UK Public Tenders Scraper — Contracts Finder & Find a Tender

UK public contracts you can bid on, with their deadline and value — and contracts already awarded, with the supplier who won and for how much.

This Actor reads both official UK procurement services through their own Open Contracting (OCDS) APIs and returns one flat row per notice:

• Contracts Finder — general and below-threshold notices from central government, councils, the NHS and the wider public sector
• Find a Tender — above-threshold procurements under the Procurement Act

No API key, no login, no proxies.

What you get

The two fields that decide whether you bid

• tenderDeadline — when bids close. Measured 2026-08-21 on 315 live tender-stage notices: present on 37 of 37 Contracts Finder and 225 of 278 Find a Tender ones
• enquiryDeadline — the cut-off for questions to the buyer. Find a Tender only (186 of those 278); Contracts Finder does not publish it
• value with currency — on 30 of the 37 CF and 202 of the 278 FTS tender-stage notices

Who is buying

• buyerName, buyerId, and buyerContact — name, email, phone and location where the buyer publishes them

What is being bought

• title, description, cpvCode and cpvDescription, plus cpvCodes with every code on the notice — most notices carry one, but Find a Tender puts several on 27% of them (measured 2026-08-21 over 1,290 live FTS notices: 30 with no code, 906 with one, 354 with two or more, one with 154), status, procurementMethod and the buyer's own procurementMethodDetails, deliveryRegions

Who won — on award notices

• suppliers: name, identifier, awarded value and an isSME flag per supplier — on 1,245 of the 1,254 live award notices measured 2026-08-21
• awardValue and awardDate — the amount is on 416 of 426 Contracts Finder awards but only 180 of 828 Find a Tender ones

Contract timing

• contractStart and contractEnd — when an incumbent's contract expires and a re-tender is coming, with contractEndFrom / contractEndTo inputs to filter on it

Provenance

• ocid (stable across every notice about the same procurement), noticeId (unique per notice — one procurement can publish several, e.g. one award notice per lot), stage, source, documents, noticeUrl, sourceApi

Who uses this

• Bid managers — a daily feed of open tenders filtered by CPV and value, read before competitors notice them.
• Sales teams — award notices show which rivals win which buyers, at what price, and whether SMEs get through.
• Incumbent-watchers — set contractEndFrom and contractEndTo to find contracts expiring in 6–12 months and approach the buyer before the re-tender.
• Analysts and journalists — spending by buyer, sector and supplier across both services.
• Developers and AI agents — one normalised schema over two APIs, callable from code or as an MCP tool.

Example output

An open tender:

{
  "ocid": "ocds-b5fd17-d887ef5b-824d-4870-93f9-ddeaab82be82",
  "stage": "tender",
  "source": "Contracts Finder",
  "publishedDate": "2026-08-18",
  "title": "BLD-3163 Store 54 Independent Heating Solution - Delivery",
  "buyerName": "KBS Maritime Ltd",
  "cpvCode": "45232141",
  "value": 1000000.0,
  "currency": "GBP",
  "tenderDeadline": "2026-09-15",
  "noticeUrl": "https://www.contractsfinder.service.gov.uk/notice/cf72a436-d6a7-4e7d-b33a-68751ab4c9d0"
}

An award, with the winner:

{
  "stage": "award",
  "title": "ICT Managed Service Provider with Hardware Provision",
  "suppliers": [{ "name": "European Electronique Limited", "id": "GB-COH-01704440", "value": 4559570.55, "currency": "GBP", "isSME": true }],
  "awardValue": 4559570.55,
  "awardDate": "2026-08-18"
}

