How to get EU public tenders from TED as JSON in Python (without learning expert-query syntax)

Every public tender above the EU thresholds, from a German city's software project to a French hospital's equipment purchase, is published in TED (Tenders Electronic Daily), the EU's official procurement journal. TED has a free, official search API. The catch is its expert query syntax, its nested multilingual fields and a single notice that can contain several lots with different deadlines and values.

This post shows a script that answers one practical question: "Which open tenders match what we sell, in the countries we serve, and are still biddable?" You get flat JSON and a CSV.

Disclosure: I built the EU Tenders (TED) API actor used below. It calls the official TED Search API v3 and only returns organisations, never contact persons.

The 20-line version

# pip install apify-client import csv, os from apify_client import ApifyClient client = ApifyClient(os.environ["APIFY_TOKEN"]) run_input = { "keywords": ["software"], "countries": ["DEU", "AUT"], # ISO alpha-3 buyer countries "cpvCodes": ["72", "48"], # IT services, software packages "noticeTypes": ["competition"], # open calls for tenders "publishedWithinDays": 7, "deadlineAfter": "today", # skip expired tenders "maxResults": 50, } run = client.actor("fast_data_asap/eu-tenders-ted-api").call(run_input=run_input) notices = list(client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items()) notices.sort(key=lambda n: n.get("deadline") or "9999") fields = ["deadline", "buyerName", "buyerCity", "buyerCountry", "title", "estimatedValue", "currency", "url"] with open("tenders.csv", "w", newline="", encoding="utf-8") as f: w = csv.DictWriter(f, fieldnames=fields, extrasaction="ignore") w.writeheader() w.writerows(notices) print(len(notices), "open tenders written to tenders.csv") 

No browser, no HTML parsing. The actor turns the inputs into a TED expert query, follows pagination and flattens each notice into one row.

What comes back

These are real rows from test runs on 8 and 9 November 2026 (shortened):

Every row has the same flat fields:

{ "noticeId": "779062-2026", "title": "Germany – Programming services of application software – Entwicklungsleistungen für OpenCore-Module der PartheCloud", "buyerName": "Stadt Brandis", "buyerCountry": "DEU", "buyerCity": "Brandis", "cpvMain": "72212000", "cpvCodes": ["72212000", "72262000", "72263000"], "formType": "competition", "procedureType": "open", "estimatedValue": 625600, "currency": "EUR", "publishedAt": "2026-11-09", "deadline": "2026-12-07T12:00:00+01:00", "lotsCount": 1, "url": "https://ted.europa.eu/en/notice/-/detail/779062-2026" } 

Two details that save you work:

• deadline is the earliest lot deadline as an ISO timestamp, so sorting and "days left" are one line.
• estimatedValue is summed across lots. It is null when the buyer did not publish a value (BWI above), which is common.

Choosing filters that actually match your business

CPV prefixes are the most useful filter. CPV is the EU's product vocabulary, and a prefix matches everything below it:

Keywords are matched in full text in any language, so ["software", "Software", "logiciel"] widens the net across countries. Start broad, look at a week of results, then add minValueEur if small contracts are noise for you. Notices without a published value are kept, so you do not silently lose them.

Want to know who wins? Switch noticeTypes to ["result"]. Contract award notices show which buyer bought what, and often for how much: useful for competitor research and pricing.

Running it every morning

For a daily alert set publishedWithinDays to 2 (one day overlap as a safety net) and de-duplicate on noticeId:

import json, pathlib seen_file = pathlib.Path("seen.json") seen = set(json.loads(seen_file.read_text())) if seen_file.exists() else set() new = [n for n in notices if n["noticeId"] not in seen] seen_file.write_text(json.dumps(sorted(seen | {n["noticeId"] for n in new}))) for n in new: print(f'{n["deadline"][:10]} {n["buyerName"]}: {n["title"][:90]}\n {n["url"]}') 

Schedule the script with cron or a GitHub Action, or use an Apify schedule and pipe the dataset into Slack or a sheet. If you prefer no-code, our free n8n sales-signal workflow does the same for German tenders and can take TED as a third branch.

Limits

• TED lists notices above the EU thresholds (plus voluntary ones). Smaller national tenders are on national portals; for Germany there is our German Public Tenders actor.
• Titles and summaries come in the notice language. The actor prefers your language (English by default) where the notice is multilingual.
• This is a search tool, not procurement or legal advice. Always read the official notice before bidding.

What it costs

$0.002 per notice returned, and empty runs are free. The 50-notice daily run above costs at most $0.10; a typical "last two days, two countries, two CPV codes" run returns far fewer rows.

Try it

• EU Tenders (TED) API on Apify
• Agent users: the free find-public-tenders skill lets an AI agent run this search for you.

Question for bid managers: which filter do you rely on most, CPV codes or keywords, and how many false positives do you accept per day before an alert becomes noise?