UK Contracts Finder Notices — Official OCDS API

UK public procurement notices from Contracts Finder, flattened from OCDS into plain rows. No personal data.

Read this first: since the Procurement Act 2023 commenced on 24 February 2025, new notices are published to Find a Tender (the Central Digital Platform). Contracts Finder continues to carry procurements commenced under the Public Contracts Regulations 2015, plus the historical record. Volume here is declining structurally. If you want current notices, you probably want the Find a Tender Actor or the Unified Feed instead.

Honest note before you install

The official Contracts Finder API is free, well documented, requires no authentication, and is licensed under the Open Government Licence. If you are comfortable calling it, do that instead — you do not need this Actor and it would be strange to pretend otherwise.

This Actor exists for people who want the awkward parts handled:

• Rate limiting arrives as HTTP 403 with an HTML body, not 429, and the documented remedy is to wait five minutes — easy to mistake for a permissions failure and give up
• It filters on publication date (publishedFrom), whereas Find a Tender filters on last-updated — using the wrong one returns an empty set rather than an error
• Values are often present only per-lot and need summing
• Cursor pagination
• OCDS release packages are deeply nested; most people want flat rows
• Contact names, emails and phone numbers must be stripped for lawful commercial use

Fields

source · ocid · noticeId · sourceUrl · stage · title · description · procurementCategory · cpvCode · cpvDescription · cpvDivision · buyerName · buyerRegion · buyerPostcode · valueAmount · valueCurrency · publishedDate · deadlineDate · contractStartDate · contractEndDate · supplierNames · awardValueAmount · isFramework

Identical field names to the other Actors in this collection, so outputs can be concatenated without reconciliation.

No personal data

Organisation-level only. The source feed includes named contact officers with email and telephone; these are stripped before anything is written, enforced by an automated guard that fails the run rather than publishing them.

→ If you want more than one source

Use UK Unified Tender Feed, which combines this source with Find a Tender and removes the duplicates that occur when a procurement is advertised on both. That is the Actor most people actually want.

What a row actually looks like

Three real rows, trimmed to the columns most people use:

publishedDate	title	buyerName	valueAmount	deadlineDate	cpvDescription
2026-07-29	Provision of Highways Maintenance Services	Lancashire County Council	4500000	2026-09-15	Highway maintenance work
2026-07-28	Grounds Maintenance Services 2027-2031	Preston City Council	500000	2026-08-29	Planting and maintenance of green areas
2026-07-30	Supply of Laboratory Consumables	NHS Lancashire Teaching Hospitals	250000	—	Laboratory reagents

Every row also carries ocid, noticeId, sourceUrl, stage, description, procurementCategory, cpvCode, cpvDivision, buyerRegion, buyerPostcode, valueCurrency, contractStartDate, contractEndDate, supplierNames, awardValueAmount and isFramework.

Export as JSON, CSV, Excel or feed it straight through the Apify API.

Questions people ask before running it

Is this data free elsewhere? Yes. It is published by the UK government under the Open Government Licence and the official APIs are linked above. If you only need one source and you are happy calling an API, do that. This Actor is for when that stops being convenient.

How fresh is it? As fresh as the source. Notices appear here as soon as they appear on the portal. Run it on a daily or weekly schedule to pick up new notices automatically.

How far back can I go? Set the date window as far back as you like. Bear in mind older windows return more rows, and you are charged per row, so use maxItems to cap it.

Does it include contact details for the buyer? No, deliberately. Contact names, emails and phone numbers are stripped before anything is written, and an automated guard stops the run if any survive. If you need named contacts, this is not the right tool and never will be.

What does a typical run cost? The default settings return 250 notices. Scale from there — you are charged per row returned, so a small window costs very little.

Can I filter to my sector? Yes. Use cpvDivisions with two-digit CPV codes — 45 construction, 85 health and social care, 72 IT services, 79 business services, 77 grounds and agriculture. Combine with minValue to drop contracts below your threshold.

Why are some notices missing a value? Buyers do not always publish one. Those rows are kept deliberately: a missing figure is not evidence of a small contract, and dropping them would lose real opportunities.

Can I get this as a proper API instead of an Actor run? Every Apify Actor is callable via the Apify API, so you can trigger a run and collect the dataset programmatically.

What if it breaks? Raise an issue on the Actor. It is built on official documented APIs rather than scraped HTML, so it breaks far less often than a typical Store listing — and there is a published maintenance runbook behind it.

Data licence

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Source: Contracts Finder, Cabinet Office / Crown Copyright.

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UK government contracts data · public sector tender alerts · procurement opportunities feed · Find a Tender API · Contracts Finder API · OCDS notices · public sector bid leads · UK tender data for CRM · government contract awards dataset