UK Tenders API: Find a Tender + Contracts Finder search and tender alerts, with deadlines, values and winners

Search UK public sector tenders and contract awards from both official portals at once: Find a Tender (FTS, the main UK portal under the Procurement Act 2023) and Contracts Finder (lower-value English contracts). Each notice becomes one clean row:

• Title, buyer (name, type, town, postcode, region) and a link to the official notice
• Deadline for tenders or requests to participate, with days left and an open/closed flag
• Estimated value (excl. and incl. VAT) and awarded value
• Winning suppliers of contract awards (company names, Companies House/PPON IDs, SME flag)
• CPV codes with descriptions, delivery regions (ITL/NUTS codes and names), procedure, legal basis, lots and award criteria
• SME and VCSE suitability, contract start and end dates, document links

Filter by keyword, CPV code, region, value, buyer, notice type and open deadline. Then turn on Only new notices since the last run and schedule a daily run to get your own UK tender alert. Tender-alert subscriptions cost £25–100+ a month; this costs cents.

It reads the portals' official OCDS APIs, so there is no scraping, no browser and no proxy. Free while in launch; planned pay-per-event price: $1.50 per 1,000 notices.

What can I use it for?

• Daily tender alerts for your bid team. New UK tenders matching your sector, region and size, every morning, by email, Slack, Google Sheets or webhook.
• Competitor and market analysis. Who wins which public contracts, from which buyers, at what value. Award notices from both portals are included.
• Pipeline planning. Pipeline, preliminary market engagement and planned procurement notices (UK1–UK3) show what buyers intend to buy months in advance.
• CRM and BI feeds. Send clean JSON or CSV to your CRM, Airtable or data warehouse through Apify integrations or the API.
• Research and journalism. Public spending by sector, region, procedure type or buyer.

What data does it return?

Field	Example
noticeId, noticeUrl, source	093436-2026, link to the notice, Find a Tender or Contracts Finder
stage, noticeType, noticeTypeLabel, isUpdate	tender, UK4, Tender notice
title, description, procurementReference	Commercial Asset Management System
publishedAt, publishedDate	2026-10-02T14:01:41Z
buyerName, buyerType, buyerTown, buyerPostcode, buyerRegion, buyerWebsite, buyerId	Oxford City Council, Public authority - sub-central government, Oxford, OX1 1BX, UKJ14
cpvMain, cpvMainDescription, cpvCodes	48100000, Industry specific software package
deliveryRegions, deliveryRegionNames, nationwide	["UKJ14"], ["South East"]
estimatedValue, estimatedValueInclVat, estimatedValueCurrency	1800000, 2160000, GBP
deadline, deadlineType, daysUntilDeadline, isOpen, enquiryDeadline	2026-11-05T12:00:00Z, tenders, 32, true
contractStart, contractEnd	2027-06-01, 2032-05-31
procurementMethod, procurementMethodDetails, legalBasis, aboveThreshold	open, Open procedure, Procurement Act 2023, true
suitableForSme, suitableForVcse, lotCount, lots[]	lot title, value, CPV, award criteria, SME suitability
awardedValue, awardDate, supplierNames, suppliers[]	46000000.09, 2026-09-30, ["Softcat PLC", …]
documentUrls, submissionDetails	Link to the buyer's e-tendering portal
matchedKeywords	Which of your keywords matched

Example output

A call for tenders from a real run on 2026-10-04 (shortened):

{
  "noticeId": "093436-2026",
  "source": "Find a Tender",
  "noticeUrl": "https://www.find-tender.service.gov.uk/Notice/093436-2026",
  "noticeTypeLabel": "Tender notice",
  "publishedDate": "2026-10-02",
  "title": "Commercial Asset Management System",
  "buyerName": "Oxford City Council",
  "buyerType": "Public authority - sub-central government",
  "buyerTown": "Oxford",
  "procurementMethodDetails": "Open procedure",
  "legalBasis": "Procurement Act 2023",
  "cpvMain": "48100000",
  "cpvMainDescription": "Industry specific software package",
  "deliveryRegionNames": ["South East"],
  "estimatedValue": 1800000.0,
  "estimatedValueInclVat": 2160000.0,
  "deadline": "2026-11-05T12:00:00Z",
  "deadlineType": "tenders",
  "daysUntilDeadline": 32,
  "isOpen": true,
  "contractStart": "2027-06-01",
  "contractEnd": "2032-05-31",
  "submissionDetails": "https://in-tendhost.co.uk/oxfordcc/aspx/Home",
  "matchedKeywords": ["software"]
}

A contract award from the same run (shortened, 16 suppliers):

{
  "noticeId": "093427-2026",
  "noticeTypeLabel": "Contract award notice",
  "title": "Corporate Software & Related Products and Services - ITT",
  "buyerName": "Crescent Purchasing Consortium Limited",
  "nationwide": true,
  "awardedValue": 46000000.09,
  "awardDate": "2026-09-30",
  "contractStart": "2026-10-19",
  "contractEnd": "2028-10-18",
  "lotCount": 10,
  "supplierNames": ["Xledger UK ltd", "Advanced Business Solutions", "ION Industries Ltd", "Softcat PLC", "…"],
  "suppliers": [{"name": "Softcat PLC", "id": "GB-PPON-PZRT-9169-TVMT", "town": "Marlow", "country": "GB", "scale": "large", "vcse": false}]
}

The Output tab has two ready-made views, Tenders and Contract awards. Export as CSV, Excel or JSON, or fetch the results through the API.

How much does it cost?

Free while in launch. The actor charges no fee of its own right now; you pay only the Apify platform usage of your runs (the free Apify plan includes $5 of usage a month). The pay-per-event price below is planned and applies only once it is switched on; Apify notifies existing users before a price change takes effect.

