📜 UK Contracts Finder Scraper

🚀 Export UK public sector contract notices in seconds. Filter tenders, awards, and planning notices by keyword and stage. No API key, no registration, no manual CSV wrangling.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-05-12 · 📊 32 fields per record · 🇬🇧 UK government tenders · 📂 OCDS-compliant · ♻️ Live per run

The UK Contracts Finder Scraper pulls live procurement notices from the official Contracts Finder OCDS feed and returns 32 fields per record, covering buyer identity, CPV classification, tender value, deadlines, award suppliers, delivery addresses, SME suitability, and document links. The source data is published by the UK Cabinet Office and is the canonical reference for public sector opportunities valued over £12,000 (£30,000 for central government).

Every UK central government department, local authority, NHS trust, and arm's-length body posts here. The feed includes contracts at every stage of the procurement lifecycle, from early planning notices through live tenders to awarded contracts and implementation updates. This Actor returns clean JSON in under a minute, with filters that match the same parameters the official search UI uses.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Bid managers, procurement analysts, supplier intelligence teams, government affairs, journalists, market research firms, fintech and govtech vendors	New business pipelines, supplier qualification, public spending audits, competitor win-loss tracking, sector market sizing, journalism on government contracts

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📋 What the UK Contracts Finder Scraper does

Several filtering workflows in a single run:

• 🔍 Keyword search. Match any phrase across title and description, like software, construction, or cyber security.
• 🪜 Stage filter. Choose tender, award, planning, or implementation, alone or in combination.
• 💷 Value capture. Pull contract value amount and currency where the buyer has disclosed it.
• 🏷️ CPV codes. Both main and additional Common Procurement Vocabulary classifications.
• 🏢 Buyer and supplier identity. Buyer name and OCID, plus awarded supplier name and ID when the notice is an award.

Each record includes the OCID, release ID, release date, full title and description, buyer details, procurement method, status, tender period, award details, CPV codes with descriptions, delivery addresses, SME and VCSE suitability flags, document links, and party counts.

💡 Why it matters: UK public sector spending exceeds £300 billion a year. Contracts Finder is the single place every notice lands. Building your own scraper means parsing the OCDS spec, handling pagination, and tracking changes across stages. This Actor returns a flat, query-ready table on every run.

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🎬 Full Demo

🚧 Coming soon: a 3-minute walkthrough showing how to go from sign-up to a downloaded dataset.

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⚙️ Input

Input	Type	Default	Behavior
keyword	string	""	Free-text search across notice title and description. Empty returns every notice in the chosen stage.
stages	array	["tender"]	One or more of planning, tender, award, implementation.
maxItems	integer	10	Records to return. Free plan caps at 10, paid plan at 1,000,000.

Example: 100 live tender notices mentioning software.

{
    "maxItems": 100,
    "keyword": "software",
    "stages": ["tender"]
}

Example: awarded contracts only, across all keywords.

{
    "maxItems": 500,
    "stages": ["award"]
}

⚠️ Good to Know: the OCDS feed paginates 100 records at a time. Large pulls take a few minutes. Award notices often link back to the original tender via the same OCID, so the same contract may appear in multiple stages with different release IDs.

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📊 Output

Each notice record contains 32 fields. Download the dataset as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

