UK Contracts Finder Tenders Scraper

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Quick answer: The UK Contracts Finder Tenders Scraper exports UK public-sector contract notices — buyer, title, value, CPV classification, publish and closing dates, status, and award/supplier detail once a contract is won — into JSON, CSV or Excel, filtered by keyword, date range, notice type and value. Contracts Finder is where every UK public body (councils, NHS trusts, central government departments) posts notices, and its public API is keyless Open Contracting Data Standard JSON: deeply nested tender/award/parties objects we flatten to one lead-ready row instead of handing you a 300+ KB OCDS blob. Pricing is pay-per-result — $4.20 per 1 000 notices, no subscription, no card required to try it.

🎯 What this scrapes

UK Contracts Finder is the central portal where every UK public body — councils, NHS trusts, central government departments — posts contract notices. The raw feed is Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS) JSON: deeply nested tender/award/parties objects that are a pain to parse by hand. This Actor queries Contracts Finder's public OCDS search API and flattens every release into one buyer-ready row — buyer name, title, value, CPV classification, publish/closing dates, status, and award/supplier info when a contract has already been won. No API key, no login, no OCDS-schema puzzle.

🔥 What we handle for you

• 🔁 Retries with exponential backoff on 429/503/network errors — up to 5 attempts, Retry-After honoured.
• 🧱 Per-release fault isolation — one malformed OCDS release is skipped and logged, never crashes the whole run.
• 🧊 Clean, typed dataset rows — Pydantic-validated, ISO-8601 timestamps, never the raw 300+ KB OCDS blob.
• 💰 Pay-Per-Event pricing — you only pay for rows that land in your dataset. No data, no charge.

💡 Use cases

• Bid-team pipeline — pull new tenders matching a keyword or CPV area every day.
• Market intelligence — track which UK public bodies are buying what, and at what value.
• Award tracking — monitor closed notices for supplier names and award values on contracts you bid on.
• Lead generation — build a prospect list of buyers issuing contracts in your sector.

⚙️ How to use it

1. Click Try for free at the top of the page.
2. Fill in the input form — most fields have sensible defaults.
3. Click Start. Output streams into the run's dataset.
4. Export from Storage → Dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel — or fetch via the API.

📥 Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Notes
keyword	string	no	'—'	Free-text keyword sent to Contracts Finder's search (e.g. grounds maintenance). Leave blank to match all…
noticeTypes	array	no	['Contract']	Notice types to search for, e.g. Contract, Tender, Award. Only…
publishedFrom	string	no	'—'	Only include notices published on or after this date, e.g. 2026-01-01.
publishedTo	string	no	'—'	Only include notices published on or before this date, e.g. 2026-08-01. Must be on/after…
minValue	number	no	'—'	Discard notices whose contract value is below this amount. Applied client-side after fetching (never sent to the API).
maxValue	number	no	'—'	Discard notices whose contract value is above this amount. Applied client-side after fetching (never sent to the API).…
maxResults	integer	no	20	Hard cap on the number of contract notice rows returned by this run.
useProxy	boolean	no	False	Route requests through Apify Proxy. Contracts Finder is UK government infrastructure with no observed anti-bot, so this…

Example input

{
  "noticeTypes": [
    "Contract"
  ],
  "maxResults": 5,
  "useProxy": true
}

📤 Output

Every row is one dataset item.

Field	Type	Notes
notice_id	string	OCDS release ID.
ocid	string	Open Contracting ID grouping releases for the same contracting process.
notice_url	['string', 'null']	Public Contracts Finder notice URL; null when the release ID doesn't match the expected GUID format.
notice_type	['string', 'null']	OCDS release tag, e.g. tender, award, contract, planning.
title	string	Notice title.
description	['string', 'null']	Notice description.
buyer_name	['string', 'null']	Contracting authority / buyer name.
status	['string', 'null']	Tender status, e.g. active, complete, cancelled.
value_amount	['number', 'null']	Contract value amount.
value_currency	['string', 'null']	Contract value currency (usually GBP).
cpv_codes	array	Deduplicated CPV classification codes; empty list when none present.
publish_date	['string', 'null']	ISO 8601 publish date of the release.
closing_date	['string', 'null']	Tender submission deadline.
award_status	['string', 'null']	Status of the first award; null for pre-award notices.
award_value_amount	['number', 'null']	Value of the first award; null for pre-award notices.
award_value_currency	['string', 'null']	Currency of the first award value.
supplier_names	array	Deduplicated supplier names across all awards; empty list for pre-award notices.
scraped_at	string	ISO 8601 UTC timestamp when this row was scraped.

Example output

{}

💰 Pricing

Pay-Per-Event — you pay only when these events fire:

Event	USD	What it is
actor-start	$0.20	One-off warm-up charge per run
result-row	$0.004	Per unique dataset item

Example: 1 000 results at the rates above ≈ $4.20. No subscription, no minimum, no card to start — Apify gives every new account $5 of free credit.

🚧 Limitations

• Contracts Finder only — Sell2Wales, Public Contracts Scotland, and eTendersNI are out of scope.
• No tender-document (PDF) downloads, only the structured notice metadata.
• Real-time per-query only — no historical bulk CSV/XML export and no cross-run deduplication.

❓ FAQ

Do I need a Contracts Finder account or API key?

No. Contracts Finder's OCDS search API is public and keyless — this Actor calls it directly.

Which notice types are supported?

notice_types defaults to ["Contract"], the confirmed-working value. Other OCDS notice types (e.g. Tender, Award) are passed through as-is; an unsupported value surfaces the API's own rejection rather than failing silently.

Why is maxResults capped at 300?

Each OCDS release is unusually large (~310 KB) because it carries full tender/award/parties objects. The cap keeps a single run's bandwidth (and cost) predictable; raise it only if you need a bigger sample.

Can I filter by contract value?

Yes — minValue/maxValue filter on the parsed value_amount client-side (Contracts Finder's API doesn't expose a value filter server-side).

💬 Your feedback

Spotted a bug, hit a weird edge case, or need a new field? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab on Apify Console — we ship fixes weekly and we read every report.

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