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

UK and EU public tenders, contract opportunities and contract awards from three official APIs: Find a Tender, Contracts Finder and, on request, the EU's TED (Tenders Electronic Daily). One flat JSON schema, with keyword, CPV, value, region, country and buyer filters. $2 per 1,000 notices ($0.002 each), no start fee.

The Actor reads the official open-data APIs, not web pages. It merges the sources, returns a notice once even when it is published on both UK portals, and never copies officials' names, e-mail addresses or phone numbers. Use it for bid alerts, pipeline building, award and competitor research, and as a tender search tool for AI agents.

What you get

One record per notice: a planning notice (early market engagement), a tender (an open opportunity you can bid for) or an award (who won, and for how much).

{
  "source": "fts",
  "sourceName": "Find a Tender",
  "ocid": "ocds-h6vhtk-06efc1",
  "noticeId": "105436-2026",
  "stage": "tender",
  "noticeType": "tender",
  "status": "active",
  "title": "Sight Testing and Dispensing of Spectacles to Children and Young People in Special Educational Settings (SES) - South West",
  "description": "This notice is inform the market of an opportunity to deliver Sight Testing and Dispensing of Spectacles…",
  "buyerName": "NHS Devon Integrated Care Board",
  "buyerId": "GB-NHS-QJK",
  "buyerWebsite": "https://onedevon.org.uk/",
  "buyerAddress": { "locality": "Exeter", "region": "UKK", "postcode": "EX2 5AZ", "country": "United Kingdom" },
  "valueAmount": 3280000,
  "valueCurrency": "GBP",
  "cpvCodes": [
    { "code": "85100000", "description": "Health services" },
    { "code": "85160000", "description": "Optician services" }
  ],
  "regions": ["South West"],
  "regionCodes": ["UKK1", "UKK3", "UKK4"],
  "mainCategory": "services",
  "procurementMethod": "Open procedure",
  "submissionDeadline": "2026-12-10T12:00:00Z",
  "contractStartDate": null,
  "contractEndDate": null,
  "publishedDate": "2026-11-05T16:57:43Z",
  "updatedDate": "2026-11-05T16:57:43Z",
  "lots": [
    { "id": "1", "title": "Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire (BNSSG) and Gloucestershire", "valueAmount": 1530000, "valueCurrency": "GBP" },
    { "id": "2", "title": "Devon and Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly", "valueAmount": 1750000, "valueCurrency": "GBP" }
  ],
  "awards": [],
  "noticeUrl": "https://www.find-tender.service.gov.uk/Notice/105436-2026",
  "documentUrls": [],
  "licence": "Open Government Licence v3.0",
  "licenceUrl": "https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/"
}

What is in a record:

• Identity: source, ocid (the Open Contracting ID), noticeId, stage, noticeType, status and a direct noticeUrl.
• What is being bought: title, a plain-text description (stray HTML turned into line breaks, capped at 2,000 characters), cpvCodes with descriptions, mainCategory (goods, services, works) and lots.
• Who is buying: buyerName, buyerId, buyerWebsite and the organisation's address.
• Money and dates: valueAmount and valueCurrency, submissionDeadline, contract start and end dates, publishedDate and updatedDate, all in ISO 8601.
• Where: regions (names such as "South West") and regionCodes (NUTS/ITL codes).
• Who won: award notices fill awards with supplierNames, amount, currency, date and status.
• Licence: every record names the licence its source publishes under.

The dataset's Overview tab shows the key columns. The run's key-value store also gets an OUTPUT record: how many notices were scanned, filtered out, removed as duplicates and returned per source, and why the run stopped.

Quick start

Every input field is optional. The form opens with maxResults set to 50, so pressing Start returns 50 recent open UK tenders from the last 7 days for $0.10:

{
  "maxResults": 50
}

A more typical search: IT and software tenders worth £100,000 or more in London and the South East, from the last 14 days.

{
  "stages": ["tender"],
  "lastDays": 14,
  "cpvCodes": ["72", "48"],
  "minValue": 100000,
  "regions": ["UKI", "UKJ"]
}

Who won NHS contracts this month:

{
  "stages": ["award"],
  "dateFrom": "2026-11-01",
  "buyerName": "NHS"
}

Open tenders from Irish and German buyers on TED:

{
  "sources": ["ted"],
  "countries": ["IE", "DE"],
  "stages": ["tender"],
  "lastDays": 3,
  "maxResults": 200
}

