Ted Eu

@pipeworx/ted-eu

TED (Tenders Electronic Daily) MCP — EU public procurement notices from national, regional and municipal buyers in every member state. ~700k notices a year; 1.3M construction notices on file. Keyless.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1684+ live data sources.

Tools

• search_notices(query?, country?, category?, cpv?, date_from?, date_to?, open_only?, value_min?, value_max?, notice_type?, sort?, limit?, page?) — newest first by default. category takes plain English ("construction", "IT services", "medical equipment") and resolves to CPV; cpv takes the code if you have it.
• get_notice(publication_number) — one notice with its full buyer-written description. notice_id / id accepted as aliases.
• cpv_lookup(term) — plain-English category → CPV code, or what a CPV code covers.
• ted_search_awards(query?, winner?, buyer?, country?, winner_country?, category?, cpv?, date_from?, date_to?, value_min?, value_max?, sort?, limit?, page?) — contract-AWARD notices only: who won, for how much. Every winner on the notice is returned (lots and consortium members), with winner_countries and decision_date where published.
• ted_supplier_history(supplier, country?, category?, cpv?, date_from?, date_to?, limit?, page?) — everything a named economic operator has won, newest first, with a summary: awarded value by currency, top buyers, top CPV categories. Name matching is partial ("Siemens" covers every Siemens entity).
• ted_buyer_profile(buyer, country?, category?, cpv?, date_from?, date_to?, limit?, page?) — everything a named contracting authority has awarded, with top winners and top categories. Use the authority's own-language name ("Ville de Paris", not "City of Paris").

Auth

None. The public search endpoint answers unauthenticated.

Note that GET /notices/{id} is NOT keyless — it 400s with "Missing Authorization header" — so get_notice fetches through the public search endpoint filtered on publication-number instead. Same data, no key.

What comes back

Each notice is flattened out of TED's raw shape:

The envelope carries total, partial and sorted_by. partial: true means TED timed out and returned an incomplete result set — the count and total are lower bounds, not an answer.

Free text

query searches the full notice via TED's FT operator, not just the title. It escalates:

1. the whole string as an exact phrase,
2. its first three words AND-ed, appearing anywhere,
3. its two most specific words AND-ed.

It stops at the first attempt that finds anything and reports which in match_strategy. This matters because ~ phrase-matches: the old title-or-description phrase search returned zero for every ordinary multi-word query real callers sent — "backup disaster recovery business continuity", "data center colocation IaaS PaaS", "GRC risk management compliance governance" were all 0 while the AND-ed forms return real notices.

Write OR between two words to hedge a spelling — fuze OR fuse artillery becomes (fuze OR fuse) AND artillery, because AND-ing both spellings asks for the one notice that contains both.

There is deliberately no any-word fallback. It was measured and cut: it answered "fuze OR fuse artillery ammunition" with 42 notices led by printed matter. A zero with an explanation beats a page of things you did not ask for.

Awards

The award tools search notice-type IN (can-standard can-social can-desg can-tran) — the four contract-award subtypes. Legacy pre-eForms award forms are mapped into these by TED, so coverage reaches back years (2022 alone has ~296k can-standard notices), 2.8M+ award notices in total. can-modif (modification of an existing contract) and veat (intent to award) are outside the default set — filter search_notices by notice_type if you want those.

Two caveats every award response states, because they are the two things a caller will otherwise get wrong:

• Coverage: TED is above-threshold EU procurement only. Below-threshold national contracts are published on national portals and never appear — a supplier with no TED awards may still win plenty of smaller public work.
• Values: as published by the buyer, in the notice's own currency, normally excluding VAT, and unvalidated by TED. Summaries sum by currency — there is no cross-currency grand total, because that would be a made-up number.

winner-name upstream is a per-language map of arrays carrying every winner (one per lot, consortium members, duplicates included). The award tools dedupe and return the full list — taking only the first, as a single winner string would, silently drops co-winners.

Upstream quirks worth knowing

• POST only. GET /v3/notices/search is 405.
• fields must be non-empty. Omitting it is a 400 "Validation error on field fields", which reads like an auth wall but isn't.
• Sorting is not a request field. It goes inside the query string: ... SORT BY publication-date DESC. Without it the result order is not recency, and a 2016 prior-information notice was the top hit for German construction tenders.
• Every text field is a per-language map. notice-title carries all 24 official languages and buyer-name a map of arrays. Handing them back raw gives a caller a Latvian title for a German tender, and costs ~4KB of duplicated title per notice.
• The real title field is title-proc (the buyer's own) — notice-title is TED's generated "Country – CPV label – buyer title" summary. Asking for a field that doesn't exist returns nothing rather than erroring, so a typo'd field name looks like missing data.
• CPV is not a dense 01-99 range. Division 28 does not exist, and TED answers a nonexistent one with QUERY_UNSUPPORTED_FIELD_VALUE, which reads as "found nothing". This pack validates the division first and names the valid ones.
• Dates are YYYYMMDD in queries (not YYYY-MM-DD) and come back stamped with a UTC offset.

Data source

https://api.ted.europa.eu/v3/notices/search — POST, JSON expert-query body. Docs: https://docs.ted.europa.eu/api/

The endpoint enumerates all 1,830 supported field names in its 400 message when you ask for an unsupported one — the cheapest way to find a field without guessing.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ted-eu": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/ted-eu/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/ted-eu/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1684+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/ted_eu_search_notices \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"category":"construction","country":"DEU","limit":25}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/ted_eu_search_notices. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.

Standalone (no gateway account)

This package also runs as a local stdio MCP server — no Pipeworx account, no gateway round-trip:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ted-eu": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-ted-eu"]
    }
  }
}

Or run it directly to confirm it starts:

npx -y @pipeworx/mcp-ted-eu

It speaks MCP over stdin/stdout and answers initialize/tools/list/tools/call for only this pack's tools — none of the shared meta-tools the gateway connection above adds. Same source, same tools, no ask_pipeworx routing.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Ted Eu data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides
• pipeworx.io

License

MIT