The main vocabulary of the Common Procurement Vocabulary contains 9,454 codes, and every one of them begins with a two-digit division number. There are 45 divisions. That is the number worth remembering, because the divisions do not run from 01 to 99. They skip. There is no division 01 and no 02, the sequence jumps from 03 straight to 09, and it stops at 98. Of the 99 possible two-digit numbers, 54 carry nothing in the current vocabulary.
A supplier who assumes the numbering is continuous will spend time looking for codes that do not exist, and will misread how wide a notice actually is. The full list of the 45 divisions is further down, each with its own anchor, so a link ending in #90000000 lands on the right row. Everything here comes directly from Annex I to Commission Regulation (EC) No 213/2008, checked on 10 August 2026.
What the eight digits actually say
The code you see on a contract notice is eight digits plus a ninth after a hyphen. Annex I describes the split in one short passage. The main vocabulary is a tree, and the numeric code of eight digits is subdivided so that “the first two digits identify the divisions (XX000000-Y), the first three digits identify the groups (XXX00000-Y), the first four digits identify the classes (XXXX0000-Y), the first five digits identify the categories (XXXXX000-Y)”. Each of the last three digits gives a greater degree of precision within each category, and the ninth digit “serves to verify the previous digits”.
So the number is read from the left, and the zeros on the right are the interesting part. A code with six trailing zeros is a whole division. A code with no trailing zeros is a single, tightly defined item. Take waste, one of the subjects people search for most often:
- 90000000-7 Sewage, refuse, cleaning and environmental services, the division
- 90500000-2 Refuse and waste related services, the group
- 90510000-5 Refuse disposal and treatment, the class
- 90511000-2 Refuse collection services, the category
- 90511100-3 Urban solid-refuse collection services, one step finer still
The ninth digit is not part of the meaning. It is a check digit, calculated from the eight that precede it, and its only job is to catch a mistyped code. Two codes that differ only in that last figure are not two different things. They are one code and one typo. The regulation says nothing about the arithmetic behind it, only what it is for, so treat it as a validation aid and never as a level of the tree.
TED, the EU tender portal, gives buyers one instruction that follows directly from the shape of the number: if the CPV is not precise enough for what you are buying, “then contracting authorities should refer to the division, group, class or category that better describes their intended purchase”, which is “a more general code that can be recognised because it has more zeros”. Reading zeros is therefore a practical skill, not trivia. When you see a notice tagged 45000000-7 rather than something six digits deep, the buyer has told you it did not want to narrow the field.
The 45 divisions of the CPV main vocabulary
Below is every division in Annex I, in the order the regulation lists them. The wording in the second column is the official English text of the annex, unaltered. The third column is a plain description written from the division’s own group-level entries, and the last column counts how many codes sit inside that division in total, including the division code itself. The row for each division carries its code as an anchor.
| Division | Official wording in Annex I | What it covers | Codes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 03000000-1 | Agricultural, farming, fishing, forestry and related products | Raw produce from farming, market gardening, hunting, fishing and forestry. | 230 |
| 09000000-3 | Petroleum products, fuel, electricity and other sources of energy | Fuel and energy supply, from diesel and coal to electricity, district heating, solar and nuclear energy. | 94 |
| 14000000-1 | Mining, basic metals and related products | Quarried and mined raw materials, ores, basic metals and recovered secondary raw materials. | 148 |
| 15000000-8 | Food, beverages, tobacco and related products | Food and drink of every kind, animal feedstuffs and tobacco, from meat and dairy to preserved fish and beverages. | 477 |
| 16000000-5 | Agricultural machinery | Agricultural and forestry machinery, including tractors, harvesters, sprayers and spare parts. | 44 |
| 18000000-9 | Clothing, footwear, luggage articles and accessories | Clothing and footwear, including occupational and protective workwear, plus jewellery, watches, furs, luggage and bags. | 194 |
| 19000000-6 | Leather and textile fabrics, plastic and rubber materials | Leather, textile fabrics, yarn and thread, rubber and plastic materials, and waste from those materials. | 97 |
| 22000000-0 | Printed matter and related products | Printed matter: books, newspapers, forms, stamps, banknotes, catalogues, ink and printing plates. | 109 |
| 24000000-4 | Chemical products | Chemicals: gases, dyes and pigments, basic organic and inorganic chemicals, fertilisers, plastics in primary forms and explosives. | 292 |
