What 1,419 European lighting tender awards actually specify
Since mid-2025 we have been collecting public lighting contract awards from TED (EU) and UK Contracts Finder to find real buyers. The by-product is a dataset worth publishing: 1,419 award notices, 59 country values, award dates from 28 July 2023 to 28 August 2026, and 305 notices with a published contract value. Below is every aggregate we can defend, plus the limits of the data.
Free to cite and republish with a link to this page. No individual buyer, supplier or contact data is published.
1. Where the awards are
Six countries carry 76 % of the notices we hold. That is partly market size and partly publishing behaviour: the UK Contracts Finder feed is unusually complete, and Poland, France and Czechia publish lighting works as separate lots far more often than, say, the Netherlands.
2. What kind of building
Counting scenario keywords in the notice titles, street and road lighting still leads, followed by healthcare, education and indoor sport. Categories overlap (a school refurbishment can also be a retrofit), so read these as signals, not shares.
The practical read for indoor suppliers: healthcare, education, sport halls and offices together already out-number street lighting, and almost one notice in five that carries a description is explicitly a retrofit — an existing installation with fixed ceilings, fixed cut-outs and an existing control system.
3. Contract values
Of the 305 notices with a published amount, the mid-market dominates: 168 awards sit between 50 k and 1 M. But 54 awards are 5 M or above, which are framework agreements covering years of call-offs rather than one delivery.
4. The uncomfortable finding: the specification is missing
Only 314 of 1,419 notices carry a description field at all, and those descriptions average 118 characters. Counting technical requirements inside them gives this:
Zero mentions of UGR, DALI or lm/W in the published award text does not mean buyers do not require them — those requirements live in the tender annexes, which are not part of the award notice payload. What it does show is that the machine-readable public record contains almost no photometric or control requirement. Anyone benchmarking European lighting procurement from open data alone is benchmarking titles, not specifications. Treat every number in this section as a floor.
Method and limitations
- Sources: 1,102 notices from ted.europa.eu (including national sub-feeds), 308 from UK Contracts Finder, 6 reference records from USAspending and AusTender that are excluded from the European findings.
- Selection: CPV lighting codes plus lighting keyword matching. Notices without a lighting CPV code and without a lighting keyword in the title are not collected, so pure electrical works packages containing lighting are under-represented.
- Time bias: collection ramped up in 2026 (1,356 of the notices), so 2023–2025 is under-sampled and no year-on-year growth claim can be made from this data.
- Country field: the sources mix ISO codes and country names; we merged the variants for the chart above and kept the raw values in the CSV.
- Currency: amounts are as published, mostly EUR and GBP, not converted. Value bands are therefore approximate.
- Refresh: the dataset grows daily; this page is refreshed quarterly.
If you are bidding one of these
We supply indoor LED luminaires for exactly these packages — schools, wards, sport halls, offices and retrofits — with UGR < 19 optics, Ra 80/90/95, DALI-2 and Casambi drivers, photometric files for your DIALux report and a 5-year warranty. Start from our BOQ template and send it back with your room list.