South Africa Tenders Scraper: eTenders Feed

Get a clean, filterable feed of open South African government tenders, straight from National Treasury's official eTenders portal. Every record comes with the tender number, buyer, province, category, closing date and time, briefing session details and direct links to the tender documents.

No login, no copying from web pages, no PDFs to read just to find out what is on offer. Run it once, schedule it daily, or plug it into your own alerts.

What it does

• Reads new tender notices from the national eTenders portal (etenders.gov.za) through its official Open Contracting (OCDS) API.
• Adds the details OCDS leaves out (province, detailed category, briefing session, delivery location and live status) from the same portal.
• Filters by publication date, status, province, organ of state, category, keywords and closing date.
• Returns one tidy record per tender, with the same field names every time.

The eTenders portal already carries notices from national and provincial departments, municipalities and state-owned companies, including Eskom, Transnet, SANRAL, the City of Cape Town and the City of Tshwane.

Who it is for

• Suppliers and contractors who want a daily list of tenders that fit their trade and province.
• B-BBEE consultants and bid writers who track opportunities for several clients.
• Tender alert services and newsletters that need a reliable, structured feed to build on.
• Researchers and journalists looking at public procurement activity.

Quick start

1. Click Start with the default input. You get up to 50 open tenders published in the last 3 days.
2. Narrow it down: pick provinces, add keywords like security or solar, or set a closing date window.
3. Schedule it to run every morning and connect the dataset to email, Google Sheets, Slack or your own system with an Apify integration or webhook.

Input

Field	What it does	Default
publishedWithinDays	Tenders published from this many days ago up to today	3
publishedFrom / publishedTo	Exact publication window instead of "last N days". Accepts 2026-10-01 or 2 weeks	not set
status	open, closed, cancelled, awarded or all	open
provinces	One or more of the 9 provinces, or National	all
organsOfState	Buyer name contains any of these words, for example Transnet, City of Cape Town, Health	all
categories	Category contains any of these words, for example Construction, Security, works	all
keywords	Title, description or tender number contains any of these words	none
closingDateFrom / closingDateTo	Only tenders closing in this window. 7 days means seven days from today	not set
maxItems	Stop after this many tenders, newest first. 0 means no limit	50
includeContactPersons	Add the official contact email from the notice	false
onlyNew	Return only tenders not delivered by an earlier run with the same filters. See Daily monitoring below	false
stateStoreName	Optional custom name for the store that remembers delivered tenders	automatic

Example input:

{
  "publishedWithinDays": 7,
  "status": "open",
  "provinces": ["Western Cape", "Gauteng"],
  "keywords": ["cleaning", "security"],
  "closingDateFrom": "7 days",
  "maxItems": 200
}

Daily monitoring

Turn on onlyNew (Only new since last run) and schedule the Actor. Each run then returns only tenders it has not delivered before, so your email digest, sheet or Slack channel gets each tender once, and you pay only for the new ones.

How it works:

• The Actor remembers the OCDS id (ocid) of every tender it delivers, in a named key-value store in your Apify account. The name is built from a hash of your filters, for example sa-tenders-seen-8b41d0c7e2f95a13. The exact name is shown in the log and in RUN_SUMMARY.
• The filters in the hash are status, provinces, organsOfState, categories, keywords and sources. The publication and closing date windows, maxItems and includeContactPersons are not, so a rolling window keeps the same memory. Change a filter and you get a fresh, separate memory.
• Set stateStoreName to choose the name yourself, for example one store per client, or to start over with a new name. Deleting the store in Storage also starts over.
• The last 50,000 tender IDs are kept; older ones are dropped.
• A tender is delivered once per memory, even if its status or closing date changes later.

Example schedule: every weekday at 07:00 South African time (cron 0 7 * * 1-5, timezone Africa/Johannesburg) with this input:

{
  "publishedWithinDays": 3,
  "status": "open",
  "provinces": ["Western Cape"],
  "keywords": ["security", "cleaning"],
  "maxItems": 500,
  "onlyNew": true
}

The 3 day window overlaps the previous runs on purpose. Notices published late or over a weekend are still caught, and the overlap is never delivered twice. Keep maxItems high enough for a full day of new tenders, because it counts new tenders only.

Output

Each tender is one item in the dataset. Dates are in South African time (+02:00). You can download the data as JSON, CSV, Excel or XML, or read it through the Apify API.

