France tops the value table — but Poland files more awards than Germany

The single most striking finding in the TED (EU Tenders Electronic Daily) archive since 2023 is the gap between notice volume and contract value. Germany (DEU) published the most procurement notices of any EU member state — 579,118 — yet France (FRA) reported the highest total awarded value at roughly €992 billion (based on 89.8% value coverage). Poland (POL), meanwhile, recorded 335,596 award notices, more than Germany's 302,020, while its reported awarded value stood at approximately €544 billion (88.6% coverage). These three countries alone account for a substantial share of EU-wide activity.

Volume versus value: a persistent asymmetry

Across the 20 countries for which data are presented here, the relationship between notice count and contract value is consistently uneven. Romania (ROU) logged 360,526 award notices — the highest in the dataset — against a reported awarded value of roughly €334 billion (89.3% coverage), while Italy (ITA), with 73,015 awards, reported approximately €631 billion (93.3% coverage). High notice counts do not reliably predict high aggregate value.

Competitiveness — measured here as a composite score reflecting average bid counts and single-bid rates — also varies sharply. Sweden (SWE) and Finland (FIN) both scored 94 out of 100, with single-bid rates of 12.5% and 12.9% respectively and average bid counts of 13.05 and 12.29. Hungary (HUN) scored 53, the lowest in the dataset, with an average bid count of just 1.37, though its single-bid rate of 13.2% appears inconsistent with that figure and should be interpreted with caution. Bulgaria (BGR) recorded an average bid count of 2,070 — an outlier that almost certainly reflects a data-quality issue rather than genuine market behaviour and is excluded from comparative interpretation.

Construction dominates by value; health and IT follow

By sector — identified using CPV (Common Procurement Vocabulary) division codes, the EU's standardised classification system for public contracts — construction work (CPV 45) is by far the largest category, with 527,692 notices and a reported awarded value of approximately €1.88 trillion (78.7% coverage). Medical equipment, pharmaceuticals and personal care (CPV 33) ranked second at roughly €475 billion (91.8% coverage), followed by IT services (CPV 72) at approximately €290 billion (86.4% coverage) and transport equipment (CPV 34) at around €278 billion (82.9% coverage).

Environmental services (CPV 90), energy and fuels (CPV 09), and transport services (CPV 60) each reported between €236 billion and €270 billion in awarded value, underlining the breadth of public-sector purchasing beyond infrastructure.

Year-on-year context: the 2023 floor

The EU-wide archive used here begins in January 2023. Pre-2023 rows in the dataset reflect a much smaller, structurally different extract — fewer than 16,000 notices in any year before 2023 compared with 795,680 in 2023 alone — and are not comparable. No year-on-year trend analysis is therefore possible.

In 2023, the archive recorded 795,680 notices and 391,382 awards with a total disclosed value of approximately €1.17 trillion. In 2024, awards rose to 647,492 with a disclosed value of roughly €1.36 trillion. The 2025 and 2026 figures are present in the dataset but likely reflect notices published across those calendar years rather than fully settled procurement cycles, and should be treated accordingly.

Methodology note

All data are drawn from TED, the official EU procurement journal, covering EU member-state buyers from January 2023 onward. Values are summed once per procedure to avoid double-counting. Where a contracting authority (the public body issuing a tender) did not report a contract value, that procedure contributes to notice and award counts but not to value totals; coverage percentages indicate what share of awards reported a value. Country rows cover national buyers only; EU institutions publishing under Belgian or Luxembourg addresses are excluded from country-level figures. No pre-2023 comparisons are made. The Bulgarian average bid count is anomalous and is not used in comparative analysis. All values are in EUR.