UK Public Contract Awards: Winners & Values

See which suppliers have just won UK public sector contracts, who awarded them, for how much and for how long. Every row is one award to one supplier, taken from the government's official Contracts Finder open data, with a link to the official notice. Run it once for a report, or schedule it daily and receive only newly published or corrected awards.

What you get for each award:

• the buyer
• the winning supplier, with its Companies House number when the notice gives one
• the award value (left blank when the buyer didn't publish one, never shown as £0)
• the award date and the contract start and end dates
• the procedure, CPV category and delivery region
• whether the supplier is an SME or VCSE
• the official notice link

Three ways buyers use it

1. Watch competitors and incumbents. Filter by supplier name or by your sector's CPV codes, schedule it daily, and see every new win as it's published.
2. Plan for re-tenders. Contract end dates, incumbents and values show who holds which contract and when it is due to be re-procured.
3. Size a public sector market. Export a period's awards by CPV category, region or buyer into a spreadsheet or BI tool, and count awards and published values.

Tested on 25–26 October 2026, against the live Contracts Finder API and in six runs on the Apify platform: exports, repeat runs and filtered monitors.

• Repeat runs: a monitor run straight after a delivery returned 0 awards, repeating nothing.
• Separate filters: monitors with different filters kept separate memories.
• Official records: sampled award rows matched their official notices.

This is a data tool, not a lead guarantee. Coverage is what public bodies publish on Contracts Finder (see Data limitations).

Example input

{
  "publishedFrom": "2026-10-19",
  "publishedTo": "2026-10-23",
  "cpvPrefixes": ["72"],
  "minValue": 100000
}

Weekly monitor of NHS and council construction wins in the North West and Yorkshire:

{
  "lookbackDays": 30,
  "cpvPrefixes": ["45"],
  "regions": ["North West", "Yorkshire and the Humber"],
  "minValue": 250000,
  "onlyNewAwards": true,
  "stateKey": "northern-construction"
}

Filters can be combined. Text filters (buyerContains, supplierContains) are not case-sensitive and match if any listed text appears. cpvPrefixes takes the start of CPV codes (72 = IT services, 45 = construction, 33 = medical equipment) and matches the main and additional codes.

Example output (one row, trimmed)

{
  "notice_id": "8d30e6ec-f30f-46a7-bcec-961a419a572f",
  "ocid": "ocds-b5fd17-bb439732-f359-40e7-9925-11073c6e5adf",
  "published_date": "2026-10-23",
  "buyer_name": "Ministry of Justice",
  "supplier_name": "Lumen Technologies UK Limited",
  "companies_house_number": "02495998",
  "award_value": 4920000.0,
  "currency": "GBP",
  "award_date": "2026-09-29",
  "contract_start_date": "2026-10-01",
  "contract_end_date": "2029-09-30",
  "procurement_method_details": "Call-off from a framework agreement",
  "cpv_main_code": "72261000",
  "cpv_main_description": "Software support services",
  "regions": [],
  "is_amended": false,
  "source_url": "https://www.contractsfinder.service.gov.uk/Notice/8d30e6ec-f30f-46a7-bcec-961a419a572f"
}

OUTPUT_EXAMPLE.json has three complete rows from the live test.

Fields

Field	Meaning
award_key	Stable key: ocid, award id and supplier. Use it to join runs
notice_id, ocid, release_id, award_id	Contracts Finder notice id (uuid), OCDS process id, id of the latest edit and award id
notice_type, is_amended, release_count	award or awardUpdate. is_amended is true when the notice was corrected. release_count is how many versions were seen in this run's window; only the latest is output
delivery	Incremental runs only: new, or changed for an award delivered before whose notice has since changed
published_at, published_date	When this version was published on Contracts Finder (UK time)
award_date, award_status	Award date entered by the buyer (can be months before publication) and status
title, description	Notice title and text, with emails and phone numbers removed
buyer_id, buyer_name	The contracting authority
supplier_name, supplier_id	Winner as published (null name when the buyer gave only a number) and Contracts Finder's id for it
supplier_identifier_scheme, supplier_identifier, companies_house_number	Registry id when given (30% of rows). Companies House numbers are padded to 8 characters
supplier_is_sme, supplier_is_vcse	The supplier's own flags when the buyer recorded them, else null
awarded_to_n_suppliers	Suppliers named on the award. Above 1 (frameworks), each supplier row repeats the whole award value. Don't add those rows up
award_value, currency	null when the buyer gave none (about 1 in 12 awards publish a value of 0, treated as unknown)
tender_estimated_value	The buyer's earlier estimate, when published
contract_start_date, contract_end_date	Contract period. Placeholder or impossible dates become null
main_procurement_category, procurement_method, procurement_method_details	goods / services / works, and the procedure as published
cpv_main_code, cpv_main_description, cpv_codes, cpv_descriptions	Main and additional CPV codes
regions	UK delivery regions named on the notice (can be empty or just England)
tender_suitable_for_sme, tender_suitable_for_vcse	Whether the buyer marked the tender as suitable (not the winner's status)
source_url	Official public notice page on Contracts Finder

Amended notices and duplicates

A corrected notice is published again with the same award id. Within one run only the latest version of each award and supplier is output (is_amended: true), and a notice repeated across pages is counted once. With onlyNewAwards, an award you already received comes back once more, flagged delivery: "changed", only if something material changed (supplier, value, dates, buyer, title, procedure, CPV codes, regions). Re-saves with no change are not repeated.

