What are international tenders?

International tenders are public-procurement opportunities that a government or public body opens to suppliers from other countries — not just domestic firms. Under the WTO Government Procurement Agreement, covered contracts above a value threshold must accept bids from any member country on equal terms.

Can a foreign company win a government contract abroad?

Yes. Across the 48 WTO-GPA parties, foreign suppliers from other member countries have the same bidding rights as domestic ones on covered tenders above the threshold. Eligibility is rarely the barrier — finding the right notices and preparing a compliant bid is.

Where can I find international tenders in one place?

Each country publishes tenders on its own portal (SAM.gov, TED, Find a Tender, CanadaBuys, AusTender and more). Aggregators like qlows ingest these sources so you can search across markets at once instead of monitoring each portal separately.

How many countries can I bid into?

The WTO-GPA has 48 member parties. qlows monitors 35 of these markets today, so you can search and match tenders across all of them from a single catalog.

International Tenders: Find & Win in 35 Countries (2026)

Governments and public bodies are among the biggest buyers in the world — and a large share of what they buy is open to foreign suppliers by treaty. If you sell a product or a service, there is almost certainly a public buyer for it somewhere across the 48WTO-GPA markets. This guide covers what international tenders are, who can bid, where they’re published, and how to cut thousands of weekly notices down to the handful worth your time.

01 · What international tenders are

A tender(also called an RFP, RFQ, ITT, or solicitation depending on the country) is a public buyer’s formal request for suppliers to bid on a contract. An international tender is simply one that a supplier from another country is legally allowed to compete for — which, thanks to trade agreements, is most public procurement above a certain value.

The volume is enormous. Public procurement is roughly 12–15% of GDP across developed economies. The United States alone posts tens of thousands of new federal notices a month; the EU’s TED publishes hundreds of thousands of notices a year. Most of it never reaches the suppliers who could win it, because those suppliers never see the notice.

02 · Who can bid: the WTO-GPA

The WTO Government Procurement Agreement (GPA) is the treaty that opens public contracts across borders. Its 48 parties — the EU and its member states, the US, UK, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and more — agree that above a published value threshold, their public buyers must treat suppliers from every other GPA party the same as domestic ones. No discrimination on origin.

In practice that means a mid-sized firm in one country can bid on a government contract in another and be evaluated purely on merit and price. Eligibility is rarely the blocker. The blockers are discovery (finding the notice) and preparation (submitting a compliant bid on time). For the full mechanics — the thresholds, which countries are covered, and how the equal-treatment rule works — see the WTO-GPA guide.

See your reach

35 markets, one catalog. See which tenders you can legally bid on today.

qlows maps your products and services to the markets you're eligible for under the WTO-GPA.

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03 · Where international tenders are published

There is no single global tender portal. Each country runs its own, and the formats, languages, and access rules differ. The major ones:

United States — SAM.gov (federal), plus state-and-local aggregators. See the US platforms guide.
European Union — TED (Tenders Electronic Daily) carries above-threshold notices from all 27 member states. See the EU / TED guide.
United Kingdom — Find a Tender and Contracts Finder. See the UK platforms guide.
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland — CanadaBuys, AusTender, GETS, and eTenders.gov.ie respectively.

Monitoring each portal by hand doesn’t scale past one or two markets. That’s the problem aggregators solve: they ingest every source into one searchable index. The full platforms guide breaks down the 20 that matter.

04 · How to find the tenders worth bidding on

Aggregation solves discovery but creates a new problem: volume. Keyword alerts flood you with near-misses — every notice that happens to contain your search term, most of which you’d never bid on. The signal drowns in noise.

The better approach is catalog matching. Instead of guessing keywords, you give the system the ground truth — your actual products and services — and it learns which notices fit and which don’t, scoring each one by how well it matches what you deliver. That’s what adaptive tender matching does across all connected markets, and you can even query it from your AI over MCP — see how to find tenders with Claude. Once a tender fits, qlows preps the bid — compliance, structure, and a hand-off to the AI you already use.

05 · Browse international tenders by country

Jump straight to live notices for any connected market. Each hub lists current tenders across 30 industries, with deadlines, buyers, and the bidding context for that country.

International tenders: how to find and win public contracts across 35 countries

Find the international tenders worth bidding on.

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