UK Contract Expiry Radar - Recompete Leads

What does UK Contract Expiry Radar do?

UK Contract Expiry Radar turns Contracts Finder award notices (the UK government portal for contracts, without Find a Tender) into a list of public contracts that are about to end. For every contract it returns the incumbent supplier (with Companies House number), the buying organisation, the award value, the contract start and end dates, and how many days are left. Filter by expiry window, CPV code, keyword and value, then export the result as JSON, CSV or Excel, call it through the Apify API, or plug it into n8n, Make and AI agents through MCP.

Who is it for?

• Bid and sales teams who want to know which public contracts come up for recompete in the next 6 to 18 months, before the tender is published.
• Consultancies and agencies that sell to a specific buyer type and want a shortlist of incumbents to approach.
• Market analysts who track contract length, extension options and supplier concentration by sector.

How to use it

1. Set the expiry window: for example 0 to 12 months to list contracts that end within a year, or 6 to 18 months to skip the ones already too close to tender.
2. Optionally add keywords (title, description, buyer or supplier), CPV prefixes (for example 72 for IT services or 45 for construction) and a minimum value.
3. Choose how far back to read award notices, then run the Actor.
4. Download the dataset or fetch it from the API.

Contracts Finder publishes roughly one to two hundred award notices per working day (1 to 2 API requests) and very few at weekends (0 to 9 per day), so a longer lookback window reads more notices and takes longer. The default is 7 days with a 240-second time budget; raise both together for a longer scan.

Example output

title	buyerName	supplierName	awardValue	contractEnd	daysToExpiry
Managed IT support services	Example Borough Council	Example Systems Ltd	480000	2027-03-31T00:00:00.000Z	182

{
  "id": "example-award-id",
  "title": "Managed IT support services",
  "buyerName": "Example Borough Council",
  "supplierName": "Example Systems Ltd",
  "supplierCompanyNumber": "01234567",
  "awardValue": 480000,
  "currency": "GBP",
  "contractStart": "2024-04-01T00:00:00.000Z",
  "contractEnd": "2027-03-31T00:00:00.000Z",
  "daysToExpiry": 182,
  "contractLengthMonths": 36,
  "cpvCode": "72000000",
  "frameworkCallOff": false,
  "callOffMentioned": false,
  "extensionMentioned": true,
  "recordDisputed": false,
  "disputedFields": null,
  "disputedOtherValues": null,
  "found": true
}

What data do you get?

Each record includes the notice title and description, buyer name, locality and website, incumbent supplier with Companies House number and company size, all suppliers for multi-supplier awards, award value and currency, award and publication dates, contract start and end dates, days and months to expiry, contract length, main and additional CPV codes, procurement method, a framework call-off flag taken from the procurement procedure field, a separate flag for call-off wording in the text, an extension-clause flag, SME suitability, a link to the original notice and a dispute marker (recordDisputed) for the rare award that was published twice with conflicting values. The buyer contact email is off by default and can be switched on in the input.

How much does it cost?

You pay per contract returned. Pricing depends on your Apify plan: a small fee when a run starts, then a price per result that is lower on paid plans. The Apify free plan includes monthly credit you can use to try it. You can set a maximum spend on the run: the Actor stops when the limit is reached. It reads a public government API over plain HTTP, so runs are fast and light on platform resources.

Input

• Keywords – optional; a contract is kept when its title, description, buyer or supplier contains any of them (the award and tender descriptions are searched in full, although the description field in the result is shortened to 800 characters).
• Expires after / before (months) – the contract end-date window, counted from today.
• Publication lookback (days) – how many days of award notices to read (default 7).
• Maximum run time (seconds) – time budget for reading the source (default 240, 0 = no limit). When it is reached the Actor keeps everything found so far and reports how many lookback days it covered.
• CPV prefixes – optional; keep contracts whose main or additional CPV code starts with a prefix.
• Minimum value – skip awards below this amount. Awards published without a value (the source reports 0, shown as null) are skipped when a minimum above 0 is set.
• Include framework call-offs – turn off to drop notices whose procurement procedure is a call-off from a framework agreement or a dynamic purchasing system (in a 3-day sample of 417 awards, 178 and 68 of them, 59 percent). The check reads the procedure field only; callOffMentioned marks notices that merely mention call-off in the text and they are kept.
• Include contact email – adds the contact published on the notice.
• Maximum results – total limit for the run.

Is it legal to use this data?

