UK Government Tenders & Contracts Feed

Search and export UK public-sector contract notices (tenders and award notices) straight from the official Contracts Finder open-data API (OCDS). No scraping, no HTML parsing, no login — this actor calls the government's own JSON endpoint and returns clean, flat records you can drop into a spreadsheet, a CRM, or an agent's tool loop.

Data source: https://www.contractsfinder.service.gov.uk/Published/Notices/OCDS/Search Licence: UK Open Government Licence (OGL). Attribution to the Crown. No terms-of-service conflict: the endpoint is published as open data and the actor only reads it.

What it does

• Queries the official Contracts Finder OCDS search API by keyword, buyer, or date window
• Returns both notice types: tender (competition live) and award (who won, and for how much)
• Normalises each notice into one flat record: OCID, published date, notice type, title, buyer name, value in GBP, deadline, status, and a direct link to the source notice
• Stops cleanly at maxItems so a run never overshoots your budget

What you can do with it

• Bid pipeline — pull live tenders matching your service keywords every morning and pipe them into a CRM or a Slack channel
• Competitor intelligence — award notices carry the winner and the contract value, so you can see who is actually winning your segment and at what price
• Market sizing — filter by buyer (council, NHS trust, central department) and date range to measure spend in a niche before you chase it
• Agent tooling — flat JSON with stable field names, designed to be consumed by an LLM agent without post-processing

Example output

{
  "ocid": "ocds-b5fd17-06291f8e-82ec-405e-87c2-1451a9f0aa93",
  "date": "2026-10-18T12:54:08+01:00",
  "type": "award",
  "title": "Observability-Tooling",
  "buyer_name": "DSIT",
  "value_amount": 249480,
  "value_currency": "GBP",
  "deadline": "2026-09-18T12:00:00+01:00",
  "status": "complete",
  "url": "https://www.contractsfinder.service.gov.uk/Notice/..."
}

Input

Field	Type	Default	Notes
query	string	""	Free-text keyword matched against notice title/description
maxItems	integer	50	Hard cap on records returned (1–1000)
noticeType	string	""	tender, award, or empty for both
buyerName	string	""	Filter on buying organisation
publishedAfter	string	""	ISO date, e.g. 2026-10-01

Example: call via API

curl -X POST https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/affable_ornament_8s8~uk-gov-tenders-feed/runs-sync \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"query":"grounds maintenance","maxItems":20}'

Read the results from the run's default dataset:

curl "https://api.apify.com/v2/actor-runs/<RUN_ID>/dataset/items?format=json" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $APIFY_TOKEN"

Use with AI agents (MCP)

This actor is a plain JSON-in / JSON-out tool, so it fits an agent loop without an adapter:

• Apify MCP — expose the Store actor list to your agent and call it as a tool; input schema above is the tool signature.
• Any HTTP agent — the run-sync call above returns the run object; pull the dataset items and feed them straight into a prompt.
• Keep maxItems small (10–50) inside an agent loop; the Contracts Finder corpus is large and the useful signal is in the newest notices.

Pricing

Currently published free (Apify platform usage fees for the run still apply per your plan). A per-result price will be added once monetisation is enabled on the account.

Coverage and gaps

• Covers Contracts Finder only (central government is often elsewhere: the incumbent's own guidance points live contracts to Find a Tender / Playfair for above-threshold notices, and the Scottish/Welsh/Northern Ireland portals publish separately). If you need above-threshold central tenders or devolved portals, that is a different feed.
• Award values are as self-published by buyers; a meaningful share of notices carry no value field. Missing values are left as null, never invented.
• The upstream API ignores some filters and paginates inconsistently; the actor compensates by capping on maxItems client-side.

Troubleshooting

• Empty dataset — the keyword matched nothing in the retained corpus; widen publishedAfter or drop query.
• 429/timeouts — the upstream open API rate-limits bursts; lower maxItems or retry.

Source

Data © Crown Copyright, released under the Open Government Licence. The actor redistributes notice metadata and links back to the official notice URL in every record.