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Guide

EU IT Tenders: The Complete Guide

Babar Al-Amin
builder of TenderCodes & founder of BrotCode UG
Last reviewed 2026-06-13

EU IT Tenders: The Complete Guide

Every year, EU public authorities spend around €2 trillion, about 14% of EU GDP, on services, works and supplies, and a large slice of that is software and IT (European Commission). The contracts are public, the rules are uniform across the bloc, and the entry barrier is mostly paperwork. The hard part is not finding the money. It is finding the right contract, under the right code, before the deadline closes.

This is the hub guide. It maps how EU IT tenders work, where they are published, and how the CPV code system files them, then points you to five deeper guides and a full index of the 117 software and IT-services codes documented here. Read this first; branch out from it.

Contents

What EU IT tenders are, and where they are published

An EU public tender is a contract a public body puts out to open competition. A ministry needs a case-management system. A city wants its website hosted. A hospital is replacing its patient records platform. Above certain value thresholds, EU law says the body cannot just call its usual supplier: it has to publish a notice, run a fair process, and award on stated criteria.

The single place those above-threshold notices land is TED, Tenders Electronic Daily, the EU's official journal supplement for procurement at ted.europa.eu. TED publishes around 800,000 notices a year across 24 official languages (TED). It is free to search, free to read, and the legal source of record.

Two thresholds decide whether a contract reaches TED at all. From 1 January 2026, under Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2025/2152, a services or supplies contract from a central government authority must be advertised EU-wide once it hits €140,000; for a sub-central authority such as a region or municipality, the figure is €216,000 (works contracts sit higher, at €5,404,000). Below those lines, the contract is handled under national rules and rarely shows up on TED. That is why an enormous volume of small public IT work never appears there: it sits under the threshold, fragmented across national portals.

So the picture is two-tier. Big IT contracts surface on TED in a standard, machine-readable form. Smaller ones scatter across national systems like Germany's service.bund.de or France's BOAMP. If you want a practical walk-through of locating, filtering, and tracking the TED side, the find your code guide is the place to start.

How CPV codes work for IT

A CPV code is the label that tells you what a tender is for. CPV stands for Common Procurement Vocabulary: a single classification, over 9,000 codes, that every EU contracting authority uses to tag what it is buying. The code is how you filter 800,000 notices a year down to the handful that match your business.

The structure is a tree. Eight digits, read left to right, narrowing as you go. The first two digits are the division (45 is construction, 48 is software products, 72 is IT services). Each pair of digits after that drills down a level. So 72000000 is "IT services" as a whole, 72200000 is software programming and consultancy, and 72212000 is the programming of application software specifically. The deeper the code, the tighter the scope.

For IT, almost everything lives in two divisions: 48 (software packages and information systems) and 72 (IT services). A short list strays elsewhere, but those two carry the bulk of the work, and they are the two this site documents in full.

The distinction that matters most, product versus service, is exactly the 48-versus-72 split. It is worth getting right, because it changes which suppliers compete and which alerts catch the contract. For the full anatomy of the 72 division, see the IT services explained guide.

Software product (48) vs service (72) at a glance

Here is the rule of thumb: 48 is the thing, 72 is the work. Division 48 codes classify a software product or a deployed system, the licences, the platform, the box. Division 72 codes classify an activity, programming, consultancy, support, hosting, the people doing the work.

A worked example. A council needs a document platform. If the contract buys the licences for a packaged product, that is Document management system in the 48 family. If the contract pays a supplier to write a bespoke one, that is Document management software development services in the 72 family. If it pays someone to run the authority's document handling as an outsourced service, that is Document management services. Same subject, three codes, three different markets.

The boundary is rarely clean, because real contracts bundle. A single award often buys a platform, configures it, and supports it for five years, straddling 48 and 72 at once. The EU rule is to set the primary CPV code by the contract's dominant purpose, then add additional CPV codes for the rest. A five-year managed-service deal with a one-off licence cost leans to 72; a perpetual licence purchase with a year of support leans to 48.

That single decision, which side of the line a contract sits on, is what the find your code guide exists to settle.

For buyers

If you are a contracting authority drafting a notice, the CPV code is not an afterthought. It is the address that lets the right suppliers find your tender. Pick a vague or wrong code and you narrow your own field of bidders, which is the opposite of what the rules are trying to achieve.