🧾 Schema

Field	Type	Example
🆔 ocid	string	"ocds-b5fd17-a211cf0c-49b4-4921-9d96-c60ca9df08f9"
🔗 url	string	"https://www.contractsfinder.service.gov.uk/Notice/..."
🏷️ releaseId	string	"8ed55a8c-...-896885"
📅 releaseDate	ISO 8601	"2026-05-12T17:00:38+01:00"
🏷️ tags	string[]	["tender"]
📰 title	string	"CA17805 - PEACEPLUS Food Fusion Festival"
📝 description	string	"Newry Mourne & Down District Council..."
🏢 buyerName	string	"Newry, Mourne and Down District Council"
🆔 buyerId	string	"GB-CFS-333373"
📋 procurementMethod	string | null	"open"
📋 procurementMethodDetails	string | null	"Open procedure"
🗂️ mainProcurementCategory	string | null	"services"
💷 valueAmount	number | null	250000
💱 valueCurrency	string | null	"GBP"
📊 tenderStatus	string | null	"active"
📅 tenderStartDate	ISO 8601 | null	"2026-05-12T17:00:00+01:00"
📅 tenderEndDate	ISO 8601 | null	"2026-06-09T12:00:00+01:00"
🏢 awardSupplier	string | null	"Example Ltd"
🆔 awardSupplierId	string | null	"GB-COH-12345678"
💷 awardValue	number | null	180000
📅 awardDate	ISO 8601 | null	"2026-04-01"
📅 awardContractPeriodStart	ISO 8601 | null	"2026-05-01"
📅 awardContractPeriodEnd	ISO 8601 | null	"2027-04-30"
🏷️ cpvCodes	string[]	["80000000", "98000000"]
📝 cpvDescriptions	string[]	["Education and training services"]
📍 deliveryAddresses	string[]	["BT34 2QU", "United Kingdom"]
🤝 suitableForSmes	boolean | null	true
🤲 suitableForVcse	boolean | null	false
🌐 language	string | null	"en"
🚦 initiationType	string | null	"tender"
📎 documents	object[]	[{ id, type, description, url }]
👥 partiesCount	number	1
🕒 scrapedAt	ISO 8601	"2026-05-12T16:30:03.259Z"

📦 Sample records

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✨ Why choose this Actor

	Capability
🇬🇧	Official OCDS feed. Pulls directly from the UK Cabinet Office Contracts Finder API, the canonical source for public sector procurement.
🪜	Lifecycle coverage. Planning, tender, award, and implementation stages in a single input.
💷	Full CPV classification. Main and additional CPV codes with human-readable descriptions for sector segmentation.
🤝	SME and VCSE flags. Filter directly for opportunities marked suitable for small businesses or voluntary, community, and social enterprises.
⚡	Fast. 100 notices in about a minute, 10,000 records in under fifteen minutes.
🔁	Always fresh. Every run pulls the live feed so your pipeline tracks new opportunities as they appear.
🚫	No authentication. Works with public procurement data. No login or API key needed.

📊 The UK public sector spends over £300 billion per year. Tracking the right notices early is the difference between bidding and missing out.

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📈 How it compares to alternatives

Approach	Cost	Coverage	Refresh	Filters	Setup
⭐ UK Contracts Finder Scraper (this Actor)	$5 free credit, then pay-per-use	All UK public notices	Live per run	keyword, stage	⚡ 2 min
Official portal search UI	Free	Same data, manual	Live	UI form	🐢 Manual export per query
Paid procurement intelligence platforms	$500+/month	Multi-country aggregated	Hourly	Many	⏳ Vendor onboarding
Legacy community dumps	Free	Subset, stale	Rarely updated	None	🕒 Variable

Pick this Actor when you want the live OCDS feed in clean JSON, with server-side filtering and zero pipeline maintenance.

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🚀 How to use

1. 📝 Sign up. Create a free account with $5 credit (takes 2 minutes).
2. 🌐 Open the Actor. Go to the UK Contracts Finder Scraper page on the Apify Store.
3. 🎯 Set input. Enter a keyword (or leave empty), pick the stages you want, and set maxItems.
4. 🚀 Run it. Click Start and let the Actor collect your data.
5. 📥 Download. Grab your results in the Dataset tab as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

⏱️ Total time from signup to downloaded dataset: 3-5 minutes. No coding required.

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💼 Business use cases

💼 Bid Management & Sales Daily pipeline of fresh tenders matching your service codes Automated alerts on CPV codes you specialise in Win-loss analysis against publicly disclosed awards Lead scoring with buyer history and contract values	🏛️ Government Affairs & Policy Track departmental spending patterns over time Map which buyers commission similar services Identify upcoming planning notices ahead of tender Brief leadership on procurement trends by sector
📊 Market Research & Analysts Sector market sizing using CPV-coded spend Supplier concentration analyses by buyer Geographic spend distribution across delivery addresses Benchmarks for SME participation in public procurement	📰 Journalism & Transparency Investigate awarded contracts and supplier links Track recurring incumbent suppliers across buyers Spend audits for council and NHS reporting Cross-reference award data with company registries

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🌟 Beyond business use cases

Data like this powers more than commercial workflows. The same structured records support research, education, civic projects, and personal initiatives.

