Updated 2026-09-02
EV procurement is the formal process public sector bodies use to buy electric vehicle charging infrastructure and related services — hardware, installation and ongoing operation — rather than simply placing a purchase order. Because public money is involved, the process is governed by procurement law: above certain contract-value thresholds, a buyer generally cannot just pick a supplier it likes. It has to publish a public notice describing what it needs, run a competitive process open to any qualified supplier, and follow a defined evaluation and award procedure it can be held to. Below those thresholds, buyers typically still run some form of competition, though the rules are lighter and often set by internal procurement policy rather than procurement law directly.
This is the same regulatory logic applied to any public contract — roadworks, IT systems, cleaning services — applied to EV charging specifically. What makes EV charging procurement worth understanding on its own terms is that a single contract commonly bundles several different things at once: hardware supply, civil and electrical installation work, and a multi-year maintenance or network-management commitment, sometimes alongside a commercial concession to operate the charge points afterward. A supplier bidding on "an EV charging tender" needs to work out which of those elements a given notice is actually asking for before it can put together a credible bid.
Four buyer types account for most of the activity.
Municipalities and local authorities are the most common buyer, procuring on-street and car-park charging for public use, plus charging for their own fleets — waste collection, social care, enforcement vehicles. Local authorities are also frequently the buyer behind national grant-funded rollout programmes, where central government funding is administered through a local procurement process rather than bought centrally.
Transit and transport operators — bus operators, rail operators, regional transport authorities — procure depot charging to electrify their own fleets, typically at a larger single-site scale than a municipal on-street installation, since a depot has to charge many vehicles overnight or between shifts.
Highways and roads authorities procure charging at a network level: service stations and strategic road locations, where the contract is less about one site and more about guaranteeing charging coverage along a route. This is often structured as a concession rather than a straightforward supply contract, for reasons covered below.
Government fleets — central government departments, health services, emergency services — procure charging to support their own vehicle electrification. This is usually depot- or site-based rather than public-facing, and often bundled into a broader fleet-electrification contract that covers vehicles and charging together.
A public buyer reaches a supplier through one of three broad routes, and which one applies changes what a supplier has to do to win the work.
The buyer publishes a notice describing exactly what it needs, any interested and qualified supplier submits a bid by a stated deadline, and the buyer evaluates bids against published criteria — typically a mix of price and quality — before awarding. This is the most transparent route and the one most people picture when they hear "a tender": a single competition for a single piece of work.
Rather than running a fresh competition for every piece of work, a buying organisation runs one procurement to appoint a shortlist of pre-approved suppliers onto a framework — or admits suppliers on a rolling basis onto a DPS — and individual public bodies then call off from that list, either by direct award to the supplier matched to the requirement or by running a short mini-competition among the suppliers already on it. ESPO's Vehicle Charging Infrastructure framework is a working example of this route in the UK: getting onto the framework itself only happens when ESPO runs that procurement, but once a supplier is on it, individual councils, schools and NHS trusts can call off without running their own full tender.
Instead of paying a supplier directly for hardware and installation, the buyer grants a supplier the right to install and commercially operate charge points on public land — on-street, in car parks, or at service stations — usually for a fixed multi-year term, with the supplier recovering its investment through charging revenue rather than, or in addition to, a direct fee from the buyer. Concessions shift usage risk onto the supplier, which is why they tend to be used for higher-traffic or strategically important locations where demand is easier to predict.
Coverage depends on contract value and country. Above the EU's procurement thresholds, notices from any EU member state are published on TED (Tenders Electronic Daily), the EU's official procurement journal. Below those thresholds, or for a specific country, buyers publish on national and regional portals instead. In the UK that means Find a Tender for above-threshold notices and Contracts Finder for lower-value ones; other countries run their own equivalents — see the current Germany, France and Spain tender pages for examples of what that looks like in practice. No single portal aggregates every country's notices, which is the main practical obstacle for a supplier trying to track opportunities across more than one market at once.
Every notice published above threshold carries one or more CPV (Common Procurement Vocabulary) codes classifying what's being procured — 31158000 and 31158100 for charger hardware, 34144900 where vehicles are bundled in, plus construction and services codes for installation and maintenance work. CPV Codes for EV Charging Tenders, Explained covers this in full, including why bundled contracts often carry three or four codes at once and why a pure CPV search can still miss notices a buyer filed under a generic code.
Most EV charging procurement lands in one of a few recognisable shapes. A supply contract covers hardware only — chargers, and sometimes back-office software — with installation handled separately or by the buyer's own team. A combined supply-and-install contract is more common: one supplier delivers the hardware and carries out the civil and electrical work to get it live. A maintain element — a multi-year service contract for upkeep, fault response and network management — is frequently bundled into the same notice as installation rather than procured separately, since most buyers would rather hold one supplier accountable for the whole lifecycle. And a concession, as covered above, hands operating rights and revenue risk to the supplier instead of the buyer paying for hardware and services directly.
The practical difficulty isn't understanding any one of these pieces individually — it's that tracking real opportunities means combining all of them at once: watching the right portals for the relevant country, filtering by the relevant CPV codes, and still catching notices that a buyer filed under a generic or slightly wrong code, across however many countries a supplier is actually able to bid into. Doing that by hand means running the same search across several national portals, in several languages, on a recurring basis, and cross-checking against TED for anything above threshold.
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EV procurement is the formal, competitive process public sector bodies use to buy EV charging infrastructure and related services — hardware, installation and ongoing operation — rather than simply placing a purchase order, governed by procurement law above certain contract-value thresholds.
Mainly municipalities and local authorities (on-street, car-park and fleet charging), transit and transport operators (depot charging), highways and roads authorities (network-level charging, often as a concession), and government fleets (health, emergency services, central departments).
An open tender is a single competition for a single piece of work. A framework or DPS appoints a shortlist of suppliers once, and buyers then call off from it by direct award or mini-competition. A concession grants a supplier the right to install and commercially operate charge points, recovering its investment through charging revenue rather than a direct fee.
Above EU thresholds, on TED; below threshold or for a specific country, on national portals such as Find a Tender and Contracts Finder in the UK, or their equivalents elsewhere. No single portal covers every country, which is why tracking more than one market means combining several sources.
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One won contract pays for decades of ChargeTenders.