UK Find a Tender Scraper: Tenders, Awards, Buyers

UK Find a Tender Scraper: Tenders, Awards, Buyers

Scrape UK public sector tenders and contract awards from Find a Tender, the official UK government procurement service, through its open OCDS API. Every notice comes back as one clean, flat record for bid teams (title, buyer, value, deadline, CPV, region, lots, suppliers, documents) plus the complete official OCDS release for developers. No login, no API key, no browser.

Built for supplier lead generation, bid monitoring and public sector market research: filter by CPV code, keyword, region, value, buyer, supplier, notice type, stage, deadline and SME or VCSE suitability, or name a monitor and get only the notices that are new since your last run.

Quick start

1. Leave Days back at 3 (or set Date from and Date to).
2. Pick Notice types, for example UK4 (tender notices = open opportunities), or leave it empty for everything.
3. Add filters: CPV codes such as 72000000 (IT services), Regions such as London, Minimum value, Keywords.
4. Set Maximum notices (each delivered notice is one paid result).
5. Click Start, then export JSON, CSV or Excel, or call the Actor through the API, a schedule or an MCP client.

An empty input {} scans the last 7 days and returns up to 100 notices.

Ready-made example: Find open IT tenders in London (UK4 notices, IT CPV codes, London, still open for bids).

What you get

One row per published notice. Measured on 2,233 notices published 2026-09-22 to 2026-09-28 (every notice of that week, ids 089389 to 091621 with no gaps):

Field	What it is	Filled
noticeId, noticeUrl, ocid	Notice id, link to the notice page, procurement id shared by every notice of one procurement	100%
noticeType, noticeTypeName	Procurement Act 2023 code and name (UK4 Tender notice, UK6 Contract award notice, ...); null for notices under the 2015 regulations (legacyRegime: true)	85%
stage, releaseTags, isUpdate, regime	planning, tender, award or contract; OCDS tags; whether the notice changes an earlier one; legal regime	100%
title, description	Full title and description, never cut	100%, 96%
buyerName, buyerEmail, buyerTelephone, buyerPostcode, buyerType, buyer	Contracting authority with contact, address, PPON id and organisation type	100% (name, email)
valueAmount, valueAmountGross, currency, valueSource	Value excluding and including VAT, and whether it is the tender estimate, the lot total or the awarded total	78% (83% of UK4)
cpvCodes, cpvMain, cpvDetails	Every CPV code on the notice, its lots and items, with descriptions	96%
regions, regionNames	NUTS / ITL delivery regions and their names	75% (82% of UK4)
tenderDeadline, enquiryDeadline, expressionOfInterestDeadline, engagementDeadline	Deadlines in ISO 8601 UTC	90% of UK4
daysUntilDeadline, isOpenForBids	Days left at run time; whether the tender is still open	100% of UK4
submissionUrl	Where to bid (the buyer's e-tendering portal)	89% of UK4
suitableForSme, suitableForVcse	True when a lot is marked suitable for SMEs or VCSEs	72% of UK4 carry the SME flag
lots	Every lot: title, value, SME and VCSE flags, contract period, renewal, options, award and selection criteria	96%
awards	Every award: value, date, status, suppliers, standstill end, contract period	100% of UK6 and UK7
suppliers, supplierNames, supplierCompaniesHouseNumbers	Every supplier with Companies House number and link, PPON, charity number, scale (sme or large), VCSE flag, address and contact email	100% of UK6 and UK7 (Companies House number on 60%)
contracts	Contract value, date signed, period, final value, termination reasons	UK7, UK10, UK11
documents, attachmentCount	Notice links and tender document attachments with type, format and publication date	85%
amendments, relatedProcesses, bidsReceived	Changes listed in the notice, linked framework procurements, number of bids received	where published
ocdsRelease	The complete official OCDS release (every field Find a Tender publishes)	100% (turn off with Include the full OCDS release)

With Link every notice of the procurement on, each row also gets processNotices (every notice of that procurement in date order), originalNoticeId, previousNoticeId and laterNoticeIds, so an amendment, award or termination is tied back to the original tender.

A final summary row (free) reports the window scanned, pages, notices scanned, delivered and charged, notices removed by each filter, and the API's own answers.

How much does it cost to scrape Find a Tender?

Pay per notice delivered, plus a small fee for the notices the Actor reads through while it applies your filters (the official API has no search, so a narrow filter over a long window reads thousands of notices to find a few). Duplicates, notices your monitor has already seen, status rows and the summary are free as notices.

Event	FREE	BRONZE	SILVER	GOLD
Notice, per 1,000	$0.50	$0.50	$0.45	$0.40
Scanned notice, per 1,000	$0.01	$0.01	$0.01	$0.01
Actor start, per run (256 MB)	$0.002	$0.002	$0.002	$0.002

SILVER is 10% off and GOLD 20% off the Notice price; the scanned notice and Actor start prices are the same on every plan.

