AusTender Contract Notices Scraper (Australia)

Pulls Australian Government contract notices (CNs) straight from the official AusTender OCDS API published by the Department of Finance and turns each notice into one flat, analysis-ready record: agency and its procurement contact, supplier name and ABN, UNSPSC category code and plain-English description, contract value, signed / start / end dates, procurement method, limited-tender reason and a link to the notice on tenders.gov.au. No API key, no browser scraping, no login. Use it to watch who is winning federal work, build supplier and agency lead lists, or find contracts that are about to expire and will be re-competed.

What you get

One record per contract notice (or per amendment, id like CN1234567-A1):

• id, contractId, url (notice page on tenders.gov.au), ocid, releaseId, releaseTag, isAmendment, amendmentId, amendsReleaseId
• Agency: agencyName, agencyAbn, agencyContactName, agencyBranch, agencyDivision, agencyContactEmail, agencyContactPhone
• Supplier: supplierName, supplierAbn, supplierStreetAddress, supplierLocality, supplierRegion, supplierPostcode, supplierCountry
• Contract: title / agencyReferenceId (the agency's own reference, shown on the notice as "Agency Reference ID"), description, unspscCode, unspscDescription, valueAmount, valueCurrency, status
• Dates, ISO 8601 UTC: dateSigned, publishedDate, awardDate, startDate, endDate
• Dates, Canberra local (YYYY-MM-DD, exactly what the notice page prints): publishedDateLocal, startDateLocal, endDateLocal
• Procurement: procurementMethod (open / limited / selective), procurementMethodDetails (Open tender / Limited tender / Prequalified tender), limitedTenderExempt, limitedTenderReasonCode, limitedTenderReason, exemptionCode, exemption
• source (austender), fetchedAt

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
dateType	select	contractPublished	Which date the window applies to: contractPublished (new parent notices), contractLastModified (new + amended), contractStart, contractEnd (expiring contracts).
daysBack	integer	7	Look-back window in days ending today (UTC). Ignored when dateFrom is set.
dateFrom, dateTo	YYYY-MM-DD	-	Explicit window (UTC, inclusive). History reaches back to 2004; use future dates with contractEnd to find expiring contracts.
keywords	string[]	[]	Case-insensitive OR match on title, description, supplier, agency and UNSPSC description.
agencies	string[]	[]	Agency-name substrings, e.g. Defence, Home Affairs.
suppliers	string[]	[]	Supplier-name substrings, e.g. Accenture.
unspscPrefixes	string[]	[]	UNSPSC code prefixes, e.g. 80 (business services), 8010 (management advisory), 43 (IT).
procurementMethods	string[]	[]	Substring match against either procurementMethod (open, limited, selective) or procurementMethodDetails (Open tender, Limited tender, Prequalified tender), so prequalified works as a filter even though it is not a procurementMethod value.
minValue, maxValue	integer	-	Contract value bounds in AUD.
includeAmendments	boolean	true	Keep amendment releases (mostly seen with contractLastModified, contractStart, contractEnd).
contractIds	string[]	[]	Lookup mode: fetch these notices by id (e.g. CN4273499), parent plus all amendments; the date window is ignored.
maxItems	integer	500	Stop after this many records (you pay per record).

All list filters are ORed within the list and ANDed across filters. Filtering happens after download, so a narrow filter over a wide window still pages through every notice in the window (about 1,100 notices per week; see "Limits and freshness" for the cost of multi-year windows).

