UK Public Tenders & Contract Awards (Find a Tender + Contracts Finder)

Search every UK public sector procurement notice in one place: open tenders, contract awards, and pipeline and planned procurements, from Find a Tender and Contracts Finder. Filter by keyword, CPV code, region, buyer, value and bid deadline, and get one clean, flat row per notice: title, buyer, region, CPV codes, estimated value, deadline, contract dates, SME suitability, who won it and for how much, and a link to the official notice.

Run it on a schedule with onlyNewNotices and it becomes a tender alert service: each run returns only the notices you haven't seen yet. Tender alert subscriptions cost £25 to £79 a month. A daily alert here typically costs pennies.

It reads the government's official OCDS APIs (the open data feeds behind both services), so it's fast, cheap and doesn't break when a website changes.

What it's for

• Bid writers and bid managers: a daily feed of new opportunities in your clients' sectors and regions, with the deadline, value and documents link in every row.
• Suppliers and SMEs: catch tenders early. Pipeline (UK1), market engagement (UK2) and planned procurement (UK3) notices tell you what's coming months before the tender opens.
• Sales and business development teams: contract awards show who's buying what, from whom, at what price, and when the contract ends (so when it'll be re-tendered).
• Market research and competitor tracking: pull every award in a CPV division for a year and see which suppliers win.
• AI agents: one call answers "which NHS software tenders are open for bids in London right now?" (see MCP below).

Input

Field	What it does
keywords	Keep notices whose title or description contains any of these (at the start of a word), e.g. software, facilities management.
excludeKeywords	Drop notices containing any of these.
cpvCodes	CPV code prefixes: 72 (IT services), 48 (software packages), 4521 (building work), 85 (health and social care). 72000000 works too.
regions	Region names (London, North West, Scotland, Wales, England...) or NUTS/ITL codes (UKI, UKD3, TLM). Matched against the buyer's address and the delivery locations.
includeUkWide	In a region search, also keep notices delivered across the whole UK (on by default).
buyerNames	Buyer name contains any of these, e.g. NHS, Ministry of Defence, Leeds City Council.
stages	planning, tender, award, contract. Leave empty for all.
noticeTypes	Procurement Act notice types, e.g. UK4 (tender), UK6 (contract award).
minValue, maxValue	Estimated value, or the award value for awards, in pounds. Notices with no published value are kept.
publishedWithinDays	Notices published in the last N days (default 7, up to 366).
publishedSince	Or a start date (YYYY-MM-DD).
deadlineAfter	Bid deadline on or after a date: YYYY-MM-DD, today (still open) or 7 days (at least a week left).
smeSuitableOnly	Only notices the buyer marked suitable for SMEs.
includeUpdates	Include changed notices (new deadline, corrections). On by default; each has isUpdate: true.
sources	find-a-tender and/or contracts-finder (both by default).
onlyNewNotices	Skip notices this search returned on earlier runs. Pair it with a schedule.
includeDescription	Plain-text description, up to 4,000 characters (on by default).
maxResults	Cap (default 1,000).

Open IT tenders in London and the South East worth £100k or more:

{
    "cpvCodes": ["72", "48"],
    "regions": ["London", "South East"],
    "stages": ["tender"],
    "deadlineAfter": "today",
    "minValue": 100000
}

Daily tender alert (run on a schedule, e.g. every morning at 7am):

{
    "keywords": ["cleaning", "facilities management", "grounds maintenance"],
    "regions": ["North West", "Yorkshire and the Humber"],
    "stages": ["planning", "tender"],
    "publishedWithinDays": 2,
    "onlyNewNotices": true
}

Set up the schedule in Apify Console (Schedules → Create), then send the results where you want them with an integration: email, Slack, Google Sheets, or a webhook into your CRM. A two-day window with onlyNewNotices means a missed run never loses anything.

