EU & UK Public Tenders: TED, Find a Tender, Contracts Finder

Get new public procurement notices from three official, keyless government APIs in one clean schema:

• TED (Tenders Electronic Daily, the EU Official Journal S series): about 2,000 tenders and 1,700 award notices every working day from EU/EEA buyers.
• Find a Tender (UK, above-threshold contracts).
• Contracts Finder (UK, including lower-value contracts from about £12,000 / £30,000).

Each result tells you what is being bought, by whom, for how much, by when, and for award notices who won and at what value, with a link to the official notice.

Typical uses: daily bid alerts for a CPV family (e.g. 72 IT services), competitor win tracking, public-sector sales prospecting, market sizing.

Not affiliated with or endorsed by the European Union, the Publications Office of the EU, the UK Cabinet Office or Crown Commercial Service. This Actor only reads their published open-data APIs.

How it works

• Reads the official search APIs for the date window you choose (by default, yesterday and today, UK date).
• Pick the stages you want: tender (open for bids), award (winners) and planning (prior information).
• Filters: keywords, CPV prefixes, TED buyer countries, minimum value, open tenders only.
• Only new notices: on a daily schedule, every notice is returned once. The Actor remembers up to 100,000 notice ids per stateKey.
• Sources are read side by side, so TED's volume cannot crowd out the UK sources before maxItems is reached.
• Polite by design: TED gets 2 requests a second (its fair-use limit is 700 a minute), Find a Tender gets 1 request every 2 seconds, Contracts Finder 1 a second. The Actor backs off on 429 using the Retry-After header (seconds or HTTP date, capped at 5 minutes; 30 s if the header is missing), backs off on 5xx, and honours Contracts Finder's documented 5-minute pause after a 403.

Input example

{
  "sources": ["ted", "find_a_tender", "contracts_finder"],
  "stages": ["tender"],
  "mode": "latest",
  "lookbackDays": 1,
  "cpvPrefixes": ["72", "48"],
  "keywords": ["software", "cloud"],
  "tedBuyerCountries": ["DEU", "FRA", "IRL"],
  "openOnly": true,
  "maxItems": 100
}

Backfill: set "mode": "date_range" with startDate and endDate (up to 92 days per run).

Output example

{
  "source": "find_a_tender",
  "noticeId": "102342-2026",
  "stage": "award",
  "noticeType": "award,contract",
  "title": "Midlands - FRAM lot 9c - Client Support Services",
  "buyerName": "ENVIRONMENT AGENCY",
  "buyerCountry": "GBR",
  "cpvCodes": [
    "72224000"
  ],
  "valueAmount": null,
  "valueIncludesVat": null,
  "deadline": null,
  "publishedDate": "2026-10-29",
  "awardedSuppliers": [
    "Mott MacDonald Limited"
  ],
  "awardValue": 927190.7,
  "awardCurrency": "GBP",
  "noticeUrl": "https://www.find-tender.service.gov.uk/Notice/102342-2026",
  "licence": "Open Government Licence v3.0"
}

See sample_output.json for full records from a live run.

Fields: source, sourceCountry (EU for TED, GBR for the UK services), noticeId, procedureId, noticeVersion, stage, noticeType, title, titleTranslated (TED's label "

• Value fields: valueAmount is the buyer's estimated value of the procedure and awardValue the awarded/contract value, both in the notice's own currency (valueCurrency, awardCurrency). valueIncludesVat (UK only) is true when the notice published only a VAT-inclusive amount (amountGross, common on Procurement Act 2023 notices) and false for a net amount.
• Blank values are blank at the source. Many notices publish no value, and the Actor never imputes one. Checked against the raw APIs on 2026-10-28: Find a Tender award notices put no estimate on the tender (use awardValue), some Find a Tender tenderUpdate and award releases have no value anywhere (tender, lots, awards, contracts), and about half of TED competition notices have no estimated-value-proc or lot values. In a 120-notice live run, 63 had valueAmount and 74 of 87 awards had awardValue. Filter on minValue only if you are happy to drop notices with no published value.
• Supplier privacy (Find a Tender, Contracts Finder): many UK contracts go to sole traders. A supplier name is shown when it reads as an organisation: any legal form (Ltd, Limited, LLP, LLC, Inc, plc, Corp, Partners, Solicitors, & Co, GmbH ...) is always kept, as are organisation words (University, Council, Services, Joinery, Taxis ...) and a list of known firms whose names carry no such word. For "
• Deadline format: TED gives a date; the UK sources give a date and time in UTC.
• Buyer contact: turn on includeBuyerContact to add buyerContact with the authority's published email and phone. It is off by default. Person names are never output, and supplier contacts are never collected.

Each run also writes a RUN_SUMMARY record with notices read, pushed, filtered out, skipped as already seen and skipped as duplicates, per source, plus a rateLimited count of 429 answers.

Price

Pay per result: $0.002 per notice saved ($2 per 1,000). There is no start fee and no charge for the dataset item itself. Set Max cost per run in the Apify Console and the Actor stops cleanly when it is reached.

