UK Tenders Scraper: Find a Tender + Contracts Finder, normalized for people and AI agents

Every public procurement notice from the UK's two official portals, Find a Tender (above-threshold, UK-wide) and Contracts Finder (England, including small contracts), as one clean JSON row: buyer, CPV codes decoded, GBP values with EUR conversion, deadline with days left, lots, winners and awarded amounts. Export UK government tenders and contract awards to JSON, CSV or Excel, build a daily tender alert by CPV, keyword or minimum value, and feed Google Sheets, n8n, Make or an AI agent, without parsing OCDS yourself.

Both portals publish Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS) releases through free APIs, but the structures differ between portals and between tender and award stages, classifications sit in three different places, and values come in net and gross variants. This Actor reads both feeds and returns one predictable schema, with the same field names as our TED (EU) and BOAMP (France) Actors.

Who uses it

• Bid writers and public-sector sales teams who need every new UK tender in their sector each morning, in Excel or Google Sheets, with the deadline and estimated value already extracted.
• Suppliers tracking competitors: who won which contract, for how much, from which council, NHS trust or department.
• Analysts and journalists working with public spending and procurement data.
• AI agents and automations (n8n, Make, Zapier, MCP) that need one flat schema for both portals.

What you get per row

Block	Fields
identity	source and portal name, OCID, release id, notice URL, release date, OCDS tags, stage (planning, tender, award, contract), status
text	title, description (emails and phone numbers pasted by buyers are removed)
buyer	name, identifier scheme and id (PPON, Companies House…), locality, postcode, region, country, website
delivery	regions and countries of performance
classification	cpv with English labels (from tender, items and awards), cpvDivisions, category (goods, services, works), procurement method and details, above-threshold flag, legal basis, SME and VCSE suitability
lots	id, title, value, currency, status; lotCount
value	amount, gross amount, currency, amountEur (ECB rate of the day), rate date
deadline	tender deadline date, date-time, daysLeft
contractPeriod	start and end
awards	id, date, status, suppliers, amount, currency, contract period; awardedTotal, bidsReceived
extras	document links, source attribution, scrape timestamp

No contact persons, emails or phone numbers are extracted.

Input

• Sources: Find a Tender, Contracts Finder, or both (default).
• Stages: tender (default), award, planning.
• Published or updated in the last N days (default 3) or explicit dates.
• CPV codes or prefixes, keyword and minimum value: applied after download, so narrow dates for large pulls.
• Max items (default 500) and Only new since last run (monitoring mode).

{ "sources": ["fts"], "stages": ["tender"], "publishedSinceDays": 7, "cpvPrefixes": ["72"], "minValue": 100000 }

{ "sources": ["cf"], "stages": ["award"], "publishedFrom": "2026-10-01", "publishedTo": "2026-10-31", "maxItems": 5000 }

Pricing

Pay per event: $0.002 per notice row, charged only after the row is saved. No charge for platform usage. Monitoring all new UK tenders daily (a few hundred rows) costs well under $1 per day.

Quality and limits

• Every row is validated against a strict schema before it is saved; invalid rows are logged and never charged.
• Tested on 200 real releases: CPV on more than 90 % of Find a Tender releases and 100 % of Contracts Finder releases, deadline on 100 % of Contracts Finder tenders, buyer locality on 100 %.
• The portals' APIs are paginated by cursor and rate-limited with Retry-After; the Actor stays at two requests per second and honours it.
• Find a Tender filters by update date (a notice updated today is returned even if first published earlier); Contracts Finder filters by publication date.

How to use it

In the Apify Console: choose sources and stages, press Start, download the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel.

From your code (Apify API):

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/islandata~uk-tenders-gov/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"sources": ["fts", "cf"], "stages": ["tender"], "publishedSinceDays": 1, "cpvPrefixes": ["72"]}'

In n8n, Make or Zapier: use the Apify node or app, pick islandata/uk-tenders-gov, schedule it daily with onlyNew: true and map the rows to Google Sheets, Airtable, Notion, Slack or email: a UK tender alert in three nodes.

With an AI agent (MCP): connect the agent to https://mcp.apify.com?tools=islandata/uk-tenders-gov and ask for "IT tenders above £100k closing in the next 14 days". Rank by value.amount and deadline.daysLeft.

FAQ

Is this the official Find a Tender or Contracts Finder API? It uses both official, free OCDS APIs and returns their data in one normalized schema. No account or key is needed.

What is the difference between the two portals? Find a Tender carries above-threshold notices for the whole UK under the Procurement Act 2023; Contracts Finder carries English public-sector contracts, including small ones below the thresholds. The Actor reads both by default.

Can I get awards (who won)? Yes: stages: ["award"] returns award notices with suppliers, amounts and contract periods.

Does it include contact persons? No. Buyer organisations are included; contact names, emails and phone numbers are not extracted, and those pasted into descriptions are removed.

Attribution and reuse

Data from the UK Cabinet Office: Find a Tender and Contracts Finder, published under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Keep the attribution in meta.source when you redistribute.