The practical advice: classify by deliverable, not by the technology underneath. A customer portal for a city council is application development, not web hosting, even if it will eventually run on the council's servers. Hosting only becomes the primary code when the hosting is the contract. And where a notice genuinely spans two categories, name a primary code for the dominant scope and add additional CPV codes rather than forcing everything under one stretched label.

The full playbook for contracting authorities, scope boundaries, how to handle bundled contracts, which codes are over-used as catch-alls, lives in the guide for IT procurement officers.

For suppliers

If you are a software firm, a dev shop, or an integrator deciding whether to chase EU public work, the CPV code does two jobs for you. It tells you whether a published tender fits what you do, and it is the filter you set your alerts on so the next one reaches you automatically.

The trap is monitoring a single code. Because authorities classify inconsistently, the contract you want often lands under a neighbour you were not watching. A custom-build shop watching only Programming services of application software will miss work filed under Software development services or Development of transaction processing and custom software. The fix is to watch your obvious code plus its two or three closest cousins. Duplicate alerts are cheap; a missed contract is not.

What wins these contracts is rarely price alone, it is a credible delivery record on comparable public work, plus a clean plan to integrate with what the authority already runs. The full version, framework dynamics, incumbency, what evidence actually scores, is in the supplier's guide to winning EU public IT contracts.

Common CPV code mistakes

A handful of mistakes recur often enough to be worth naming up front.

The first is treating Programming services of application software as a universal IT code. It is broad, but it is not a catch-all, and over-using it buries genuinely different work under one label. The second is confusing build with run: World wide web (www) site design services builds a website, while World wide web (www) site operation host services keeps an existing one online, and these are different suppliers entirely. The third is mixing the licence with the service: buying IT software package (the product) is not the same as buying Software supply services (the act of supplying it).

Each of these has a clean test that resolves it. The full set, with the boundary line for every confused pair, is collected in the common CPV code mistakes guide.

Complete index of IT CPV codes

This is the map. Every code below is documented in full on its own page: what it covers, when to use it, which codes it is confused with, real award titles, and the historical spend behind it. The list runs to 117 codes across the two IT divisions.

A note on the numbers you will see on those pages. The award counts and mean values are drawn from real TED contract award notices over 2009 to 2026, so they reflect what authorities actually bought, not a guess. They range widely: Programming services of application software carries 1,746 awards at a mean of about €1.5M, while IT software package shows 1,002 awards at a mean near €9.3M, inflated by a few very large enterprise-licensing frameworks. Read the mean on each page alongside its caveat.

Software products (48xxxxxx)

These 45 codes classify software products and deployed systems: the licences, packages, and platforms themselves.

IT services (72xxxxxx)

These 72 codes classify the work: programming, consultancy, testing, data handling, hosting, support, and networking.

Want to find your code instead of scanning the list? Try the find your code tool, or browse all codes by hierarchy.

What is a CPV code?
A CPV (Common Procurement Vocabulary) code is the standard label EU public authorities put on a tender to say what they are buying. It is an eight-digit number from a single classification of over 9,000 codes, and it is how suppliers filter the contracts that fit them.

Where do I find EU IT tenders?
Above-threshold contracts are published on TED, Tenders Electronic Daily, at ted.europa.eu, around 800,000 notices a year, free to search in 24 languages. Smaller contracts sit on national portals below the EU advertising threshold.

What is the difference between CPV 48 and CPV 72?
Division 48 codes classify software products and deployed systems, the licences and platforms. Division 72 codes classify IT services, the programming, consultancy, hosting, and support work. As a shorthand: 48 is the thing, 72 is the work.

How do I know which CPV code to set or watch?
Classify by what the contract delivers, not the technology stack underneath it, and set the primary code by the dominant purpose. Suppliers should watch their main code plus its closest neighbours, because authorities classify inconsistently. The find your code guide walks through it.

Is it free to bid on EU public tenders?
Reading and finding tenders on TED is free, and there is no fee to submit a bid. The cost is your own time preparing a compliant bid, which is why setting alerts on the right codes matters: it keeps you from spending that time on contracts you cannot win.

This guide is written and maintained by Babar Al-Amin, who builds TenderCodes and runs the Berlin Rails consultancy BrotCode (BrotCode on LinkedIn, Babar on LinkedIn). It is part of a free, ad-free reference to EU IT procurement codes. More on why this site exists, and how its content is made, on the About page. Last reviewed 2026-06-13.