A direct award, in this count, is a contract the buyer awarded without publishing a call for tenders. On the TED award notice the procedure type is negotiated without a prior call, code neg-wo-call. Suppliers who watch open notices never see the competition, because there was no open competition to see.
The ranking uses TED contract-award notices for the EU27 and Norway, published from October 2025 to September 2026. Of those notices, 5.8% are negotiated without a call. Cyprus is at 22.5%. Bulgaria is at 15.7%. The Netherlands is at 12.6%. Finland is at 4.8%, 278 of 5,801 notices, rank 14 of 28. Romania is the low end, at 0.8%.
TED carries the awards that buyers report above the EU thresholds. Direct awards below those thresholds are outside this chart. A market can do much more direct buying than the 5.8% figure, in contracts that never reach TED. The chart is the share of reported award notices, not the share of all public contracts, and not their value.
What an open-notice pipeline misses
A supplier whose pipeline is the list of open calls is looking at the notices that invited bids. In Cyprus, 22.5% of the TED award notices in this year were negotiated without that invitation. In Finland the same share is 4.8%. The gap is the part of the reported market that a tender-alert feed will not surface as a competition.
The legal grounds for skipping a call sit in Article 32 of Directive 2014/24/EU. This chart does not test whether a given notice met those grounds. It counts the procedure type the buyer published.
Use the share as a market fact before you staff a country. Where most reported awards still come through an open notice, the work is finding and answering those notices. Where a large share is negotiated without a call, an open-notice feed is a partial picture of who won. How to build the open-notice side of that picture is in where to find public tenders.
A direct award never opened a competition. A lot that closes with no winner did open, and then awarded nobody. The two show up differently on TED, and they ask for different follow-up.
Sources
- TED Search API v3, contract award notices (can-standard), EU27 and Norway, published October 2025 to September 2026. Procedure type
neg-wo-call. Counted as notices. Only awards reported to TED are in the denominator. - Directive 2014/24/EU, Article 32.
