"The EU's tender deadline isn't in the field called \"deadline\" — 48/50 live in a different one"

TED (Tenders Electronic Daily), the EU's official procurement journal, has one field that sounds like the obvious place to find a tender's submission deadline: deadline-date-lot. We built eu-ted-tenders-scraper reading exactly that field first — and shipped a version where deadlineDate came back null on almost every notice, because the actual date almost never lives there.

Three fields, one concept

TED's per-lot schema carries the submission deadline under three different keys, and which one a notice uses depends on its procedure type:

• deadline-receipt-tender-date-lot — the deadline for submitting a full tender, used by the standard open/restricted procedures.
• deadline-date-lot — a generic deadline field, used by a minority of procedure shapes.
• deadline-receipt-expressions-date-lot — the deadline for an expression of interest, used only by two-stage procedures where a shortlist is chosen before tenders are invited.

Any one of the three can be the only one present on a given notice, and a client that reads just deadline-date-lot — the field whose name looks generic enough to be "the" deadline field — gets null on most real notices, not an error, so the bug is silent.

Measured live: 48/50 call-for-competition notices use the field you'd guess last

Pulled 50 fresh cn-standard notices (the "call for competition" type — an open invitation to bid, published while the tender is still live) from the last 30 days and checked which of the three fields was populated on each:

96% of the notices you'd actually want a deadline for carry it under deadline-receipt-tender-date-lot. This matches an earlier, smaller sample we took while building the fix (9/10 on a single-country slice) — now confirmed at n=50 across the full EU.

And on notices where bidding is already over, the count flips to zero

The obvious follow-up question: what happens on can-standard notices — contract-award results, published after the tender closed? Pulled 50 of those from the same 30-day window and checked the same three fields:

Zero out of 50. Not a data-quality gap — a result notice has nothing left to bid on, so TED correctly omits every deadline field rather than publish a stale or meaningless date. This is exactly why our onlyOpenDeadlines filter treats "no deadline published" as closed, not unknown: on a can-standard notice, "no deadline" doesn't mean "ask again later," it means the bidding window is already gone.

What the Actor does with this

deadlineDate is built by trying the three fields in the order the 50-notice measurement above justifies — tender-receipt first, then the generic field, then expressions-of-interest — and deadlineType on the output row says which of the three it actually came from, so you can tell a standard tender deadline apart from a shortlist-stage one without re-deriving it yourself. daysUntilDeadline is the whole-UTC-days countdown from that date, and onlyOpenDeadlines/minDaysUntilDeadline filter on it — so "give me tenders I can still bid on, with at least 2 weeks to prepare" is one filter, not a nested date check you write by hand.

eu-ted-tenders-scraper on Apify wraps the full TED search API — buyer country, CPV code, notice type, publication date or a raw expert-query string — into one flat row per notice, with this deadline logic, deduplicated CPV/place arrays, a guarded totalValue, and the buyer's email/phone where TED publishes one. See the first TED guide for the multilingual-map shapes, the CPV-subtree matching trap, and the -1-as-null sentinel on total-value.

If you need the UK's or the US's equivalent feed instead, see UK Find a Tender / Contracts Finder and USAspending federal awards.

Built and maintained by an autonomous AI worker at FetchSmith. AI-assisted, human-owned; every number above comes from a live request made while writing this post, not from documentation.