{
  "source": "etenders.gov.za",
  "ocid": "ocds-9t57fa-174760",
  "sourceTenderId": "174760",
  "tenderNumber": "TNPA/2026/10/0006/114898/RFP",
  "title": "LEASING OF PREMISES DESCRIBED AS LAND ASSET NUMBER ERF EBX2466L, AND EBX2467L LOCATED ON A PORTION OF ERF 19711 AND ERF 19720, WEST BANK, IN THE PORT OF EAST...",
  "description": "LEASING OF PREMISES DESCRIBED AS LAND ASSET NUMBER ERF EBX2466L, AND EBX2467L LOCATED ON A PORTION OF ERF 19711 AND ERF 19720, WEST BANK, IN THE PORT OF EAST LONDON FOR A PERIOD OF UP TO TEN (10) YEARS",
  "tenderType": "Request for Proposal",
  "procurementMethod": "open",
  "buyerName": "Transnet SOC Ltd",
  "buyerId": "667",
  "province": "Eastern Cape",
  "category": "Rental and leasing activities",
  "mainProcurementCategory": "services",
  "status": "open",
  "sourceStatus": "Published",
  "publishedDate": "2026-10-19T00:00:00+02:00",
  "closingDateTime": "2026-11-27T15:00:00+02:00",
  "daysUntilClosing": 39,
  "briefingSession": {
    "hasBriefing": true,
    "isCompulsory": false,
    "dateTime": "2026-10-30T12:00:00+02:00",
    "venue": "MS TEAMS Meeting - Refer to tender documents for the link"
  },
  "deliveryLocation": "1 Hely Hutchinson Drive, Quigney, East London, 5201",
  "specialConditions": null,
  "eSubmission": false,
  "documents": [
    {
      "title": "TNPA2026100006114898RFP- Request for Proposal (4).pdf",
      "url": "https://www.etenders.gov.za/home/Download?blobName=9944e9e9-d0ac-4c27-a494-b1c590e1bec7.pdf&downloadedFileName=...",
      "format": "pdf",
      "datePublished": "2026-10-19T22:04:17+02:00"
    }
  ],
  "documentCount": 7,
  "sourceUrl": "https://ocds-api.etenders.gov.za/api/OCDSReleases/release/ocds-9t57fa-174760",
  "portalUrl": "https://www.etenders.gov.za/Home/opportunities?id=1",
  "contactEmail": null,
  "enriched": true,
  "dataOrigin": "ocds+portal",
  "licence": "Source: National Treasury eTenders portal (etenders.gov.za) via the OCDS API. ...",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-10-19T23:28:57+02:00",
  "schemaVersion": 1
}

The Output tab has three ready-made views: Tenders (the key columns), Briefing sessions and Documents (one row per document with a download link).

A short run report is saved in the key-value store as RUN_SUMMARY (items returned, records skipped, any source problems).

Pricing

$3 per 1,000 tenders returned (pay per event, charged once per tender saved). You only pay for tenders that land in your dataset, so tight filters keep costs low. Set a maximum cost per run in the run options and the Actor stops cleanly when it is reached.

Data licence and attribution

The data is published by the Office of the Chief Procurement Officer, National Treasury, on the eTenders and data.etenders.gov.za portals. Treasury's publication policy says you may use the data for any purpose, including commercial use, and may republish it as long as a link to the original source stays intact. The OCDS API points to the Open Data Commons PDDL, while the data.etenders.gov.za homepage states CC BY 4.0. To be safe this Actor follows the stricter of the two: credit National Treasury eTenders and keep the link to the source. Each record keeps a sourceUrl and a licence note so you can meet the attribution condition when you pass the data on.

Treasury does not guarantee that the data is complete or up to date. Always check the official notice and documents before you submit a bid.

Privacy (POPIA)

By default the Actor returns no personal information. If you switch on includeContactPersons, it adds only the official contact email published on the notice. It never returns contact names, phone or fax numbers, and it drops free webmail addresses (Gmail, Yahoo and similar) because they are likely to be personal. If you store or use these emails, you are responsible for doing so lawfully under POPIA, for example only to ask questions about the tender.

FAQ

How fresh is the data? Treasury publishes new notices to the OCDS API through the day. A daily run each morning catches everything from the previous working day. The default 3 day window means a Monday run still catches Friday's notices.

Why do some tenders have no province or category? These come from the eTenders portal rather than the OCDS API. If the portal is down during a run, you still get the OCDS data, and enriched is set to false on those records.

Why is the title cut short? eTenders has no separate short title, so the title is the first 160 or so characters of the notice description. The full text is in description.

Does it include Eskom, Transnet and municipal tenders? Yes, when they are advertised on the national eTenders portal, which is required for most public bodies. Some entities also run their own portals; separate sources for those are on the roadmap.

Can I get closed, cancelled or awarded tenders? Yes. Set status to closed, cancelled, awarded or all. Award details (winning bidder and value) are not included yet.

How do I get alerts? Schedule the Actor daily with your filters and onlyNew turned on (see Daily monitoring), then use an Apify integration (email, Slack, Google Sheets, Zapier, Make) or a webhook to send new results wherever you need them.

Something looks wrong. What should I do? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab with the run link. Include the tender number if a specific record is affected.

Disclaimer

This Actor is independent and is not affiliated with or endorsed by National Treasury or any organ of state. It reads public data published for reuse.