Event	Planned price
Notice output	$0.0015 (= $1.50 per 1,000 notices)

• Notices removed by your filters, older versions of the same notice and notices already delivered in earlier runs ("Only new" mode) are not charged.
• Alert example (at the planned price): our test alert (tenders and planning notices in London and the South East above £50,000) found 105 notices in the last 3 days on its first run ($0.16). The next run found 0 new notices ($0.00). After simulating 3 new notices, the run after that would cost $0.0045.
• Cost cap: once pricing is on, set Maximum cost per run and the actor stops cleanly when it reaches it.

For comparison (Apify Store, checked 2026-10-04): other UK tender actors charge $2–$15 per 1,000 notices, several add a per-run start fee, and one charges $0.10 per notice. UK tender-alert subscriptions cost £25–100+ a month.

How to use it

1. Set your filters: keywords, notice types, CPV codes, regions, value range, buyer names or "Only open tenders". All filters are optional and combined with AND. Several values inside one filter are combined with OR.
2. Choose the period: Published in the last N days (default 3), or exact dates.
3. Click Start. Results are sorted newest first.

Daily tender alert

{
  "keywords": ["software", "cyber security", "cloud*"],
  "noticeTypes": ["tender"],
  "onlyOpen": true,
  "regions": ["London", "South East"],
  "minValueGbp": 50000,
  "publishedWithinDays": 2,
  "onlyNew": true
}

Create a schedule (for example every weekday at 08:00) with this input and connect an integration (email, Slack, Google Sheets, webhook) to the run's dataset. Each run returns only notices you haven't received before. The 2-day window means a missed run never loses notices.

Who won IT contracts in the last 3 days?

{
  "noticeTypes": ["award"],
  "cpvCodes": ["72", "48"],
  "publishedWithinDays": 3,
  "maxItems": 1000
}

API example

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/adamhaleworks~uk-tenders-find-a-tender-contracts-finder/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=<TOKEN>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"keywords": ["software"], "noticeTypes": ["tender"], "onlyOpen": true}'

Useful CPV codes and regions

CPV: 72 IT services · 48 software packages · 45 construction work · 79 business services · 85 health and social care · 90 waste and cleaning · 71 architecture and engineering · 33 medical equipment · 34 transport equipment · 80 education and training. A short code includes every code below it.

Regions: London, South East, South West, East of England, East Midlands, West Midlands, North East, North West, Yorkshire and the Humber, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, England, or ITL/NUTS codes such as UKI, TLJ or UKM7. Nationwide notices (delivered across the UK) are included by default.

How it works

• Data sources. The official OCDS APIs of Find a Tender and Contracts Finder. No key is needed, and both publish under the Open Government Licence v3.0. The two portals barely overlap (2 of 197 Contracts Finder notices on a test day were also on Find a Tender), so reading both gives the full picture.
• Filtering. The APIs only filter by date, so the actor reads every notice in your date window and applies your filters itself. Keywords match whole words in the title, description, main CPV description and lot titles (cloud* matches cloud and cloud-based). Set Search keywords in to Title only for stricter matching.
• Rate limits. Find a Tender allows about 12 requests (1,200 notices) per 2 minutes. The actor stays under that, so up to 3 days of notices are read in about 10 seconds, and a week takes about 4 minutes. If a portal asks it to slow down (for example when you start two runs within a minute or two), it waits the 2 minutes the portal asks for and continues. Nothing is lost.
• One row per notice. When a tender has been updated, only the latest version is returned by default (turn off Only the latest version of each notice to get every version).
• Only new. The notices already delivered for a search are stored in a named key-value store in your account. A different search keeps a separate memory.
• Reliability. If one portal is down, notices from the other are still delivered and the status message says what is missing. A migrated run continues without delivering or charging notices twice.

Limitations

• Notices are as published by buyers. Some have no value, a value only per lot, or a region only for the buyer. The region filter then falls back to the buyer's region.
• Contracts Finder mostly carries awards and lower-value English contracts. Scottish (Public Contracts Scotland), Welsh (Sell2Wales) and Northern Irish portals are not read, but their above-threshold notices also appear on Find a Tender.
• Long date windows are slow because of Find a Tender's rate limit: about 6 minutes per 10 days.
• Contact persons, email addresses and phone numbers are never included. Descriptions are scanned to remove email addresses and phone numbers.
• Supplier names: a supplier can be a sole trader whose business name is a person's name. To avoid outputting personal data, a supplier's name is shown only when it contains a company or organisation marker (Ltd, LLP, PLC, CIC, Council, Trust, University, Solutions, and so on). Otherwise the row says "nameWithheld": true and keeps the country and SME flag. In our 3-day IT awards test, 8 of 153 supplier entries (5%) were withheld.

Is it legal?

Both portals are official UK government services, and their data is published under the Open Government Licence v3.0, which allows commercial reuse with attribution: Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. This actor is not affiliated with the Cabinet Office or Crown Commercial Service. It outputs organisations, not people. You are responsible for using the data in line with the laws that apply to you.

FAQ

Why do I get fewer results than on the portal? "Only open tenders" drops notices whose deadline has passed, value filters drop notices without a published value, and "Only the latest version of each notice" collapses updates into one row.

Why is a tender's deadline empty? Some procedures (for example the competitive flexible procedure's first stage) only publish a deadline for requests to participate. That deadline is returned with deadlineType: "requestsToParticipate". Some notices have no deadline at all.

Does it include Scottish and Welsh tenders? Above-threshold notices from all four nations are on Find a Tender and included. Smaller Scottish and Welsh contracts that only appear on Public Contracts Scotland or Sell2Wales are not.

Something is wrong or missing? Open an issue on the actor's Issues tab and include the notice ID.

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Author: Adam Hale