Common Procurement Vocabulary (CPV)

The Common Procurement Vocabulary (CPV) is the European Union's mandatory eight-digit classification system for public procurement, used to describe and categorise contracts so that tenders published in the Official Journal of the EU can be consistently searched, filtered, and routed to suppliers across all member states and beyond.

What is Common Procurement Vocabulary (CPV)?

CPV organises goods, works, and services into a hierarchy of division, group, class, and category, each represented by pairs of digits culminating in an eight-digit main code plus a ninth check digit. For example, the division for construction narrows through group and class to a specific category code for road resurfacing. Every tender published on TED (Tenders Electronic Daily), the EU's public procurement portal, must carry at least one CPV code, and the code drives both how the notice is indexed and how suppliers filter and subscribe to relevant opportunities.

The European Investment Bank aligns with EU procurement directives and uses CPV codes for its own tendering and for projects it finances in EU member states. This means any firm targeting EIB-financed works or EIB institutional procurement should maintain an accurate CPV profile alongside its unspsc profile for UN work. There is no official cross-mapping between the two systems, so companies bidding across both markets must manage both code sets independently.

Why CPV matters for bidders

CPV codes are the single lever that controls which EU and EIB tenders a supplier sees and which notices buyers associate with its offering. A firm that maps itself too broadly receives a flood of irrelevant notices; one that maps too narrowly misses relevant contracts entirely. The practical approach is to identify the three to five CPV codes that describe the core of the firm's offering at category level, subscribe to those on TED, and review the match quality over the first month. EU procurement thresholds for 2024 are EUR 143,000 for goods and services and EUR 5.538 million for works, above which CPV-tagged notices must appear in TED.

Example

The European Investment Bank financed transport infrastructure across the EU at a scale of EUR 86 to 100 billion annually. A civil engineering firm targeting EIB-financed road projects in Poland would filter TED using the CPV division for construction works and the specific category codes for road and motorway construction, ensuring its alert subscription captures relevant contract notices as soon as they are published.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many digits does a CPV code have?

A CPV main code is eight digits structured as division, group, class, and category, plus a ninth verification digit, giving nine digits in total for the complete code.

Is CPV used outside the EU?

CPV is mandatory for EU public procurement and is adopted by EIB for its tendering. It is not used by MDBs or UN agencies, which use unspsc instead, so firms bidding across both markets need to maintain profiles in both systems.

Where can I search EU tenders by CPV code?

EU tenders are published on TED (Tenders Electronic Daily) at api.ted.europa.eu, which provides a public REST API allowing suppliers to search and filter notices by CPV code, country, value threshold, and notice type.