| 30000000-9 | Office and computing machinery, equipment and supplies except furniture and software packages | Office machinery, computer equipment and supplies. Furniture and software packages are deliberately excluded. | 401 |
| 31000000-6 | Electrical machinery, apparatus, equipment and consumables; lighting | Electrical machinery and equipment: motors, generators, transformers, switchgear, insulated cable, batteries and lighting. | 363 |
| 32000000-3 | Radio, television, communication, telecommunication and related equipment | Broadcast, communication and telecommunication equipment, including networks, transmitters and receivers. | 226 |
| 33000000-0 | Medical equipments, pharmaceuticals and personal care products | Medical equipment, pharmaceuticals, personal care products and mortuary equipment. | 641 |
| 34000000-7 | Transport equipment and auxiliary products to transportation | Vehicles of every kind: cars, bodies and trailers, motorcycles, bicycles, ships, rolling stock, aircraft and spacecraft, plus parts. | 468 |
| 35000000-4 | Security, fire-fighting, police and defence equipment | Emergency, security, police and defence equipment, from warships and missiles to individual soldier kit. | 210 |
| 37000000-8 | Musical instruments, sport goods, games, toys, handicraft, art materials and accessories | Musical instruments, sports goods, games and toys, fairground amusements, handicraft and art supplies. | 345 |
| 38000000-5 | Laboratory, optical and precision equipments (excl. glasses) | Laboratory, optical, navigational and measuring instruments, plus industrial process control and remote control equipment. | 316 |
| 39000000-2 | Furniture (incl. office furniture), furnishings, domestic appliances (excl. lighting) and cleaning products | Furniture and furnishings, textile articles, domestic appliances and cleaning and polishing products. | 468 |
| 41000000-9 | Collected and purified water | Collected and purified water. The whole division is four codes: the division itself, natural water, drinking water and non drinking water. | 4 |
| 42000000-6 | Industrial machinery | Industrial machinery: power plant, food and beverage processing machinery, furnaces, lifting equipment, cooling, machine tools and paper machinery. | 552 |
| 43000000-3 | Machinery for mining, quarrying, construction equipment | Mining, quarrying and construction machinery, earthmoving equipment, metallurgy machinery and workshop equipment. | 127 |
| 44000000-0 | Construction structures and materials; auxiliary products to construction (except electric apparatus) | Construction materials and structural products, cable and wire, tools, locks and fasteners, tanks, paints and building stone. | 539 |
| 45000000-7 | Construction work | Construction work itself, from site preparation through building work and installation to completion, plus plant hire with an operator. | 822 |
| 48000000-8 | Software package and information systems | Software packages and information systems, including servers, database and operating software and industry-specific packages. | 198 |
| 50000000-5 | Repair and maintenance services | Repair and maintenance of vehicles, aircraft, rolling stock, computers, medical equipment, building installations and defence materiel. | 224 |
| 51000000-9 | Installation services (except software) | Installation work for everything except software, from electrical and mechanical plant to fire protection and guidance systems. | 110 |
| 55000000-0 | Hotel, restaurant and retail trade services | Hotels, camping sites, restaurants, bars, canteens, catering and retail trade services. | 39 |
| 60000000-8 | Transport services (excl. Waste transport) | Passenger and goods transport by road, rail, pipeline, air, water and space. Waste transport sits elsewhere. | 55 |
| 63000000-9 | Supporting and auxiliary transport services; travel agencies services | Cargo handling and storage, travel agency and tour operator services, and support services for land, water and air transport. | 85 |
| 64000000-6 | Postal and telecommunications services | Postal and courier services, and telecommunications services. | 55 |
| 65000000-3 | Public utilities | Distribution of water, gas, electricity and other energy sources, plus meter reading. | 17 |
| 66000000-0 | Financial and insurance services | Banking and investment, insurance and pensions, treasury services and reinsurance. | 89 |
| 70000000-1 | Real estate services | Real estate services: own property, letting and leasing of own property, and agency work on a fee or contract basis. | 36 |
| 71000000-8 | Architectural, construction, engineering and inspection services | Architecture, engineering, urban planning, construction-related services, technical testing and inspection, monitoring and laboratory services. | 184 |
| 72000000-5 | IT services: consulting, software development, Internet and support | IT services: hardware and software consultancy, programming, data services, internet, networks, audit and backup. | 252 |
