Public procurement in Finland: a practical guide for foreign companies

All Finnish public procurement above the national threshold is published on Hilma (hankintailmoitukset.fi), the official national notice portal. It is free and open to everyone. Procurement above the EU thresholds is additionally published on TED (ted.europa.eu), the EU-wide tender database, with structured summaries that are easier to work with in English.

Thresholds decide where a notice appears. The national threshold for goods and services is 60 000 euros. EU thresholds are higher and are revised every two years, so always check the current values. Below the national threshold, small purchases are not centrally published, though many municipalities run their own small-procurement portals.

The practical challenge is volume and language: thousands of notices a year, mostly in Finnish. This is exactly the problem AURE's market scanner solves: it reads public tender notices, scores each one against your company profile with AI, and alerts you only about the ones worth your time. Tender alerts on AURE are free.

Most Finnish notices and tender documents are written in Finnish, and below the EU threshold the authority usually expects bids in Finnish or Swedish. Above the EU threshold, notices carry at least an English summary on TED, and some authorities accept English bids, particularly in IT and specialized technical fields. The tender documents always state the accepted languages, so check that first.

A realistic playbook for a foreign company: start with EU-threshold tenders where documentation is more standardized, target fields where English is common, or partner with a Finnish company and bid as a consortium. Consortium bids are explicitly allowed, and a local partner solves both language and local-presence questions at once.

The most common procedure is the open procedure: the authority publishes the call, any company may bid by the deadline through an electronic tendering system, bids are compared against pre-announced criteria, and the decision is sent to all bidders with scoring and reasoning. There is a standstill period before contract signature during which the decision can be challenged in the Market Court.

Selection criteria and award criteria are separate. Selection criteria (turnover, references, certifications) decide whether your bid is considered at all. Award criteria (price, quality scoring) decide who wins. Read both carefully before investing time: if you fail a mandatory selection criterion, the rest of your bid is never read.

• Register on the e-tendering platform named in the notice well before the deadline.
• Fill in the ESPD (European Single Procurement Document); as an EU company you can reuse it across tenders.
• Ask questions during the Q&A window; answers are published to all bidders.
• Answer exactly what is asked, in the order it is asked. Most rejections are formal, not substantive.

You do not need to master Finnish procurement law to win your first contract. You need a reliable pipeline of relevant tenders, a partner or translator for Finnish-language processes, and the discipline to bid only where you meet the criteria. Losing a first bid is normal; the published decision tells you the winning price and scores, which is market intelligence you can use in the next round.

AURE was built for exactly this workflow: create a company profile once, let the scanner watch Finnish and EU tenders for you, and use the AI analysis to judge which calls are worth a bid. You can also use the company directory to find Finnish partners for consortium bids. Registration is free to start.