Input reference

Field	Type	Default	What it does
sources	string[]	["fts", "contractsFinder"]	fts (Find a Tender), contractsFinder, and/or ted (EU and EEA; opt in).
stages	string[]	["tender"]	planning, tender (open opportunities), award (winners).
lastDays	integer	7	Notices published or updated in the last N days (1 to 365). Ignored when dateFrom is set.
dateFrom / dateTo	string		An explicit window: 2026-10-01 or a full ISO date-time. dateTo defaults to now.
keywords	string[]		Keep notices whose title, description or lot titles contain ANY of these words or phrases (case-insensitive).
cpvCodes	string[]		CPV prefixes of 2 to 8 digits: 72 = IT services, 45 = construction work, 85 = health and social work.
minValue / maxValue	integer		Value range. Compared in GBP on the UK sources and in EUR on TED.
includeUnknownValue	boolean	false	With a value filter set, also keep notices that publish no value.
regions	string[]		NUTS/ITL code prefixes (UKI = London, UKM = Scotland) or region names ("North West").
countries	string[]		TED only: buyer countries as ISO codes or names (GB, DEU, Germany). Applied by TED's own search.
buyerName	string		Keep notices whose buyer name contains this text ("NHS", "County Council").
maxResults	integer	500	Stop after this many notices (1 to 100,000). Each notice returned is one charged result.
deduplicate	boolean	true	Return a notice once even if it appears on both UK sources or was updated several times in the window.

An invalid input fails at once with a message that lists every problem, so a person or an AI agent can fix it in one go.

The three sources

Find a Tender (UK)

The UK's central service for higher-value public procurement and for notices under the Procurement Act 2023, covering England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Read through its official OCDS release-package API. Published under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Contracts Finder (England)

Lower-value opportunities and awards from English public bodies. Read through its official OCDS search API. Published under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

TED: Tenders Electronic Daily (EU and EEA)

Every above-threshold notice from buyers in the EU and EEA, read through TED's official Search API. TED is opt-in (add ted to sources) because it is large, about 2,500 notices a day: narrow it with countries, stages and the date window. Titles and descriptions are taken in English where TED provides it, otherwise in the first language given. TED values are in EUR; regions are NUTS codes in regionCodes and the buyer's country in regions. TED data is reusable under Commission Decision 2011/833/EU, noted on each record.

Use cases

• Bid alerts. Schedule a daily run for your keywords or CPV codes and send new opportunities to e-mail, Slack or a spreadsheet.
• Bid pipeline and business development. Build a list of open tenders that match what you sell, with deadlines, values and buyers.
• Market research. See who buys what, how much is spent, and which regions and buyers are active in a CPV category.
• Competitor and award tracking. Follow award notices to see which suppliers win contracts in your sector and at what value.
• Contract expiry research. Where a notice publishes contract start and end dates, they show when an incumbent contract is due to be re-let.
• Cross-border sales. Add TED to follow public buyers in specific EU countries next to your UK pipeline.
• AI agents. A small, predictable schema and filters that take plain values make this a practical tender search tool for agents.

Pricing

Pay per result. $0.002 per notice returned ($2 per 1,000). No start fee, no monthly fee. Notices that are filtered out or removed as duplicates are free.

Run	Notices returned	Cost
The quick-start run	50	$0.10
A daily keyword alert that returns 20 notices	20 a day	$0.04 a day, about $1.20 a month
One week of all open UK tenders, at the default cap	500	$1.00
A year of award notices for one sector, 10,000 notices	10,000	$20.00

To cap spending, set maxResults, or set a maximum cost per run in the run options (maxTotalChargeUsd in the API). The Actor stops cleanly at the limit and the status message says so.

Daily tender alerts in 2 minutes

1. Set your filters (keywords, CPV codes, regions) and set lastDays to 1.
2. Save them as a Task, then add a Schedule to run it every morning.
3. Add an integration (e-mail, Slack, Google Sheets, webhook) to receive the notices.

With lastDays: 1 and a daily schedule you see each new or updated notice once a day.

Use it from the API

Run it and get the results in one call:

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/localwire~uk-public-tenders/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>" \
  -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{"stages": ["tender"], "lastDays": 3, "keywords": ["cyber security"], "maxResults": 100}'

With the official clients:

import { ApifyClient } from "apify-client";

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: process.env.APIFY_TOKEN });
const run = await client.actor("localwire/uk-public-tenders").call({ cpvCodes: ["72"], lastDays: 7, maxResults: 100 });
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("localwire/uk-public-tenders").call(run_input={"cpvCodes": ["72"], "lastDays": 7, "maxResults": 100})
items = client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).list_items().items

Use it from an AI agent (MCP)

Apify hosts an MCP server at https://mcp.apify.com. Add it to an MCP client (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, VS Code and others) and sign in with your Apify account, or send your API token as an Authorization: Bearer header. To expose just this Actor as a tool:

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

Then ask in plain language: "find open NHS tenders for software over £100k published this week". An agent that leaves fields out gets the schema defaults: both UK sources, the tender stage, the last 7 days and up to 500 notices. Tell it to pass a small maxResults when it only needs a sample.