Input

Field	What it does
services	contracts-finder, find-a-tender, or both (default).
stages	tender = open to bid, award = winners, plus planning, contract, implementation. Read from the OCDS release tag, filtered here rather than upstream, so an update or amendment counts as its own stage. Find a Tender contract awards are exported as award, like Contracts Finder. Measured over 1,762 live releases on 2026-08-14..18: Contracts Finder published only planning, tender and award, while contract and implementation came from Find a Tender alone and are rare there (12 of 1,290).
query	Keyword matched against title and description.
cpvCodes	Classification filter: 45* construction, 72* IT, 79* business services, 85* health. Matches any CPV code on the notice.
publishedFrom / publishedTo	Date window, both ends inclusive. Default: the last 7 days, today included.
minValue	Drop notices whose published value is below this amount. Notices with no published value are dropped too — measured 2026-08-21, 809 of 1,761 live rows (46%) carry neither value nor awardValue: 11 of 471 Contracts Finder (2%) but 798 of 1,290 Find a Tender (62%), so any minValue removes most of Find a Tender.
openOnly	Keep only tenders whose deadline has not passed.
contractEndFrom / contractEndTo	Keep only notices whose contract ends inside this window. Notices with no published contract end are dropped.
maxItems	Cap on exported (and charged) notices, split evenly across the selected services. 0 = unlimited. It caps rows, not requests — see Pricing.

Open IT tenders over £100k from the last month:

{ "stages": ["tender"], "cpvCodes": ["72*"], "minValue": 100000, "publishedFrom": "2026-07-21", "openOnly": true }

Who won cleaning contracts this month:

{ "stages": ["award"], "query": "cleaning", "publishedFrom": "2026-08-01" }

Contracts expiring in the next 6–12 months, so you can approach the buyer before the re-tender:

{ "stages": ["award"], "contractEndFrom": "2027-02-21", "contractEndTo": "2027-08-21" }

Run it on a schedule

Save your filters as a Task, leave the dates empty so each run covers the last 7 days, and schedule it daily. Attach an Apify integration to push results into Google Sheets, Slack, e-mail, a webhook, or Make and Zapier.

Deduplicate on ocid + noticeId + stage — the key the Actor itself uses. ocid alone is not enough: it stays constant across every notice about one procurement, so a single OCID routinely carries several distinct notices at the same stage (per-lot awards, or an award later corrected). Measured on 2026-08-21 over 1,761 live notices from both services (2026-08-14..18): 85 ocid + stage pairs carried 129 rows more than they had pairs, so deduplicating on ocid + stage alone would have silently thrown 129 real notices away — 7.3% of the run.

Use it from code or from an AI agent

Start runs and read the dataset over the Apify API or CLI, as JSON, CSV, Excel or XML. The Actor is also exposed as an MCP tool via the Apify MCP server, so an agent can answer "which NHS cleaning contracts close next month?" in one call.

Pricing

Pay per event: a small fee per notice exported. API calls only, no browser and no proxy, so platform usage on top is negligible. Use maxItems for a hard ceiling on how many notices you are charged for. It does not bound how many requests the run makes: every filter except the date window is applied to the rows after they arrive, so a selective query, cpvCodes or minValue over a wide window keeps reading pages until it hits the rate limit no matter how low maxItems is. Narrow the date window for that, not maxItems.

Where the data comes from

Both endpoints are the UK government's own OCDS APIs: Contracts Finder (contractsfinder.service.gov.uk) and Find a Tender (find-tender.service.gov.uk). The data is published under the Open Government Licence, which permits commercial reuse with attribution; sourceApi and noticeUrl on every row point back to the original.

Honest limits.

• Rate limit — the one real constraint. Both services sit behind a single shared per-IP limiter, and it caps requests per block, not requests per minute, so slowing down does not buy you more of them. Measured live on 2026-08-21, each time starting from an unblocked state:

  • at one request per second, 27 requests went through and the 28th returned Rate limit of 12 exceeded. Please retry after 120 seconds. (34.5s in);
  • at one request every five seconds — the 12/minute the message names — only 19 went through before the same 429 (108s in);
  • the block cleared after 46s, 61s and 121s on three separate checks;
  • immediately after Contracts Finder returned that 429, the first Find a Tender request returned it too, so the limiter really is shared.

