Public buyers publish their notices on official procurement portals, and each portal has its own search box, its own filters and its own way of naming things. A company that sells to governments therefore ends up repeating the same searches on several sites, in several languages, week after week. This guide sets out three ways to search: by keyword, by CPV code, and by country or sector. It uses live examples from the open tenders ScoutTide has collected as of 29 October 2026. Those counts change daily.
Searching by keyword
A keyword search is the quickest way to start. You type what you sell, for example "road marking" or "sterile gloves", and the portal returns notices whose text contains those words. It works well when your product has a distinctive name, and less well when the same thing is called different names in different places. A buyer may write "refuse collection vehicles", "waste collection trucks" or "garbage compactors" for the same purchase.
Two habits make keyword searches more useful. First, search for the thing bought rather than the thing sold: buyers describe the item, the service or the works, not your product line. Second, run the same keyword in the local language of each country you care about, because a notice written in Portuguese or German will not match an English phrase.
Keyword searching also has a structural limit. Each portal searches only its own notices. A term that returns nothing on one site may return results on another, and there is no single place where all of them are typed in at once. That is the gap a daily list of matches is meant to close, and it is why the examples below are drawn from one collected set rather than from a single portal.
Searching by CPV code
CPV stands for Common Procurement Vocabulary. It is the European Union's classification of what a tender buys, and each code describes a category of goods, works or services. Searching by CPV code is more precise than searching by keyword, because the buyer has already assigned the notice to a category. If your company sells medical consumables, the codes for those goods will find notices that a keyword search might miss when the wording differs.
The practical difficulty is knowing which codes apply to you. There are many divisions, and the labels are not always obvious to someone outside procurement. the CPV code finder lists the divisions with their open tenders, so you can see which codes carry notices and which are quiet. A sensible approach is to note the codes that fit your products, then use them alongside keywords rather than instead of them.
CPV codes are used most consistently in the European Union, and notices from other systems may not carry one at all. Where a notice has no code, a keyword search remains the way in. The two methods work best together: codes for precision, keywords for reach.
Searching by country and sector: live examples
Country and sector filters answer a different question from keyword and code searches. Instead of asking "who is buying my product", they ask "where are the notices, and in which sectors". That is useful when you are deciding which markets to follow, or when you want to see how a sector looks in a particular country before committing time to it.
The examples below are drawn from the open tenders ScoutTide has collected as of 29 October 2026. Each figure is the number of open tenders in that country and sector, not the size of a market.
- Construction tenders in Germany: 5,253 open tenders.
- Construction tenders in Brazil: 4,343 open tenders.
- Manufacturing tenders in the United States: 3,335 open tenders.
- Construction tenders in China: 3,244 open tenders.
- Construction tenders in the Philippines: 3,119 open tenders.
Each of these pages is a saved search in effect: a country, a sector, and a count that moves as notices are published and deadlines pass. You can start from all open tenders by country and sector and narrow down from there, or go straight to a country page such as open tenders in Brazil, open tenders in India, open tenders in China, open tenders in the United States or open tenders in Germany.
Sector pages work the same way across borders: open construction tenders worldwide, open healthcare tenders worldwide, open manufacturing tenders worldwide, open engineering services tenders worldwide and open facilities management tenders worldwide.
Where the open tenders are
As of 29 October 2026, ScoutTide has collected 235,860 open tenders, and 78,563 of them are new in the last 7 days. They come from 185 countries with at least one open tender.
The countries with the most open tenders are Brazil with 24,620, India with 18,535, China with 16,927, the United States with 14,934, Germany with 13,981, the Philippines with 12,284, France with 10,525, Kazakhstan with 9,509, Ukraine with 8,652 and Poland with 7,962.
By sector, the largest groups in the collected set are construction with 45,911 open tenders, healthcare with 22,449, manufacturing with 15,775, engineering services with 14,147, facilities management with 12,266, transport and logistics with 12,165, energy and utilities with 10,606 and hardware with 9,104.