| 73000000-2 | Research and development services and related consultancy services | Research and experimental development, research and development consultancy, and design and execution of research, including defence research. | 26 |
| 75000000-6 | Administration, defence and social security services | Public administration, provision of services to the community, defence and compulsory social security. | 57 |
| 76000000-3 | Services related to the oil and gas industry | Professional services for the oil and gas industry, including drilling, rig positioning and pipeline inspection. | 67 |
| 77000000-0 | Agricultural, forestry, horticultural, aquacultural and apicultural services | Services in farming, forestry, horticulture, zoology, animal husbandry, hunting, fishing, aquaculture and beekeeping. | 54 |
| 79000000-4 | Business services: law, marketing, consulting, recruitment, printing and security | Business services: legal, accounting and audit, market research, management consultancy, office support, recruitment, investigation and security, and printing. | 199 |
| 80000000-4 | Education and training services | Education and training at every level, including adult education and training in defence and security materials. | 55 |
| 85000000-9 | Health and social work services | Health services, veterinary services, and social work and related services. | 98 |
| 90000000-7 | Sewage, refuse, cleaning and environmental services | Sewage, refuse collection and disposal, street and building cleaning, sanitation and environmental services. | 197 |
| 92000000-1 | Recreational, cultural and sporting services | Film and video, radio and television, entertainment, news agencies, libraries, archives and museums, and sport. | 105 |
| 98000000-3 | Other community, social and personal services | Membership organisations, equal opportunities consultancy, private households with employed persons and extraterritorial bodies. | 85 |
Why the numbering jumps
Only 45 of the 99 possible two-digit numbers are in use; 54 are not. The unused ones are 01, 02, 04 to 08, 10 to 13, 17, 20, 21, 23, 25 to 29, 36, 40, 46, 47, 49, 52 to 54, 56 to 59, 61, 62, 67 to 69, 74, 78, 81 to 84, 86 to 89, 91, 93 to 97 and 99. The pattern is not random. Related subjects cluster: construction sits at 44 and 45, transport at 60 and 63, business and professional services at 70 to 79. Adjacency is not identity, though. Division 64 is postal and telecommunications services and division 65 is public utilities, so the run from 60 to 65 is not a block of transport codes.
The reason for the gaps is stated in the regulation itself, in its recitals. The 2008 revision set out to make the vocabulary “less material-driven and more product-driven”, and to that end “divisions which are strongly material driven in the current vocabulary should be redistributed over the other divisions”. The next recital goes further and describes a deliberate thinning out: the hierarchy was to be rationalised “by aggregating and redistributing divisions with a limited number of codes, which should partially be considered together, as well as divisions which could cause confusion”. Annex I was then replaced wholesale rather than patched. The gaps are what a rationalisation leaves behind.
One honest caveat. The regulation explains the mechanism but does not print a list of which division numbers were dropped, and we were not able to retrieve the pre-2008 annex from EUR-Lex to compare the two sets directly. So the mechanism is documented, the individual casualties are not.
The same thinning runs further down the tree, and that is the part most lists miss. Of the 45 divisions, 18 also skip group numbers. Division 14 has no 14100000 and starts at 14200000. Division 33 goes from 33100000 straight to 33600000, leaving four group numbers unused inside a single division. Division 90 starts at 90400000. If you are building a filter or a crawler on the assumption that a division’s groups run one, two, three, the tool will quietly miss rows.
The divisions are nothing like the same size
Counting the codes inside each division produces a spread that is much wider than the neat two-digit labels suggest. Construction work, division 45, holds 822 codes on its own. Medical equipment, pharmaceuticals and personal care products, division 33, holds 641. Food, beverages, tobacco and related products, division 15, holds 477.
At the other end sits division 41, collected and purified water. It contains four codes in total: 41000000-9 for the division, 41100000-0 natural water, 41110000-3 drinking water and 41120000-6 non drinking water. That is the whole of water in the CPV. A division-level match in construction narrows nothing at all, while a division-level match in water is already as specific as the vocabulary gets. Any tool that treats “matched at division level” as a single quality of result is flattening a difference of two orders of magnitude, and so is any reader who assumes a two-digit code always means a broad hit. Our own CPV code lookup shows the same tree, and the counts above are a reminder to check which part of it you are standing in.
