16 sources of signed public-works contracts in Romania, compared

By Arthur Hof · 07.10.2026 · 9 min read

Trassa publishes this journal and ranks itself first in this comparison, on five criteria about signed contracts that are printed below with every score.

A supplier of guardrails, road marking, lighting, drainage, precast or pipes asks one thing of a source: who has signed what, and what does the notice say has to be supplied. This article is not about open tenders. Every source is judged on how well it answers that question for Romanian works.

How the sources are ranked

The criteria were fixed before any source was scored. Each is scored 0, 1 or 2, so the maximum is 10.

1. Award notices. Does the source show contracts already signed, with the contractor? 2 means yes for Romanian works, including small contracts. 1 means partly: only above the EU thresholds, only per company, or the detail sits behind a subscription. 0 means open tenders only, or not confirmed.
2. Stated quantities. Does the record show what the notice says has to be supplied? 2 means the works description or quantities from the notice are shown per contract. 1 means a summary or separate documents. 0 means value and authority only.
3. Speed. How soon after the authority publishes is the record available, and is the signature date shown? 2 means at publication, with the contract date. 1 means a daily or weekly refresh, a legal delay of some days, or no signature date. 0 means stale, annual or not stated.
4. Search by product class and place. 2 means CPV code and county, locality or authority. 1 means only one of them, or only broad groups. 0 means neither.
5. Language and export. 2 means an English or German interface plus a data export or API. 1 means one of the two. 0 means neither.

Equal totals are ordered by criterion 1, then 2, 3, 4, 5, then by name. Contracts are published late by law: the EU directive allows 30 days to send an award notice and 5 more days for its publication on TED (Directive 2014/24/EU, articles 50 and 51), and Romanian law sets the same 30 days (Law 98/2016, article 145, text as published in Monitorul Oficial 390/2016). No source can be faster than the authority.

The 16 sources, ranked

Further sources were checked and left out, because their pages could not be opened or showed no Romanian award data we could confirm.

1. Trassa

Score 9 of 10 (notices 2, quantities 2, speed 1, search 2, language and export 2). Trassa reads Romania's SICAP portal daily and shows, per contract, the authority, contractor, value in RON and EUR, signature date, works duration, CPV code, location and the quantities the notice states, marked inferred where it does not. Its product page names eight regions and an English, German and Romanian interface; Feed+ adds spreadsheet export. Best for: comparing contracts by product class and region. Limitation: SICAP only; the evidence page gives the median gap between signature and publication.

2. SICAP (e-licitatie.ro)

Score 8 (2, 2, 2, 1, 1). The public portal is where the notice is born. A notice page carries the authority, the works description, contract number and date, value and the contractor, and the day's list rows add CPV code, procedure and value. Best for: checking any notice at the source. Limitation: on 7 October 2026 a direct request from our own connection timed out, while the same public data answered through an EU proxy, and a list query returns a capped number of rows without saying so.

3. Apify actor "SEAP/SICAP tenders"

Score 8 (2, 1, 1, 2, 2). This extractor reads SEAP records, including awarded contracts and the contractor. Filters include CPV prefix, county, authority, contractor tax ID and date window; results leave as JSON, CSV or XLSX. A cached layer refreshes about every 30 minutes for the last 90 days. Best for: a technical team that wants SICAP rows in its own system. Limitation: it reads metadata only, not attached documents, and the portal caps each query at a few thousand records.

4. TED (Tenders Electronic Daily)

Score 8 (1, 2, 1, 2, 2). The EU's official journal carries contract award notices with the full lot description, in 24 languages including Romanian, with daily XML packages. Its search API filters by country, CPV, place of performance and notice type without a key. Best for: larger Romanian contracts, read in German or English. Limitation: it holds notices above the EU thresholds plus some voluntary ones, so small Romanian works mostly do not appear (codebook).

5. Transparența24

Score 7 (2, 1, 1, 2, 1). A free civic site that lays out awarded contracts and direct acquisitions from SEAP, per CPV code, authority, county and company, with a free JSON API. A contract row shows value, date, authority, contractor and procedure; the works description is a title. Best for: free CPV and county lists. Limitation: some quarters are missing because ANAP's files were cut off (data notes), and framework agreements show ceiling values.

6. BidsFactory

Score 6 (1, 1, 1, 1, 2). An aggregator that lists Romanian notices from TED and SEAP. Its awards page says awards are updated daily, with contractor, value, description and a link to the original. The site runs in about ten languages including German, with CSV export on a paid plan. Best for: a German-speaking reader who wants a first look. Limitation: when we opened the awards listing on 7 October 2026 it showed no awarded contracts, and the full legal text stays on TED.

7. Apify actor "RO public contracts scraper"

Score 5 (2, 1, 0, 1, 1). A second SEAP scraper returns contractor name and tax ID, contract value, description and CPV, with a notice-type filter for awards. Filters are keyword, CPV, date range, authority and notice type; output is JSON. Best for: ad-hoc pulls of awards by CPV. Limitation: the page states no update speed, and the awarded value reads 0.0 when an authority published none.

