UK Contract Opportunity Records — Contracts Finder (OCDS)

Official source. No API key. Pay per record.

This actor turns the UK government's Contracts Finder procurement feed into clean, per-notice records — both open tender opportunities and completed contract awards — delivered through the official Open Contracting (OCDS) API. Each run reads the live Contracts Finder OCDS Search endpoint and delivers one row per notice: the buyer organisation, the title and description, the CPV classification, the value, the deadline, and — on award notices — the winning supplier organisation and award value. Values are verbatim, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0, and no natural-person contact data is ever emitted.

What this is, in one paragraph

Every UK public-sector body above a low threshold must publish its contract opportunities and awards on Contracts Finder. The site exposes this as machine-readable Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS) releases. This actor reads those releases through the keyless OCDS Search API and flattens each into a single, analysis-ready row: who is buying, what they are buying, how it is classified (CPV), what it is worth, when bids are due, and — for awards — who won and for how much. It paginates the official cursor, paces politely, and stops at the record ceiling you set. You are billed only for records actually delivered.

Who buys this and for what job

• Suppliers and bid teams watching for new opportunities in their CPV categories and tracking who is winning comparable contracts.
• Market and competitive analysts building a picture of public-sector spend by buyer, category, and value band.
• Procurement and consultancy teams benchmarking award values and framework usage across departments and councils.
• Data engineers who want a keyless, one-call UK procurement feed that is already deduplicated to org-level fields.

Open Government Licence v3.0 (carried on every record)

Contracts Finder data is published by the Crown Commercial Service / Cabinet Office under the Open Government Licence v3.0. That licence permits free commercial reuse with attribution, and the OCDS payload itself names the licence on every response. This actor carries the required attribution on every record:

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Source: UK Contracts Finder.

These are decision-records of published procurement notices — point-in-time facts, not a monitoring, alerting, or bid-writing service. Verify against the official notice before acting.

No person data — by construction

OCDS releases carry a buyer contact point (a named official, their email and phone) under parties[].contactPoint. This actor never reads that structure — it maps only organisation-level fields (buyer name/id, org address locality/region/postcode/country, supplier org name/id). As a second, structural safeguard, every free-text field (title and description) is scrubbed before emit: any known contact string, and any email address or phone-number pattern, is redacted. This is enforced by acceptance tests that feed a notice containing a person's name, email, and phone and assert none of it survives, plus a live leak check against real notices (234 real contact strings across 100 live notices → 0 emitted).

Pricing

Event	Free plan	Bronze	Silver	Gold / Platinum / Diamond
contract_record	$0.05	$0.045	$0.04	$0.0335

Delivered before charged. Blocked runs and empty results cost nothing.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
stages	string list	tender, award	Which OCDS stages to pull: tender (open opportunities), award (contract awards).
publishedFrom	string (YYYY-MM-DD)	—	Optional. Keep only notices published on or after this date.
cpvPrefix	string (2–8 digits)	—	Optional. Keep only notices whose CPV code starts with these digits. Applied to delivered records.
maxRecords	integer	500	Ceiling on records delivered and billed.

The actor paces requests between pages and follows the official OCDS pagination cursor.

Output

One JSON object per notice. Real example (award notice, from live data, values verbatim):

{
  "record_id": "ocds-b5fd17-1beb6241-727d-4d4e-a6e0-86ad2cdcec43",
  "ocid": "ocds-b5fd17-1beb6241-727d-4d4e-a6e0-86ad2cdcec43",
  "notice_id": "238f133b-cb67-4695-9e33-af26f18c1413-911210",
  "stage": "award",
  "release_date": "2026-08-18T17:46:56+01:00",
  "title": "ICT Managed Service Provider with Hardware Provision",
  "tender_status": "complete",
  "cpv_code": "72000000",
  "cpv_description": "IT services: consulting, software development, Internet and support",
  "procurement_category": "services",
  "procurement_method": "Call-off from a framework agreement",
  "value_amount": 4559570.55,
  "value_currency": "GBP",
  "deadline": "2026-06-04T14:00:00+01:00",
  "buyer_name": "Golden Lane Housing",
  "buyer_id": "GB-SRS-...",
  "buyer_locality": "Manchester",
  "buyer_postcode": "M14 7HR",
  "buyer_country": "United Kingdom",
  "award_value_amount": 4559570.55,
  "award_value_currency": "GBP",
  "award_date": "2026-08-18T00:00:00+01:00",
  "award_status": "active",
  "supplier_names": ["European Electronique Limited"],
  "supplier_ids": ["GB-COH-01704440"],
  "source": "UK Contracts Finder (OCDS)",
  "source_url": "https://www.contractsfinder.service.gov.uk/Notice/238f133b-cb67-4695-9e33-af26f18c1413-911210",
  "licence": "UK Contracts Finder ... Open Government Licence v3.0 ...",
  "attribution": "Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Source: UK Contracts Finder.",
  "observed_at": "2026-08-18T23:44:20Z"
}