Empty input {} and the prefilled input stop at 4 notices (the Max notices default), so they cost at most $0.008. Raise Max notices for a fuller feed.

Use with AI agents / MCP

AI agents can run this Actor as a tool through Apify's MCP server. Add this server URL to your MCP client (Claude, Cursor, VS Code, OpenAI Agents SDK, LangChain and others) and sign in with OAuth, or send your Apify token as Authorization: Bearer <token>:

https://mcp.apify.com?tools=fecklesspleb/eu-uk-public-tenders

The tool is named fecklesspleb--eu-uk-public-tenders. Agents can also find it with search-actors and run it with call-actor. The run returns a dataset ID; read the notices with get-dataset-items, and pass fields (for example source,sourceCountry,stage,publishedDate,title,buyerName,buyerCountry,mainCpv,valueAmount,valueCurrency,deadline,noticeUrl) to keep the response small.

Minimal tool input (TED + UK sources, IT/software CPV prefixes, open tenders only, one notice):

{"sources": ["ted", "find_a_tender", "contracts_finder"], "stages": ["tender"], "mode": "latest", "lookbackDays": 1, "cpvPrefixes": ["72", "48"], "openOnly": true, "maxItems": 1}

One shortened row from the Actor's bundled sample_output.json (live notices scraped 29 October 2026 UTC):

{
  "source": "ted",
  "sourceCountry": "EU",
  "stage": "tender",
  "publishedDate": "2026-10-28",
  "title": "Beschaffung Rugged-Windows-Tablets inkl. Zubehör",
  "buyerName": "Flughafen Wien AG",
  "buyerCountry": "AUT",
  "mainCpv": "30213200",
  "valueAmount": null,
  "valueCurrency": null,
  "deadline": "2026-11-09",
  "noticeUrl": "https://ted.europa.eu/en/notice/-/detail/745241-2026"
}

Tips for agents:

• Cost is $0.002 per notice saved (tender-notice event). There is no Actor-start fee. Always set maxItems, and set maxTotalChargeUsd in the run options (callOptions in call-actor) to cap a run.
• Empty input {} and the Console prefills stop at 4 notices ($0.008). Raise maxItems only when you need a fuller feed.
• Filter with stages, cpvPrefixes, keywords, tedBuyerCountries, minValue and openOnly so fewer notices are returned and charged.
• Status rows (recordType: "status") are free and uncharged; filter them out when you only want notices.
• Prefer fields on get-dataset-items so long description and nested buyer fields do not fill the context window.

FAQ and limits

• Duplicates across OCDS sources: within a run, each procedure is saved and charged once per stage: Find a Tender and Contracts Finder notices are matched by a source-independent key (OCID, or the notice ID when there is no OCID, plus the stage) before charging. Find a Tender updates (tenderUpdate) for a procedure already saved in the same run are skipped too. An amendment published on a later day is a new notice and is returned on that day's run. The first notice seen wins; skipped ones are counted as duplicates in RUN_SUMMARY. A tender and its later award are different stages and both kept. The two services usually issue different OCID prefixes, so a notice republished on both under different OCIDs is not matched.
• Updates: Find a Tender returns every release in the window, including tender updates and cancellations. These map to the tender stage; noticeType keeps the original tag.
• Country filter: tedBuyerCountries filters TED on the server. The UK sources are always UK buyers (GBR).
• minValue compares amounts in each notice's own currency (EUR, GBP); nothing is converted.
• Language: TED texts are multilingual. language picks your preferred one where present; otherwise the notice's own language is used.
• Bid documents are not downloaded; follow noticeUrl.
• Formats differ by source: TED gives deadline as a date (2026-11-30) and the notice language as an ISO 639-3 code (DEU); the UK sources give an ISO datetime (2026-11-30T12:00:00Z) and an ISO 639-1 code (en).
• CPV codes: UK award notices under the Procurement Act 2023 often carry CPV codes only on the awarded items; these are included in cpvCodes.
• Source down: if one source (or all of them) cannot be reached or answers with errors and no notices were saved, the run still succeeds and the dataset gets one free record (recordType: "status", message starting "Not charged") explaining what failed. status is "error" when every source failed and "warning" when only some did; failedSources and errors name them. It is not charged. Data records have no recordType.
• Nothing new or nothing matching: a run that saves no notice still ends with one free record (recordType: "status", status: "warning", not charged). "Not charged: no new items since last run" means every notice in the window was already delivered by an earlier run with the same stateKey (set onlyNewSinceLastRun to no or use another stateKey to get them again). "Not charged: no matching notices in the selected window" means the window had nothing that passed your input; filteredBy counts what each filter cut, for example the default stages (tender only). Neither record is written when at least one notice was saved.

Data licences and attribution

• TED notices: © European Union, reused under Commission Decision 2011/833/EU. Acknowledge the source and do not distort the original meaning.
• Find a Tender and Contracts Finder: contain public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0, © Crown copyright.