23,043 |
| Lithuania | 31 days | 34 days | 35 days | 540 |
| Romania | 31 days | 35 days | 39 days | 1,985 |
| Italy | 34 days | 43 days | 53 days | 4,781 |
| Belgium | 35 days | 48 days | 61 days | 3,363 |
| Denmark | 35 days | 52 days | 66 days | 310 |
| Sweden | 37 days | 59 days | 71 days | 984 |
| France | 41 days | 52 days | 63 days | 14,511 |
| Netherlands | 58 days | 74 days | 90 days | 2,967 |
Bidding window = deadline minus publication, open procedures; framework agreements and systems with windows above 200 days excluded. Only countries with more than 300 measurable procedures.
3 · Your real deadline is Friday noon
26% of all deadlines fall on a Monday — 1.6 times the quietest weekday (Wednesday). Where the buyer has stated a time of day, 55% of them expire before noon.
What follows: with a Monday deadline, the last real working day is Friday. If a certificate or a guarantee is still missing on Friday afternoon, all you have left is the weekend. Schedule your internal bid review for Thursday — then every Monday deadline reaches you with a working day of buffer instead of an hour too late.
4 · The year has a rhythm
March is the strongest month (960,268 notices over the last two years), August the weakest (566,062). And December, at 855,397, ranks among the strongest — that is year-end budget money: whatever is not committed by New Year's Eve expires.
What follows: the summer lull is preparation time — refresh your evidence, write up references, renew certificates. Clean house in August and you can bid in September and December while your competitors are still sorting papers.
Deep dive: certificates
The most common “not met” in a selection-criteria check is a missing certificate — and that is not a permanent state, it is an investment with a known lead time. What ISO 9001, 14001, 27001 and the rest mean, how many open procedures require them right now and what obtaining them typically costs: the certificate guide.
5 · The market repeats itself — use that
54 to 62% of buyer-and-category pairs that purchased in one year purchase again the following year (measurement). That is why every tender page shows the buyer's purchasing rhythm and the past winners: whoever knows the cycle prepares before the notice appears — while the competition is only starting to read.
SOURCE · all figures measured nightly on our own corpus · times of day only from procedures with a recorded time — deadlines without one appear as midnight in the sources and would distort any before-noon share · methodology: friedrich-clement.com/methodology