🎓 Research and academia Empirical datasets for papers, thesis work, and coursework Longitudinal studies tracking changes across snapshots Reproducible research with cited, versioned data pulls Classroom exercises on data analysis and ethical scraping	🎨 Personal and creative Side projects, portfolio demos, and indie app launches Data visualizations, dashboards, and infographics Content research for bloggers, YouTubers, and podcasters Hobbyist collections and personal trackers
🤝 Non-profit and civic Transparency reporting and accountability projects Advocacy campaigns backed by public-interest data Community-run databases for local issues Investigative journalism on public records	🧪 Experimentation Prototype AI and machine-learning pipelines with real data Validate product-market hypotheses before engineering spend Train small domain-specific models on niche corpora Test dashboard concepts with live input

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🔌 Automating UK Contracts Finder Scraper

Control the scraper programmatically for scheduled runs and pipeline integrations:

• 🟢 Node.js. Install the apify-client NPM package.
• 🐍 Python. Use the apify-client PyPI package.
• 📚 See the Apify API documentation for full details.

The Apify Schedules feature lets you trigger this Actor on any cron interval. Hourly, daily, or weekly refreshes keep downstream databases in sync automatically.

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❓ Frequently Asked Questions

🧩 How does it work?

Configure your keyword and stage filters in the input form, click Start, and the Actor calls the official OCDS endpoint, flattens each release into 32 columns, and emits clean JSON. No browser automation, no captchas, no setup.

📏 How accurate is the data?

Records come straight from the official Cabinet Office feed, so accuracy mirrors what each buyer publishes. Free-text fields like description follow the buyer's own format. Numeric fields like value are present only when the buyer chose to disclose them.

🔁 How often is the dataset refreshed?

The OCDS feed updates continuously as buyers publish new notices and amend existing ones. Every run of this Actor fetches the live feed at run time, so your dataset stays current.

🪜 What is the difference between stages?

planning is early market engagement, tender is a live opportunity open for bids, award is a notice that a contract has been awarded, and implementation is updates during contract delivery. The same OCID can appear in multiple stages over its lifecycle.

⏰ Can I schedule regular runs?

Yes. Use Apify Schedules to run this Actor on any cron interval (hourly, daily, weekly) and feed your CRM or pipeline tooling.

⚖️ Is this data legal to use?

UK Contracts Finder data is published under the Open Government Licence and is intended for public reuse. You are responsible for any downstream regulatory obligations in your own product.

💼 Can I use this data commercially?

Yes. Open Government Licence permits commercial use with attribution. Many bid intelligence and govtech products are built on this same feed.

💳 Do I need a paid Apify plan to use this Actor?

No. The free Apify plan is enough for testing and small runs (10 records per run). A paid plan lifts the limit and gives you access to scheduling, higher concurrency, and larger datasets.

🔁 What happens if a run fails or gets interrupted?

Apify automatically retries transient errors. If a run still fails, you can inspect the log in the Runs tab, fix the input, and re-run. Partial datasets from failed runs are preserved so you never lose progress.

🏷️ Can I filter by CPV code directly?

Not in the input today. The fastest workaround is to filter the dataset after the run by cpvCodes (an array on every record). If you need server-side CPV filtering, reach out via the contact form below.

🆘 What if I need help?

Our support team is here to help. Contact us through the Apify platform or use the Tally form linked below.

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🔌 Integrate with any app

UK Contracts Finder Scraper connects to any cloud service via Apify integrations:

• Make - Automate multi-step workflows
• Zapier - Connect with 5,000+ apps
• Slack - Get run notifications in your channels
• Airbyte - Pipe procurement data into your warehouse
• GitHub - Trigger runs from commits and releases
• Google Drive - Export datasets straight to Sheets

You can also use webhooks to trigger downstream actions when a run finishes. Push fresh tender data into your CRM, or alert your bid team in Slack the moment a target CPV lands.

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🔗 Recommended Actors

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• ⚖️ eCFR US Federal Regulations Scraper - US Code of Federal Regulations full text
• 🇫🇮 Finland YTJ Companies Scraper - Finnish business registry with 1M+ companies
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💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for more reference-data scrapers.

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🆘 Need Help? Open our contact form to request a new scraper, propose a custom data project, or report an issue.

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⚠️ Disclaimer: this Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Contracts Finder, the UK Cabinet Office, or any government body. All trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. Only publicly available open data published under the Open Government Licence is collected.