The Store pricing card shows these prices per 1,000 events: "$0.50 / 1,000" on the Notice row means one notice costs a twentieth of a cent. Examples at the BRONZE tier: every notice of one week (about 2,200) costs about $1.14; a daily monitor that reads a day of Find a Tender (about 400 notices) and delivers 20 new ones costs about $0.016 a day; a 30 day search that reads 9,200 notices to find 60 costs about $0.12.

Input

• What to scan: daysBack (default 7) or dateFrom / dateTo; or noticeIds (notice ids like 091621-2026, procurement ids like ocds-h6vhtk-06dce3, or notice URLs).
• Filters (run in the Actor): noticeTypes (UK1 to UK17, LEGACY), stages (planning, tender, award, contract), includeUpdates, keywords, excludeKeywords, cpvCodes (codes or prefixes, 72000000 keeps the whole IT services branch), regions (NUTS or ITL codes, or names like London, Wales, England), includeNationwide, minValue, maxValue, buyerNames, supplierNames, supplierCompanyNumbers, procurementCategories, smeSuitableOnly, vcseSuitableOnly, aboveThresholdOnly, openForBidsOnly, deadlineWithinDays, deadlineFrom, deadlineTo.
• Monitoring and output: monitorName, resetMonitor, includeProcessHistory, includeOcdsRelease, maxItems, maxPagesToScan, useApifyProxy.

Example: open IT tenders in London worth at least 100,000 pounds, closing in the next 30 days:

{
    "daysBack": 30,
    "noticeTypes": ["UK4"],
    "cpvCodes": ["72000000", "48000000"],
    "regions": ["London"],
    "minValue": 100000,
    "deadlineWithinDays": 30
}

Monitoring: only new or changed notices

Set monitorName (for example it-tenders-london) and schedule the Actor daily. Each run scans from where the last complete run stopped (with a two hour overlap) and delivers only notices it has not delivered before under that name, marked changeType: "new", or notices whose content changed, marked "changed". Known notices are skipped and never charged again as notices. If a run stops early (Maximum notices or your spending limit), the next run rescans the same window, so nothing is skipped. Two runs on one monitor name at the same time are not allowed: the second one delivers its notices free and remembers nothing. If you change a monitor's filters, the next run also rescans the Days back window so notices the old filters removed are not missed. With a moving deadline window (deadlineWithinDays), notices that close later than the window are remembered and delivered on the run when their deadline comes inside it. A monitor remembers every notice it has delivered, for good; a monitor of every Find a Tender notice grows by about 5 MB a year, and a memory that grows past the storage limit makes runs free until it is reset or split.

How it works with the Find a Tender API

• The official API allows 12 requests per two minutes per IP. The Actor waits 11 seconds between requests, honours the service's Retry-After answer, and uses one Apify datacenter IP for the whole run. It scans about 545 notices a minute: one day takes about a minute, a month about 25 minutes.
• The API's own stage filter returns only notices under the 2015 regulations, so stages are filtered in the Actor instead. Tools that pass the stage filter to the API miss almost every Procurement Act 2023 notice.
• The API reads its date window in UK local time; the Actor converts your UTC dates, and checks the window the API echoes back.

What this Actor does NOT do

• It covers Find a Tender only. Contracts Finder (lower value English contracts) is a separate service.
• It does not download or read attachment files; it lists their links.
• Value filters drop notices that publish no value.
• Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland notices are included only where their buyers publish on Find a Tender.

FAQ

What is the difference between Find a Tender and Contracts Finder?

Find a Tender is the UK service for higher value public procurement notices across the whole UK, and the one the Procurement Act 2023 notices (UK1 to UK17) are published on. Contracts Finder lists lower value contracts in England. This Actor scrapes Find a Tender.

Which notice types can I filter?

Every Procurement Act 2023 type Find a Tender publishes: UK1 pipeline, UK2 preliminary market engagement, UK3 planned procurement, UK4 tender, UK5 transparency, UK6 contract award, UK7 contract details, UK9 contract performance, UK10 contract change, UK11 contract termination, UK12 procurement termination, UK13 to UK16 dynamic market notices, UK17 payments compliance, plus LEGACY for notices under the 2015 and 2016 regulations.

How do I get only open tenders I can still bid for?

Set noticeTypes to UK4 and turn on openForBidsOnly, or use deadlineWithinDays for a closing window. Each row has tenderDeadline in ISO 8601 UTC, daysUntilDeadline and submissionUrl.

Can I track which companies win contracts?

Yes. Award and contract notices (UK6, UK7) list every supplier with name, Companies House number where published, scale (SME or large) and contact. Filter by supplierNames or supplierCompanyNumbers to follow a competitor.

Is the data official and can I reuse it?

It comes straight from the Find a Tender OCDS API run by the Cabinet Office, published under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Why does this Actor run with limited permissions?

Least privilege: it only reads and writes its own run storage, plus the monitor memory, which is a named key-value store the Actor creates for your monitor name the first time you use it.

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