The Actor reads only information the UK government publishes openly under the Open Government Licence through the Contracts Finder API. It does not log in or bypass any access control. Contact details, if you enable them, are personal data in some cases: you are responsible for using them in line with applicable data protection law. This description is not legal advice.

FAQ

What if the run returns nothing? The run status tells you why. "Published no award notices in the last N days" means the source had nothing in the window (it is nearly empty at weekends, so a 1-day lookback on a Saturday or Sunday is often empty): raise the lookback days. If the source answers with empty days on working days while it is clearly throttling (it does this when one IP sends many requests), the Actor waits up to 3.5 minutes per day (within "Maximum run time"), re-checking against a control request, and then either continues without that day (named in the run status) or, if nothing could be read at all, fails with a clear message instead of returning an empty result: run it again later or turn on a proxy. "No contract matched your filters" means notices were read but none passed your expiry window, keywords, CPV or value filters: widen those.

Does it list contracts that are not yet awarded? No. It covers awarded contracts and shows when each one ends. Use the expiry window to find recompete opportunities early.

Why do some contracts have no end date? Some notices are published without a contract period. Those are skipped, because the expiry window cannot be applied.

How current is the data? Every run reads the live Contracts Finder API for the lookback window you choose.

How long does a run take? Contracts Finder allows 12 requests per 120 seconds. A working day costs 1 or 2 requests (a day with more than 100 notices needs a second page), a weekend day 1. The default 7-day window comes to 11 to 12 requests (measured on the live feed: 11 or 12 requests and several hundred award records per week; the exact number changes from week to week), which fits inside the limit: reading the whole week takes about 15 seconds with no pause. The count is not fixed: a single day above 200 notices (the busiest measured day had 193) would add a request, and the 13th request waits about two minutes for the window to reopen - the run then takes around 2.5 minutes, still inside the default 240-second budget. Windows longer than a week need more than 12 requests, and then the Actor pauses about two minutes after every further 12 requests (roughly 20 seconds per extra working day). The run also stops at the run-time budget (240 seconds by default): the results found so far are kept and the run status says how many lookback days were read. For a longer lookback window raise both the lookback days and the maximum run time (0 removes the limit).

Which sources does it cover? Contracts Finder only. Contracts published only on Find a Tender (the above-threshold notices) are not included, and some other UK tender Actors on the Store read both portals. The nearest Actor on the same source, dataio/uk-public-contract-awards, also reads only Contracts Finder and filters by the days left to contract end, so the expiry view is not what sets this Actor apart. Choose this Actor when you care about how the award rows are built: a call-off flag taken from the procurement procedure field (frameworkCallOff) next to a separate flag for call-off wording in the text (callOffMentioned), an extension-clause flag (extensionMentioned), one row per award with corrected and republished notices merged field by field and conflicting values marked (recordDisputed), and an expiry window counted in months ahead.

What if a notice was corrected and published twice? You get one row per award, merged field by field. On the live feed the two copies of a duplicated award carry the same award date (12 of 12 pairs in a 7-day scan), so the award date cannot tell which copy is right. The rules are:

• A missing value never beats a real one. When one copy has no award value (the source publishes 0, shown as null), no end date or no supplier and the other has the data, the row carries the data (in the scan above one award was published once with a value of 0 and once with 150,263.40 GBP; the row shows 150,263.40). Days, months to expiry and contract length are recomputed from the merged dates.
• When both copies have a value and the values differ (for example an award value of 504,113 against 50,411,351, or an end date a year apart), the Actor cannot know which is right. It keeps the copy with the later award date, or the later one in the feed when the dates are equal, and marks the row: recordDisputed is true, disputedFields lists the fields and disputedOtherValues shows the values it did not use (for example awardValue=504113). Check those rows against the notice link before you rely on the value; in the 7-day scan 5 of 586 rows were disputed.
• frameworkCallOff is recomputed from the procedure of the kept copy; callOffMentioned and extensionMentioned are true when either copy says so. A newer publication day always wins over an older one.

The run status reports how many duplicates were merged, how many carried different data, how many rows had a missing value copied in from the other copy (not counted when the copy that was kept already had the value) and how many disputed contracts are in the result (disputed award records removed by your filters are counted separately and do not appear in the dataset).

Can I schedule it? Yes, use Apify schedules or call the Actor from your own workflow.

Something looks wrong. Open an issue with the input you used; layout or API changes at the source are fixed quickly.

Related Actors

Other public-data Actors from the same publisher are listed on the Store profile.