A framework agreement is the most consequential document in public procurement and the least covered. It does not buy anything; it decides who will be allowed to sell, and for how long, after which the actual purchasing happens quietly as call-offs that are never advertised again. A supplier who misses the framework does not lose a contract — it loses access to every contract underneath it, usually for four years. Here is what is currently open.
Counted by the phrase each market uses for them, the open frameworks cluster heavily in two Spanish-language records and thin out sharply everywhere else.
| Phrase | Market | Open now | Largest currently accepting bids |
|---|---|---|---|
| acuerdo marco | Spain | 120 | €299.2M — regional family and youth authority |
| acord marc | Catalonia | 118 | €376.7M — Catalan telecommunications centre |
| accordo quadro | Italy | 78 | €42.3M — Prefecture of Lodi |
| framework agreement | English-language markets | 21 | €2.5M — Helsinki Partners |
WHY THE COUNT IS APPROXIMATE
These figures come from the words in the notice title, not from a structured field, because the structured one is unusable: procedure type is empty on roughly four notices in five, and where it is present it holds raw national strings rather than a common code. Counting by phrase therefore undercounts — a framework that does not say so in its title is invisible to this method — and the true number open in Spain is higher than 238. That is worth stating plainly, because it describes a broader gap: the single most binding instrument in European procurement cannot be counted reliably from published data, in any market, by anyone. The instruments that decide multi-year access are the ones the record identifies least well.
Data: Otnox — live procurement intelligence across 56 markets. Basis: open notices whose title contains the native term for a framework agreement, identified by phrase because the procedure-type field is unpopulated, open as at 2026-07-26.