Data source and attribution

Contracts Finder OCDS API, run by the Cabinet Office. Published under the Open Government Licence v3.0 (see the site terms). No API key is needed.

If you republish this data, include: Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Every row links to its official notice. Note that Contracts Finder carries the content of notices as published by thousands of buyers; its operators give no guarantee of accuracy or completeness.

Data limitations (please read)

• Coverage is whatever buyers publish on Contracts Finder. It is not every UK public contract: large above-threshold contracts are also published on Find a Tender, which this Actor does not read yet, and the devolved nations have their own portals.
• Award values are the buyer's entry. About 1 in 12 are blank, and framework "values" are often ceilings, not spend.
• Publication date is not award date. The date window filters on when a notice was last published or edited. Late and corrected notices carry old award dates.
• Regions are often missing (58% of rows in the live test) and are the delivery region, not the supplier's location.
• Supplier identity is only as good as the notice. Matching by name across buyers will have gaps; use companies_house_number when present.
• Personal data. Buyer contact names, emails and phones and supplier street addresses are never output, and emails and phone numbers found in the title or description text are replaced with [email removed] / [phone removed]. Supplier names are published as given, which for sole traders can be a person's name or a trading name containing one. Names of individuals typed into free-text descriptions cannot be reliably removed. If you process this data you remain the controller for your own use under UK GDPR.
• Corrected notices published after your window ended appear in your next run.

Running time and cost

The Actor reads one UK day at a time, at about 1 request per second, because the API blocks heavy callers for 5 minutes. Measured on 25 October 2026:

Run	Time	Rows
7-day export, no filter (default)	12 s, ~90 MB memory (132–247 s seen when the source is slow)	~760
Daily monitor, first run (7-day backfill)	11 s	~760
Daily monitor, each later run	4 s	new or corrected awards only: about 150–220 on a weekday, ~0 at weekends

Platform usage is a fraction of a cent per run.

Pricing

$3.00 per 1,000 award rows ($0.003 per row). There's no subscription and no extra charge per run beyond Apify's standard tiny start fee. Each row is one award to one supplier, and you are charged only for rows written to your dataset.

How you use it	Rows	You pay (approx.)
One-off 7-day export, all awards	~760	~$2.30
Daily monitor, all awards, for a month	~3,500	~$10–11 a month
Daily monitor filtered to one sector (e.g. CPV 72, IT services)	a few dozen to a few hundred a month	well under $1–2 a month

• No double billing: in monitor mode an award is charged once, and again only if the buyer publishes a correction (flagged delivery: "changed").
• Failed runs: a run that fails before reading any data outputs nothing and costs only the start fee.
• Spending limits: if you set a maximum cost per run, the Actor stops cleanly when it's reached. Awards it didn't deliver arrive on the next run.

Troubleshooting

• No rows? The window may hold nothing that matches all filters. Widen lookbackDays or relax minValue (awards with no value are dropped when a minimum is set, unless includeUnknownValue is on) or regions (notices without a region are dropped).
• "Contracts Finder refused the request (HTTP 403)": the API rate-limits heavy callers for 5 minutes. The Actor already waits and retries once. Wait 5 minutes, then run again. Days already read in an incremental run are saved.
• "could not be reached": Contracts Finder is down or slow. Try again later.
• Run says partial: it stopped at maxResults, maxRuntimeSeconds or a source error. In incremental mode the next run continues where it stopped and repeats nothing.
• "Only new awards" returned nothing: everything in the window was already delivered to this stateKey. Use a new key to start over.
• Same award twice in one dataset with different suppliers: that is correct. One row per supplier per award.

Known restrictions

• Date limits:
  • lookbackDays accepts 1 to 366 days.
  • For older history, set publishedFrom and publishedTo (up to 3,650 days per run). Use maxResults and Apify's per-run spending limit to keep large exports in budget.
  • A single day is limited to 40,000 notices, about 100 times a normal day. Past that, the run stops with an error rather than returning partial data.
• Separate monitors: each combination of stateKey and filters is its own monitor with its own memory. If a run starts while another run of the same monitor is still going, it stops without output, so nothing is charged twice.
• onlyNewAwards remembers up to 100,000 awards per state key. In that mode publishedFrom is only used on the first run; later runs continue from the saved position minus overlapDays.
• With maxResults, the newest awards are output first. In incremental mode the rest are delivered on the next run.
• A run that hits maxRuntimeSeconds outputs what it has read from completed days. Its summary says status: partial.
• Only award stage notices are read (tenders and planning notices are not).