An unbilled RUN_RECEIPT records the robots check, the stages pulled, the licence seen, releases seen, records delivered, and whether charged equals delivered.

Field reference

Every record carries a stable, flat set of fields so it drops straight into a spreadsheet or a warehouse table:

• Identity: record_id / ocid (the OCDS contracting-process id), notice_id (the Contracts Finder notice id), stage (tender or award), and release_date.
• What is being bought: title, description (both scrubbed of any contact data), cpv_code and cpv_description (the Common Procurement Vocabulary classification), procurement_category, and procurement_method.
• Money and timing: value_amount and value_currency for the tender estimate, and deadline (the tender-period end date) for open opportunities.
• Buyer organisation: buyer_name, buyer_id, and the organisation's buyer_locality, buyer_region, buyer_postcode, and buyer_country — organisation address only, never a named individual.
• Award detail (award stage): award_value_amount, award_value_currency, award_date, award_status, and the winning supplier_names / supplier_ids (organisation registrations such as Companies House numbers).
• Provenance: source, source_url (a deep link to the official notice), licence, attribution, disclaimer, and observed_at (the UTC retrieval time).

How a run works

A run first checks the site's robots posture, then walks each requested stage in turn. For each stage it opens the OCDS Search endpoint with your date window, reads a page of releases, builds one org-level record per release, applies your CPV filter, and delivers the record before it is charged. It then follows the official pagination cursor (links.next) to the next page, pausing briefly between requests to stay well within polite-use limits, and stops as soon as your maxRecords ceiling is reached. Because delivery precedes billing, a run that is blocked at the door or that finds nothing costs you nothing, and the charge_equals_delivered flag in the run receipt lets you confirm you were billed for exactly what you received.

Cost guidance

One contract_record per delivered notice: cost = notices delivered × your plan's per-record price. 1,000 notices is $50 (Free) / $33.50 (Gold). Contracts Finder publishes on the order of hundreds of new notices per day across tender and award stages, so a dated pull (publishedFrom) keeps runs bounded and cheap.

Honest limitations

• UK only. This is the UK Contracts Finder feed (central government, councils, NHS, and other public bodies in England — with UK-wide notices). For EU-wide procurement, see the sibling actor below.
• Point-in-time. Each record is the notice as published at retrieval; statuses and awards can change. Re-run to refresh.
• Org-level only. No buyer contact person, email, or phone is emitted — by design.
• CPV filter is client-side. Contracts Finder's OCDS endpoint does not honour a server-side CPV filter, so cpvPrefix is applied to delivered records rather than at the source. You are billed only for records that pass the filter and are delivered.
• Award value fields are populated only on award-stage notices.

Differentiation

Distinct from the sibling EU Tender Bid Signals (nexgensignal/eu-tender-bid-signals), which reads the EU's Tenders Electronic Daily (TED) across all member states. This actor is UK procurement specifically, from Contracts Finder, in native OCDS — a different jurisdiction, a different source system, and a different schema. Run both for full UK + EU coverage.

The NexGen Signal family

Part of the NexGen Signal family of official-source, pay-per-record products:

• Eurostat House Price Index
• Eurostat Waste Generation
• Eurostat Business & Consumer Confidence
• Eurostat Income Distribution (EU-SILC)
• Eurostat Immigration Statistics
• Eurostat Road Freight Transport
• Organization Sanctions & LEI Risk
• EU Tender Bid Signals — TED

Source: UK Contracts Finder (Crown Commercial Service / Cabinet Office) via the OCDS Search API. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Reformatted to org-level records; values verbatim; no natural-person contact data emitted.