The list also preserves a few things that have aged. Division 92 still carries 92700000-8, cybercafé services, and division 98 still has 98500000-8 for private households with employed persons. The vocabulary was last revised in 2008 and it shows.
The supplementary vocabulary, and a wrinkle in the official explanation
Alongside the numeric main vocabulary, Annex I contains a second, alphanumeric list. In the words of the annex, it “may be used to expand the description of the subject of a contract”, adding “further details regarding the specific nature or destination of the goods to be purchased”. It holds 903 items, arranged in 19 sections lettered A to U. The letters skip too: there is no section N and no section O.
Here the two official explanations do not agree. Annex I says the alphanumeric code is made up of “a first level comprising a letter corresponding to a section, a second level comprising a letter corresponding to a group, a third level comprising three digits corresponding to subdivisions”, with the last digit serving to verify the previous ones. The TED page on the CPV describes something different: a letter for the section, then “a second level comprising four digits, the first three of which denote a subdivision and the last one being for verification purposes”.
The codes themselves settle it. Every one of the 903 entries in Annex I takes the form of two letters, two digits, a hyphen and a check digit. AA01-1 is metal, in section A for materials, group A for metal and alloy. AA11-1 is steel. There is no supplementary code anywhere in the annex that consists of a single letter followed by four digits. The annex describes the codes that exist; the TED explainer, checked on 10 August 2026, describes a shape the current list does not use. If you are validating supplementary codes in software, validate against the annex.
Which version applies, and since when
The CPV was created by Regulation (EC) No 2195/2002 of 5 November 2002, published in the Official Journal L 340 of 16 December 2002 and amended in 2003. Regulation 213/2008 did not create a new instrument. It replaced Annex I of the 2002 regulation with the version we still use, which is why practitioners call it CPV 2008.
The starting date is where the sources part company, and anyone quoting a date should know it. Article 4 of the regulation says it enters into force on the twentieth day following its publication in the Official Journal of 15 March 2008, and then gives the date of application. In the English, French, Dutch and Danish texts of the Official Journal that date is 15 September 2008, which matches recital 11, where the Commission explains that application should follow six months after publication. The German text of the same article reads 29 September 2008. TED, for its part, states that the CPV adopted by Regulation 213/2008 “is in use since 17/09/2008”. Three official EU texts, three dates, all checked on 10 August 2026. The reading supported by the regulation’s own reasoning, and by four of the five language versions we examined, is 15 September 2008.
None of this affects which codes are valid, and there is no newer main vocabulary to switch to. TED also notes that use of the CPV has been mandatory in the European Union since 1 February 2006. What the date question does affect is archive work: if you are searching historic notices around September 2008, expect the changeover to be untidy.
Reading a code you have never seen before
Put the pieces together and an unfamiliar code stops being opaque. Count the trailing zeros to place it in the tree, look up the first two digits in the table above to find the subject area, then read left to right to see how far the buyer chose to narrow it. A notice tagged 79111000-5 is legal advisory services, four levels down inside business services. A notice tagged 79000000-4 is business services and nothing more, which tells you the buyer either could not or did not want to be specific. Both are legitimate. They are simply not the same signal, and treating them as equivalent is the root of a good many classification mistakes that hide tenders.
FAQ
How many CPV codes are there?
The main vocabulary in Annex I to Regulation (EC) No 213/2008 contains 9,454 codes, counted across all levels from division down to the most detailed entry. The supplementary vocabulary adds a further 903 alphanumeric items. Both figures come from counting the annex itself on 10 August 2026.
How many divisions does the CPV have?
Forty-five. They are the two-digit codes at the top of the tree, from 03 for agricultural products to 98 for other community, social and personal services, and all 45 are listed above with their official wording.
Is there a CPV division 01?
No. Divisions 01, 02, 04 to 08, 10 to 13 and many others do not exist in the CPV 2008 main vocabulary. Of the 99 possible two-digit numbers, 54 are unused, which is why the list starts at 03 and jumps to 09.
What does the ninth digit in a CPV code do?
It verifies the eight digits before it. Annex I states only that “a ninth digit serves to verify the previous digits”, so it carries no meaning of its own and is not a level of the classification. Its practical use is catching a code that has been mistyped or truncated.
Which CPV division contains the most codes?
Division 45, construction work, with 822 codes. The smallest is division 41, collected and purified water, with four. That range is worth keeping in mind whenever a search result is described as a division-level match.