Behind the notices sit many separate buyers: 76,746 different buyers have open tenders in the collected set. The busiest buyers are the Ministry of Railways, India with 11,009 open tenders; E-IN-C BRANCH, MILITARY ENGINEER SERVICES, India with 2,536; Pakistan PPRA EPMS, Pakistan with 1,073; DLA MARITIME COLUMBUS / DLA LAND AND MARITIME, United States with 904; and DLA LAND COLUMBUS / DLA LAND AND MARITIME, United States with 734. Further down the list are DLA AV RICHMOND / DLA AVIATION, United States with 596; NAVSUP WSS MECHANICSBURG / NAVSUP WEAPON SYSTEMS SUPPORT MECH, United States with 564; SECRETARIA DE ESTADO DA SAUDE, Brazil with 460; COMANDO DA MARINHA, Brazil with 455; and Ministry of Education, Schools, Singapore with 403. The 5 busiest buyers together account for 16,256 open tenders, 7% of the total.
The notices come from official sources, among them EU TED with 38,299 open tenders, Brazil PNCP with 24,585, India CPPP with 18,492, China Government Procurement (ccgp.gov.cn) with 16,818, Philippines PhilGEPS with 11,975, Kazakhstan Goszakup with 9,471, Germany Vergabe with 9,285 and Ukraine ProZorro with 8,598. The full set is on the official sources ScoutTide reads.
One figure matters when you are choosing where to look. Of the 235,860 open tenders, 114,600 (49%) carry a stated value as ScoutTide reads the notice. Where a value is stated in EUR, across 24,065 tenders, the median is EUR 300,000 and the middle half lies between EUR 52,419 and EUR 1,204,500. For BRL, across 21,008 tenders, the median is BRL 303,789 and the middle half between BRL 68,443 and BRL 1,215,688. For CNY, across 16,673 tenders, the median is CNY 1,270,000 and the middle half between CNY 630,000 and CNY 2,605,593. The remaining notices do not carry a stated value in the form ScoutTide reads.
Deadlines: how much time you get
Time is the constraint that shapes every search. Of the open tenders with a stated deadline, 87,995 close in under 7 days, 92,891 close in 7 to 29 days, 7,884 close in 30 to 59 days and 11,230 close in 60 days or more. A further 35,860 open tenders have no stated deadline.
The median time left until the deadline is 7 days. The median gap between a notice first appearing and its deadline is 20 days. In practice this means that a search run once a month will often surface notices that are already closing. A weekly search is better, and a daily list is better still, because the useful window is short.
Turning a search into a daily list
Every method above produces a saved search: a keyword, a set of CPV codes, a country, a sector, or a combination. The work that remains is repetition. Someone has to run each search on each portal, in each language, and check what is new.
ScoutTide collects open tenders from official portals, matches them against what a company sells, sends a daily list of new matches and shows titles in English. That replaces the manual round of searches with one list a day. You keep the searches you have built, and the list tells you what has appeared since yesterday.
Each portal publishes its own registration requirements, and readers should check them there before bidding. ScoutTide does not handle registration on any portal.
To see how a daily list would work for your products, sign up to get tenders like these matched to what you sell, and see plans and pricing for the options.
Frequently asked questions
How many open tenders has ScoutTide collected?
235,860 as of 29 October 2026. The counts change daily as notices are published and deadlines pass.
How many countries have at least one open tender?
185 countries, as of 29 October 2026.
Which countries have the most open tenders?
Brazil with 24,620, India with 18,535, China with 16,927, the United States with 14,934 and Germany with 13,981, as of 29 October 2026.
How much time is left on the open tenders?
Of those with a stated deadline, 87,995 close in under 7 days and 92,891 close in 7 to 29 days. The median time left is 7 days.
What does a CPV code do?
CPV codes classify what a tender buys. the CPV code finder lists the divisions with their open tenders.