Warsaw gives you 18 days to bid. Amsterdam gives you 74. Same single market.
We measured the bidding window — publication to deadline — for 86,000 open tenders across 24 countries. The single market gives you four times more time in some countries than in others.
How long do you actually get to prepare a bid? EU directives set minimum periods for above-threshold procedures, but the lived reality — across every open tender we hold, above and below threshold — varies far more than the rulebook suggests.
The spread is fourfold. A median Polish tender gives bidders 18 days; a median Dutch one gives 74. And medians understate the pressure at the sharp end: in Greece, a third of all open tenders close within ten days of publication. In Poland it is 17%. In the Netherlands, effectively nobody publishes a ten-day tender.
Why it matters: a cross-border bidder calibrated to French or Dutch rhythms will structurally miss Polish and Greek work — by the time a weekly review meeting sees the notice, half the window is gone. Short-window markets are not worse markets; they are markets that reward monitoring speed over deliberation. If your pipeline review is weekly, you are competitive in Amsterdam and structurally late in Warsaw.
A small rhythm fact from the same data: Thursday and Friday are the busiest publication days — and more tenders are published on Sunday (3,793 in the current open set) than on Saturday (1,658). Portals batch; officials schedule; the market does not sleep, it queues.
Data & method
Sample: all currently open tenders with a publication date and a submission deadline 0–200 days later (n = 86,559, snapshot 14 Aug 2026), grouped by buyer country, countries with ≥300 open tenders shown. Median via percentile_cont. Below-threshold notices are included — this measures lived windows, not regulatory minimums. Caveat: countries whose portals publish retrospectively are under-represented in the open set.