  One request returns up to 100 notices, so a run reads roughly 2,000-2,800 notices before it is cut off. When that happens the Actor stops cleanly, exports everything it already collected and says so in the run status instead of failing. Split a large backfill into several runs over narrower date windows, spaced a couple of minutes apart.

• Overlap between the two services. It is rarer than you would expect: 5 shared titles in 1,761 live notices on 2026-08-14..18. When it does happen ocid will not spot it — the two services mint OCIDs from different prefixes (ocds-b5fd17- on Contracts Finder, ocds-h6vhtk- on Find a Tender), so the same procurement gets two different OCIDs. Every row carries source, so match on title and buyer if you need to collapse them.

• What buyers publish. Fields the buyer left out are empty rather than guessed. Measured 2026-08-21 over 1,761 live notices (471 Contracts Finder, 1,290 Find a Tender, published 2026-08-14..18): a CPV code on 100% of CF and 98% of FTS notices; a contract start and end on 98% of CF but only 53% of FTS; a tender value on 78% of CF and 23% of FTS. The SME flag appears only where the buyer classified the winner.

• No bid count. Neither service publishes the OCDS numberOfTenderers field — it was absent from all 1,762 of those releases — so this Actor does not return one. Find a Tender does publish bid counts on some award notices, but per lot and under a different OCDS extension (219 of the 1,761, one notice carrying nine lots with 2/2/2/5/2/3/3/4/3 bids), which cannot be collapsed into a single number without double-counting suppliers who bid on several lots.

• Timing. Notices appear on their publication day, so this is a daily feed, not real time. Contract documents themselves are linked, not downloaded.

This Actor is independent and not affiliated with the UK government.

Frequently asked questions

Why read both Contracts Finder and Find a Tender?

They cover different thresholds: Contracts Finder carries general and below-threshold notices, Find a Tender the above-threshold procurements. The UK Public Tenders Scraper reads both and marks each row with its source.

Is UK procurement data free to reuse?

Yes, under the Open Government Licence, which permits commercial reuse with attribution. Each row carries sourceApi and noticeUrl pointing back to the original notice.

How do I find contracts coming up for renewal?

Filter on contractEnd. A contract expiring in six to twelve months is a re-tender being scoped now, which is earlier than any tender notice will tell you.

Do the two services overlap?

For some procurements, yes. Every row carries ocid and source so you can deduplicate deliberately rather than discovering duplicates later.

Related Actors

Same engine, same official-source approach:

• AusTender (Australia) — federal contracts, winners and expiry dates
• EU Tenders (TED) — European procurement notices and contract awards
• Swiss Public Tenders (simap.ch) — tenders and awards with prices, bid counts and weighted criteria
• Swiss Commercial Register (SHAB) — new companies, changes, deletions and bankruptcies
• France Company Register — SIREN/SIRET, executives, official labels
• US Business Registry — newly registered companies by state
• GLEIF LEI — LEI lookup, lapsed-LEI screening, parent companies

---

Italiano

Esporta gli appalti pubblici britannici dalle due API ufficiali OCDS (Contracts Finder e Find a Tender): gare aperte con scadenza e importo, e aggiudicazioni con fornitore vincitore e cifra. Filtri per parola chiave, CPV, valore minimo e data. Il campo di fine contratto permette di individuare le concessioni in scadenza prima della riassegnazione.

Deutsch

Exportiert britische öffentliche Ausschreibungen aus beiden offiziellen OCDS-APIs: laufende Ausschreibungen mit Frist und Auftragswert sowie Zuschläge mit Gewinner und Betrag. Filter nach Stichwort, CPV, Mindestwert und Datum; über das Vertragsende erkennen Sie auslaufende Verträge vor der Neuausschreibung.

Français

Exporte les marchés publics britanniques depuis les deux API officielles OCDS : appels d'offres ouverts avec date limite et montant, et attributions avec titulaire et valeur. Filtres par mot-clé, CPV, montant minimum et date ; la date de fin de contrat révèle les marchés arrivant à échéance.