Output example

Real record from a live run on 2026-09-07 (dateType: contractPublished, daysBack: 2, maxItems: 5), unmodified:

{
  "id": "CN4274736",
  "contractId": "CN4274736",
  "source": "austender",
  "url": "https://www.tenders.gov.au/cn/show/0a1fd420-8093-4d1c-8b3d-71c95f024c92",
  "ocid": "prod-d13af6bc9ec945189df23390f6c56e00",
  "releaseId": "prod-d13af6bc9ec945189df23390f6c56e00-d8c405f724ba343ebce0b220ac5b9250",
  "releaseTag": "contract",
  "isAmendment": false,
  "amendmentId": null,
  "amendsReleaseId": null,
  "agencyName": "Australian Communications and Media Authority",
  "agencyAbn": "55386169386",
  "agencyContactName": "Procurement Enquiries",
  "agencyBranch": null,
  "agencyDivision": null,
  "agencyContactEmail": "ProcurementEnquiries@acma.gov.au",
  "agencyContactPhone": null,
  "supplierName": "HorizonOne Recruitment Pty Ltd",
  "supplierAbn": "98129885838",
  "supplierStreetAddress": null,
  "supplierLocality": "BRADDON",
  "supplierRegion": "ACT",
  "supplierPostcode": "2612",
  "supplierCountry": "AUSTRALIA",
  "title": "ACMA00000183",
  "agencyReferenceId": "ACMA00000183",
  "description": "27ACMA008 - Procurement services",
  "unspscCode": "80111600",
  "unspscDescription": "Temporary personnel services",
  "valueAmount": 105000,
  "valueCurrency": "AUD",
  "dateSigned": "2026-09-07T05:51:04Z",
  "publishedDate": "2026-09-07T05:51:04Z",
  "publishedDateLocal": "2026-09-07",
  "awardDate": "2026-09-07T05:51:04Z",
  "startDate": "2026-08-09T14:00:00Z",
  "startDateLocal": "2026-08-10",
  "endDate": "2026-11-29T13:00:00Z",
  "endDateLocal": "2026-11-30",
  "procurementMethod": "open",
  "procurementMethodDetails": "Open tender",
  "limitedTenderExempt": null,
  "limitedTenderReasonCode": null,
  "limitedTenderReason": null,
  "exemptionCode": null,
  "exemption": null,
  "status": "active",
  "fetchedAt": "2026-09-07T06:17:21.883Z"
}

Every field above matches the published notice at that url, which reads: "CN ID: CN4274736 - Publish Date: 7-Sep-2026 - Category: Temporary personnel services - Contract Period: 10-Aug-2026 to 30-Nov-2026 - Contract Value (AUD): $105,000.00 - Agency Reference ID: ACMA00000183".

Pricing

Pay per result: US$0.003 per record, US$3 per 1,000 records. Nothing is charged for a run that returns no records. Platform usage (compute) is billed by Apify on top of the per-result price; runs on the Apify free plan are limited by the plan's monthly credit.

Data source and licence

• Source: AusTender Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS) API, https://api.tenders.gov.au/ocds, operated by the Australian Government Department of Finance. Publisher documentation: https://github.com/austender/austender-ocds-api. The Actor only calls the two public, keyless endpoints findByDates/{dateType}/{from}/{to} and findById/{cnId}, and it reads only public pages otherwise.
• Licence: every API response declares "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/au/", and the AusTender Terms of Use clause 5.1 states: "With the exception of the Commonwealth Coat of Arms, Approach to Market (ATM) material and where otherwise noted, all materials on AusTender are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia licence (CC BY 3.0 AU)." CC BY 3.0 AU permits commercial reuse with attribution. Attribute as: "Source: AusTender, Australian Government Department of Finance, licensed under CC BY 3.0 AU."
• Clause 5.4 of those Terms carves out Approach to Market (ATM) material from reuse. This Actor returns contract notice data only - awarded contracts published under CC BY 3.0 AU - and never ATM documents.
• UNSPSC category descriptions are resolved offline from the MIT-licensed unspsc-lookup npm package (UNSPSC code list); the codes themselves come from AusTender. Roughly 99% of codes seen in live data resolve; the rest leave unspscDescription null.
• Personal data: agencyContactName, agencyContactEmail and agencyContactPhone are the named procurement contact the agency itself published on the notice, and supplier records for sole traders can carry an individual's name and trading address. The Commonwealth publishes those details lawfully on tenders.gov.au under the AusTender Terms of Use, but they remain personal information under the Australian Privacy Act 1988 (and the Australian Privacy Principles, including APP 7 on direct marketing).
• If you contact the people in this data, that use is yours to justify, not the publisher's: check the Privacy Act, the Spam Act 2003 and the Do Not Call Register Act 2006 before any outreach, and honour opt-outs. The Actor exposes only what the notice page shows and adds no enrichment from other sources.