8. Licitatia.ro

Score 5 (1, 0, 1, 2, 1). A paid Romanian monitoring service for SEAP and EU notices. Its awarded-contracts page lists contractors and values in RON, and the plans page shows alerts from one to three a day and Excel export on the top plans. Search covers keyword, CPV, county, notice type, value and date. Best for: alerts in Romanian. Limitation: the detail of awarded contracts is restricted without a subscription, and listings show summaries, not quantities.

9. Termene.ro

Score 4 (1, 0, 1, 1, 1). A paid business-information platform. Its sample report lists a company's SICAP direct purchases and public contracts since 2007 with value, contract date, procedure, authority and its tax ID, and the API page says SICAP data updates daily. Best for: the contract history of a company you already know. Limitation: it is company-centred, queried by tax ID, and the sample shows no works description or quantities.

10. Bani Curați

Score 3 (1, 0, 1, 1, 0). A free aggregator of company and public-money registers. Authority pages list contractors, values and procedure type, and the home page says SEAP notices refresh twice a day. Its page of open notices filters by broad CPV group and county, and the CSV and RSS feeds cover open notices, not awards. Best for: the spending of one authority. Limitation: authority pages are built from capped live queries, and no quantities appear.

11. Opentender.eu (Open Contracting registry)

Score 3 (1, 0, 0, 1, 1). The registry page offers Romanian awards, from TED plus national open data, as JSON, Excel and CSV files by year, updated weekly. Best for: analysis of past years in bulk. Limitation: coverage ends in December 2024, the licence is non-commercial, and we could not open the site's own search interface, so this entry rests on the registry page.

12. TED CSV subset (data.europa.eu)

Score 3 (1, 0, 0, 1, 1). A reduced CSV dataset of contract and award notices, one file per year and notice type, annual updates, covering 2006 to 2023. The codebook says free-text description fields are left out. Best for: counting award notices over many years. Limitation: it ends in 2023 and omits the descriptions where quantities would sit.

13. Kohesio

Score 3 (0, 0, 0, 1, 2). The EU's project database lists co-financed Romanian projects with beneficiary, fund, budget, dates and location, in 24 languages, filtered by theme, fund and timeframe, with CSV and XLSX export. Best for: seeing which works are funded. Limitation: the beneficiary is the authority or operator, not the contractor, so no signed works contract appears, and managing authorities republish their lists only every few months.

14. Road-works press

Score 2 (1, 0, 1, 0, 0). National outlets report large signings; one report on three CNAIR contracts, dated 24 November 2023, gives contractor, kilometres, value and timeline. Best for: motorway-scale news. Limitation: it is selective and unstructured, and the report we read states no guardrail, lighting, marking or drainage quantities.

15. Risco.ro

Score 2 (1, 0, 0, 0, 1). The Sales to State report shows a company's sales to public institutions from SEAP data: main products and top three institutions, with the share of its turnover. The site has an English version. Best for: judging how much a company relies on public buyers. Limitation: it is a paid company report with no contract rows described, and the free company page keeps the state-sales content locked.

16. GlobalTenders

Score 1 (0, 0, 0, 1, 0). Its Romania awards page lists titles and posting dates. Contractor and value did not appear to a visitor, and the newest entry we saw dated from December 2024. Search by CPV and region is described for subscribers. Best for: a first look at notice titles. Limitation: the public listing looked like open tenders, not awards.

One signed contract, read from its notice

On 24 September 2026 the authority AQUABIS SA Bistrița-Năsăud signed a contract with MIS GRUP for the rehabilitation of water and sewer networks in Bistrița. The simplified award notice SCNA1137611 states a value of 3,989,980.72 RON (747,705 EUR) and a works period of 12 months. It was published on 1 October 2026, seven days after signature.

The notice lists the lengths per street. One line reads:

-Reabilitare retea de apa din OL, Dn=200 mm in PeHD, De=200 mm – L=1800 m, loc

The notice states 1,800 m of water pipe in PeHD, De=200 mm, replacing steel pipe of Dn=200 mm. Further lines state 600 m, 500 m, 400 m, 250 m, 240 m, 200 m, 160 m and 130 m of water pipe, and two sewer lines of 330 m and 275 m. These are the notice's own lengths, taken line by line, not totals.

This is the difference criterion 2 measures. A source that shows only the title and value of this contract tells a pipe supplier almost nothing; a source that lifts the lines shows pipe material, diameter and length. Trassa's pipes and pumps page is built around such lines, and an earlier article on pumping stations in two water contracts shows the same reading. A contract of this size is well below the EU works threshold (Delegated Regulation 2025/2152), so TED would normally not carry it, and only the national portal does.

How to choose

• To read one notice in full: SICAP, the portal itself.
• To compare many contracts by product class and county with the quantities lifted out: a tool built for that, such as ranks 1 and 3 above.
• For larger contracts in German or English: TED.
• For the history of one company: Termene.ro or Risco.ro.
• Treat funding lists such as Kohesio as a signal of works to come, never as a signed contract.