EU public procurement glossary — CPV, NUTS, notices, thresholds and more

TED (Tenders Electronic Daily): The EU's official journal for public procurement: the online supplement to the Official Journal of the European Union where every notice for a contract above the EU thresholds must be published. It is free to read; national portals carry the notices below the thresholds.
eForms: The structured, machine-readable format EU buyers have used for procurement notices since 2023. Every field of a notice (buyer, classification codes, value, deadline, winner) has a defined place, which is what lets notices be read automatically instead of parsed from free text.
Contract notice: The notice that opens a competition: it announces that a buyer intends to award a contract, describes what is being bought and sets the deadline for tenders or requests to participate. What people usually mean by an open tender.
Contract award notice: The notice a buyer publishes after a contract has been awarded, naming the winning tenderer and usually the awarded value. It is the public record of who won, and the source of Forastro's subcontracting leads.
Prior information notice (PIN): An early announcement that a buyer plans to run a procurement in the coming months, before a contract notice exists. Useful for planning capacity; it is not yet something you can bid on.
Buyer (contracting authority): The public body running the procurement: a ministry, municipality, hospital, university, state-owned utility or similar. The notice names it, its country and the region where the work will be done.
Economic operator: The procurement rules' word for any business or consortium that can bid: contractor, supplier or service provider. A tenderer is an economic operator that has submitted a bid.
CPV (Common Procurement Vocabulary): The EU's classification of everything that can be bought, as numeric codes with a shared meaning in every language. Each notice carries a main CPV code and often several additional ones. Forastro groups CPV codes into sectors so you subscribe to trades, not code lists.
NUTS region: The EU's statistical regions, used in notices to say where a contract will be performed, down to a county or metropolitan area. Forastro translates these into the countries and regions you choose in your profile.
EU thresholds: The contract values above which the EU procurement directives apply and a notice must be published EU-wide. They are revised every two years and differ by contract type: far higher for works than for supplies and services. Contracts below them follow national rules and may only appear on national portals.
Open procedure: The most common procedure: any interested economic operator may submit a tender by the deadline, and the buyer evaluates all of them. No prior selection stage.
Restricted procedure: A two-stage procedure: operators first request to participate and demonstrate their capability, then the buyer invites a shortlist to submit tenders.
Negotiated procedure and competitive dialogue: Procedures in which the buyer discusses or negotiates the solution with selected candidates before final tenders, used for complex contracts where the requirements cannot be fully specified in advance.
Framework agreement: An agreement with one or more suppliers that fixes the terms for contracts to be awarded over a period, typically up to four years. Winning a place on a framework does not guarantee work; individual call-offs are placed under it later.
Lot: A separately awardable part of a contract. Buyers split large contracts into lots, by trade, region or phase, so that smaller firms can bid for the part they can deliver. Each lot can have its own winner and value.
ESPD (European Single Procurement Document): A standard self-declaration form in which a bidder states that it meets the exclusion and selection criteria, replacing the pile of certificates at the bidding stage. The buyer can ask for the actual evidence at any point, but in practice it is the winner who has to produce it before the award.
Award criteria (MEAT): The rules by which the buyer picks the winner. Contracts are awarded to the most economically advantageous tender, which may mean lowest price alone or a weighted mix of price and quality, delivery time, environmental and social factors, all set out in the notice.
Subcontracting: Having part of a contract performed by another company under the main contractor's responsibility. Award notices can state whether the winner intends to subcontract, and buyers may require the main contractor to disclose its subcontractors. It is how most specialist trades take part in large public works.
Estimated and awarded value: The estimated value is the buyer's forecast of the contract's worth, stated in the contract notice. The awarded value is the actual amount of the winning tender, stated in the award notice. Both are usually excluding VAT.
Notice number: The identifier a published notice receives, unique across the EU system. A change or correction to a notice is published as a new notice with its own number that references the original.