Limits and freshness

• Data is read live from the API on every run; AusTender publishes new notices on business days (roughly 200-250 per business day). Use daysBack of 3 or more to cover a weekend.
• Pagination, handled for you: the API caps every response at 100 releases and chains the rest through links.next cursors; there is no page or limit parameter. The Actor follows those cursors until the API returns an empty page or maxItems is reached, so nothing in the window is missed. Measured on 2026-09-07: the 7-day window 2026-08-31 to 2026-09-07 needed 13 requests and returned 1,131 releases with zero duplicates, and a wider re-check over 260 paged requests / 25,380 releases (four windows, including two full months) again found zero duplicate release ids. Results arrive newest release first.
• Cost of long windows: filters are applied after download, so a narrow filter still pages through every notice in the window. Budget 1 request per 100 notices and 5,000-10,000 notices per month (measured 2026-09-07: 4,758 releases in February 2025, 9,162 in June 2025, 10,433 in June 2015 - the June financial-year end is the annual peak), so roughly 80,000-100,000 notices, ~900 requests and 30-40 minutes per year of history at the ~2 seconds per request measured here. A full 2004-onward backfill is therefore tens of thousands of requests and many hours of compute: size dateFrom accordingly, and run long backfills year by year rather than in one pass. Memory does not grow with the window - the Actor de-duplicates within each page and caps its cross-page key memory at 200,000 notices (~30 MB) - so the default 1 GB Actor memory is enough even for a full backfill; the cost of a long window is time and compute units, not RAM.
• contractPublished is almost entirely parent notices - a handful of amendments do slip in (measured 2026-08-24 to 08-31: 1,021 releases tagged contract, 6 tagged contractAmendment) - so use contractLastModified to reliably receive amendments (value changes, extensions). Amendment records reuse the CN number with an -A1, -A2 suffix as id and keep the parent number in contractId - for example CN4252129 was published at A$27,270 and its CN4252129-A1 amendment doubled it to A$54,540.
• Dates: the OCDS feed is UTC, but tenders.gov.au prints Canberra local dates, so a notice stamped 2026-09-01T23:46:49Z appears on the site as 2-Sep-2026 and a period starting 2026-09-13T14:00:00Z appears as 14-Sep-2026. Both forms are in every record: the raw UTC timestamps and the *Local calendar dates that match the site.
• Each notice carries one UNSPSC category and one supplier. In practice dateSigned equals the notice's publication timestamp; the site's separate "execution date" is not in the OCDS feed.
• ATM (approach to market) id, SON id, consultancy flag, SME flags and confidentiality flags are shown on the notice page (url) but are not part of the OCDS feed, so they cannot be included - the url takes you to them.
• Source quirk, handled for you: AusTender publishes the agency's procurement contact under the supplier party; the Actor exposes it as agencyContact* fields, matching what the notice page shows under "Agency Details".
• History reaches back to 2004 (verified), though volume is thin before the 2007-08 financial year, which is AusTender's own stated start of coverage.
• Windows with no notices (for example far-future dates) return zero records and no charge.

Use cases

• Sales intelligence: alert on new contracts in your UNSPSC categories or with target agencies, with the agency procurement contact attached.
• Competitor and incumbent tracking: filter by suppliers to see every federal contract and amendment a competitor wins.
• Re-compete pipeline: run with dateType: contractEnd and a future window to list contracts about to expire, sorted by value. This input returns December 2026 Defence expiries over A$100k in IT and business services:

{ "dateType": "contractEnd", "dateFrom": "2026-12-01", "dateTo": "2026-12-31",
  "agencies": ["Defence"], "unspscPrefixes": ["80", "43"], "minValue": 100000, "maxItems": 5 }

Support

Found a problem or need another field? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab on Apify Store; replies within 14 days.