Integrations

Apify connects runs to Make, n8n, Zapier, LangChain, webhooks and other tools, and datasets export as JSON, CSV, Excel, XML or RSS. Typical setups: a scheduled run that appends new tenders to Google Sheets; a webhook that posts each morning's notices to Slack; a CRM import of award winners.

FAQ

Is there a free API for UK government tenders?

Yes. Find a Tender and Contracts Finder both publish free open-data APIs, and TED has a free Search API. The UK APIs filter only by date and stage, the three return nested data in two different formats (OCDS and eForms), and the UK portals overlap with each other. This Actor adds the keyword, CPV, value, region and buyer filters, merges the sources, removes duplicates and returns one flat schema.

What is the difference between Find a Tender and Contracts Finder?

Find a Tender carries higher-value notices from the whole UK. Contracts Finder carries lower-value opportunities and awards from English public bodies. Some notices appear on both; with deduplicate on you get each once, keeping the copy from the source listed first in sources (Find a Tender by default).

How do I get UK tender alerts by e-mail?

Save your filters as a Task with lastDays: 1, schedule it daily and add an e-mail, Slack or Google Sheets integration. See "Daily tender alerts in 2 minutes" above.

Does it include EU tenders from TED?

Yes, when you add ted to sources. Use countries to choose buyer countries; without it you get every country TED covers.

How do I search tenders by CPV code?

Put CPV prefixes in cpvCodes. 72 matches every IT services code, 7226 software-related services, 45000000 exactly construction work. A notice matches when any of its CPV codes starts with any prefix you give.

How do I find out who won a public contract?

Set stages to ["award"] and filter by buyerName, keywords or cpvCodes. Each record's awards lists supplier names, award value, date and status.

Can I export tenders to Excel or CSV?

Yes. Open the run's dataset and choose Excel or CSV, or request https://api.apify.com/v2/datasets/<DATASET_ID>/items?format=csv.

Does it cover Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland?

Through Find a Tender, yes, for the notices those nations publish there. Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales and eTendersNI are not read directly, so lower-value notices that appear only on those portals are not included.

Why did the same notice come back in a later run?

Find a Tender filters on the last-updated date, so an amended notice reappears in a later window. Contracts Finder filters on the publication date of the notice's current stage.

Does the data include contact names or e-mail addresses?

No. See the next section.

Personal data

The Open Government Licence does not cover personal data, so the notices' contact fields (officials' names, e-mail addresses and phone numbers) are never copied, and e-mail addresses and phone numbers found inside notice text are removed. Suppliers that are clearly individuals (sole traders) have their names withheld in award records. Full postcodes inside notice text (for example pick-up points in school-transport tenders) are shortened to the postcode district, such as BS1; the buyer's own organisation address is kept in full. Notice text can still name people where the published notice itself does, for example the decision-makers listed in Provider Selection Regime notices.

Limitations

• Sources. Only the three listed. Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales, eTendersNI and national portals of EU countries are not read; below-threshold EU notices are not on TED.
• Notices, not documents. documentUrls links to attached documents where the notice lists them; the documents themselves are not downloaded.
• Filters run after fetching. The UK APIs filter only by date and stage, so the Actor reads the whole window and filters it. Narrow windows run faster; you are charged only for notices returned.
• Values and regions are only as complete as the published notices: many publish no value and some give a country rather than a region. Values are not converted between GBP and EUR.
• Languages. TED notices are in the publisher's language unless TED supplies English; nothing is translated.
• Descriptions are capped at 2,000 characters.
• Award notices make up most of the volume. If you only want open opportunities, keep stages set to tender.
• Rate limits. Requests are paced, and a rate-limited or failed request is retried with a growing delay a few times. If a source keeps failing, the run continues with the others and the status message names the source that failed. The Actor does not use proxies or any technique to get round a block.

Licence and attribution

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. TED notices are © European Union, reusable under Commission Decision 2011/833/EU.

This Actor is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Cabinet Office, Crown Commercial Service, GOV.UK or the Publications Office of the European Union.

Feedback

Found a notice that looks wrong, or need another source (for example Public Contracts Scotland)? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab.

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