Who won NHS software contracts this year:

{
    "buyerNames": ["NHS"],
    "cpvCodes": ["48"],
    "stages": ["award"],
    "publishedSince": "2026-01-01",
    "includeDescription": false
}

Output

One row per notice, the same shape from both services:

{
    "source": "find-a-tender",
    "noticeId": "100188-2026",
    "ocid": "ocds-h6vhtk-078e4f",
    "noticeType": "UK4",
    "noticeTypeName": "Tender notice",
    "stage": "tender",
    "isUpdate": false,
    "title": "Yorkshire Highway Alliance Road Markings Framework 2026-28",
    "description": "Implementation of road markings within Leeds and across the Yorkshire Highway Alliance",
    "buyerName": "Leeds City Council",
    "buyerId": "GB-PPON-PJYG-6658-PPMY",
    "buyerRegion": "UKE42",
    "buyerRegionName": "Yorkshire and the Humber",
    "buyerTown": "Leeds",
    "buyerPostcode": "LS1 1UR",
    "buyerEmail": "contracts.support.unit@leeds.gov.uk",
    "deliveryRegions": [],
    "cpvCodes": ["34922100", "45233210"],
    "cpvDescriptions": ["Road markings", "Surface work for highways"],
    "category": "works",
    "valueMin": null,
    "valueMax": 7200000,
    "currency": "GBP",
    "publishedAt": "2026-10-22T16:08:58.000Z",
    "tenderDeadline": "2026-11-19T12:00:00.000Z",
    "contractStart": "2026-12-14T00:00:00.000Z",
    "contractEnd": "2028-12-13T23:59:59.000Z",
    "procedureType": "Open procedure",
    "lotCount": 1,
    "suitableForSme": null,
    "suitableForVcse": null,
    "awardedSuppliers": [],
    "awardValue": null,
    "awardDate": null,
    "noticeUrl": "https://www.find-tender.service.gov.uk/Notice/100188-2026",
    "documentsUrl": "https://leedscitycouncil.ukp.app.jaggaer.com/esop/ogc-host/public/leedscitycouncil/web/login.html"
}

For awards, awardedSuppliers, awardValue and awardDate are filled in. Fields a notice doesn't publish are null. Values are net of VAT where the notice gives both figures. stage is one of:

• planning: pipeline (UK1), preliminary market engagement (UK2) and planned procurement (UK3) notices
• tender: tender notices (UK4), procurement terminations (UK12) and dynamic markets (UK14 to UK16)
• award: contract award (UK6) and transparency (UK5, direct award) notices
• contract: contract details (UK7), performance (UK9), change (UK10) and termination (UK11) notices

Pricing

$0.003 per notice returned, plus a token $0.00005 per run. 1,000 notices cost about $3. A daily alert that finds 20 new notices costs about $1.80 a month. Notices your filters drop cost nothing.

Good to know

• Since the Procurement Act 2023 went live on 24 February 2025, Find a Tender carries every notice under the new rules, above and below threshold, with a UK notice type (UK1 to UK16). Contracts Finder still carries notices for procurements started under the old rules, mostly awards now, so both are searched by default. Scottish buyers publish on Public Contracts Scotland, and only their above-threshold notices reach Find a Tender.
• Every change to a notice is published as a new notice. The actor returns only the latest version of each procurement stage, and copies of the same notice on both services are returned once.
• Both services limit how fast they can be read, so the actor reads one page of 100 notices every 5 seconds: a week of everything takes about 3 minutes, a day well under a minute. Filters are applied as it reads.
• Contracts Finder notices have no region code, so the buyer's region is looked up from its postcode (postcodes.io).
• onlyNewNotices remembers results in a named key-value store in your Apify account (uk-public-tenders-seen), separately for each set of filters. Change the filters and it starts afresh; delete the store to reset them all.
• Keywords match the title and description only, not attached documents.

Use it from Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor (MCP)

AI assistants can call this actor as a tool through Apify's MCP server. Add this server URL to your MCP client and sign in with your Apify account when prompted:

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

Data source

Find a Tender OCDS release package API and Contracts Finder OCDS search API, both run by the Cabinet Office. Notice data is published under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Buyer regions for Contracts Finder notices come from postcodes.io (ONS data, OGL). Every row's noticeUrl links to the official notice.

This actor isn't affiliated with or endorsed by the Cabinet Office.

Questions or feature requests? Open an issue on the actor's Issues tab or email admin@onibaku.co.uk.