How to find Irish public sector tenders in 2026

eTenders is administered by the Office of Government Procurement and is the central repository for Irish public procurement. The current platform, built by European Dynamics, went live on 15 May 2023. Anyone can browse the latest calls for tender without logging in, but you need a supplier account to receive alerts, download documents and respond.

Registering asks for one of a Companies Registration Office number, a VAT number or a D-U-N-S number, so you do not need an Irish company to sign up. The registration form accepts suppliers from any country, including the United Kingdom. If you last used eTenders before May 2023, your old alerts and saved CPV codes did not migrate to the new platform, so set them up again.

eTenders sends email alerts based on Common Procurement Vocabulary codes. Choose codes at the division or group level first and narrow once you see what arrives. Too narrow a selection is the most common reason suppliers conclude 'nothing relevant is ever published'.

Buyers code notices inconsistently, so a service contract can arrive under a works code or the other way round. Search by keyword for your core service once a week as well, to catch what the CPV alert misses.

Under Circular 05/2023, goods and services contracts worth €50,000 or more (ex VAT) must be advertised on eTenders, as must works-related services at €50,000 and works at €200,000. Between €5,000 and €50,000, buyers send a written specification to at least three suppliers or run a quotes competition on eTenders. Under €5,000, a verbal or written quote is enough. Unadvertised works below €200,000 need at least five written tenders.

The EU thresholds for 2026 and 2027 are €140,000 for central government supplies and services, €216,000 for other public bodies, €5,404,000 for works, €750,000 for social and other specific services and €432,000 for utilities supplies and services. Contracts above these are advertised on eTenders and published on TED within the same process.

The practical consequence: a large volume of sub-€50,000 work reaches only the suppliers a buyer already knows. Registering with your target buyers, and responding well to quote requests when they arrive, is how you get onto that list. eTenders introduced a new quotes competition workflow in September 2026, so more of this work now runs through the platform.

The Office of Government Procurement, the Education Procurement Service, the HSE, the Local Government Operational Procurement Centre and the Department of Defence are Ireland's five central purchasing bodies. Between them they run around 275 central arrangements across 16 categories, listed in the OGP's searchable central arrangements catalogue.

Mini-competitions under a framework are sent only to the suppliers appointed to it, so if your buyers purchase your category through a framework, the opportunity to win is when that framework is re-tendered, not when a call-off happens. The OGP publishes a quarterly renewal schedule of its central arrangements. It is the closest thing Ireland has to a published forward pipeline.

SupplyGov is the portal run by the Local Government Operational Procurement Centre, hosted by Kerry County Council. It handles local authority frameworks and dynamic purchasing systems for categories such as plant hire, minor building works and civils, with over €500 million a year of spend and more than 2,500 registered suppliers.

If you supply councils in those categories, register on SupplyGov as well as eTenders, since call-offs and competitions within those arrangements run there.

Award information for every contract over €25,000 must be published on eTenders, including call-offs under frameworks, and above-threshold awards go to TED. The OGP also publishes an open dataset drawn from eTenders covering 2013 onwards. Together these show who holds a contract now, what it was worth and when it started, which is how you estimate when it will come back to market.

Many public bodies also publish their purchase orders over €20,000 quarterly on their own websites. There is no single central file for these, but for a specific target buyer they are the best view of who is supplying it today.

You need tax clearance from Revenue for any public sector contract worth €10,000 or more (including VAT) in a 12-month period. The buyer checks it using your Tax Clearance Access Number. Non-resident suppliers with no Irish tax registration apply using form TC1, which takes time, so do it before you need it.

Above the EU thresholds, buyers issue and accept the European Single Procurement Document (ESPD) as the self-declaration of eligibility. Circular 05/2023 also asks buyers to set turnover requirements at no more than twice the contract value, which puts most individual contracts within reach of an SME. Construction contracts use the Capital Works Management Framework's standard forms and suitability questionnaires, so read those before bidding for works.

Irish regulations require covered contracts to treat suppliers from signatories of the WTO Government Procurement Agreement no less favourably than EU suppliers, and the UK–EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement adds further coverage. Above threshold, a UK company can bid for covered Irish contracts on equal terms. Below threshold, check the eligibility section of the request for tender.

Northern Ireland is a separate market: its public bodies advertise on eTendersNI, which belongs to the UK system, not the Irish one. Cross-border PEACEPLUS projects led from Northern Ireland also publish on eTenders, so a supplier working both sides of the border needs both platforms. InterTradeIreland's Go-2-Tender programme runs workshops and funded mentoring for SMEs across the island, and Invest NI runs a free tender alert service for Northern Ireland firms.