UK Government Tenders Scraper: Find a Tender & Contracts Finder API

Get UK government tenders, contract opportunities, pipeline notices and contract awards from both official UK procurement portals, Find a Tender (FTS) and Contracts Finder, in one clean, deduplicated dataset. Filter by keyword, CPV code, region, contract value, buyer, deadline and SME suitability, then schedule it as a daily new-tender alert feed. No API key, no proxies, no browser. You pay only for the notices you keep.

What does UK Government Tenders Scraper do?

UK public bodies (central government, councils, NHS trusts, universities, housing associations, police, and devolved governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) must publish their procurement notices on the government's official portals. This Actor reads them directly from the official OCDS (Open Contracting Data Standard) APIs published by the UK Cabinet Office:

• Find a Tender carries above-threshold notices and, since the Procurement Act 2023 took effect in February 2025, most new UK notices (UK1–UK17 notice types).
• Contracts Finder carries many lower-value (below-threshold) opportunities and awards in England.

It turns the deeply nested OCDS JSON into one flat row per notice, with the fields bid teams actually need: title, buyer, value, deadline, CPV codes, regions, SME flag, the official notice link and the e-tendering portal link to submit your bid.

Why use it?

• 🎯 Find opportunities before competitors. Run it every morning with your keywords and CPV codes, and get only the new notices since yesterday.
• 🏛️ Two portals, one feed. No more checking Find a Tender and Contracts Finder separately.
• 🧹 Analysis-ready data. Values, deadlines, CPV codes and regions are normalised. You get the latest version of each notice, not five revisions of it.
• 🏆 Win/loss intelligence. Switch to contract awards to see who won what, for how much, and from which buyer.
• 🛡️ Built to keep running. It respects both portals' rate limits automatically, including Contracts Finder's silent throttling that makes other tools return empty results.
• ⚖️ Legally clean. The source is official government open data under the Open Government Licence v3.0, which permits commercial reuse.

Who uses it: bid writers and bid consultancies, SME suppliers to the public sector, sales and business development teams selling to councils and the NHS, market researchers, journalists, and procurement analysts.

What data can you extract?

Field	Example
Title / description	"Asset Tracking System"
Buyer, buyer ID, town, postcode	NHS Borders, GB-PPON-…, Melrose
Stage / notice type	tender / UK4
Estimated value (net and gross) and currency	116000, 139200, GBP
Submission deadline / clarification deadline	2026-11-16T12:00:00Z
Contract start, end and duration	2027-02-01 → 2030-01-31, 1095 days
CPV codes and descriptions	48422000 "Software package suite"
Region codes and names	UKM91 / Scotland
SME / VCSE suitable	true
Procedure	Open procedure
Lots	count and titles
Awarded suppliers, award value, award date	for award notices
Official notice URL	https://www.find-tender.service.gov.uk/Notice/…
Submission portal URL	the buyer's e-tendering portal link
OCID / release ID	stable IDs for joining and deduplication
Optional	buyer contact point, full raw OCDS release

How to use it

1. Click Try for free.
2. Enter keywords (e.g. software, cleaning, cyber security) and/or CPV code prefixes (e.g. 72 for IT services, 45 for construction).
3. Choose the stage: open tenders (default), planning/pipeline notices, or contract awards.
4. Optionally narrow by region (e.g. London, Scotland, UKD), value range, buyer name (e.g. NHS, Council) or SME-suitable only.
5. Click Start, then download the results as JSON, CSV, Excel or HTML, or pull them through the API.

Daily alert feed (monitor mode)

Turn on Monitor mode: only new notices and give your saved search a Monitor key (e.g. london-it). Then create an Apify Schedule (e.g. every weekday at 07:00). Each run returns only notices you haven't seen before, which you can push to email, Slack, Google Sheets, HubSpot or Zapier/Make with Apify integrations.

Input example

{
  "keywords": ["software", "cloud", "digital", "IT support", "website"],
  "keywordScope": "titleOnly",
  "noticeStages": ["tender"],
  "sources": ["find-a-tender", "contracts-finder"],
  "daysBack": 7,
  "onlyOpen": true,
  "maxResults": 25
}

More examples:

{ "noticeStages": ["award"], "sources": ["find-a-tender"], "buyerNameContains": ["NHS"], "daysBack": 3, "maxResults": 100 }

{ "noticeStages": ["tender"], "cpvCodes": ["72000000", "48"], "regions": ["London"], "daysBack": 3,
  "onlyNewSinceLastRun": true, "monitorKey": "london-it" }

Output example

One item from a real run on 8 Oct 2026 (description shortened):

{
  "source": "Find a Tender",
  "stage": "tender",
  "noticeType": "UK4",
  "title": "NS&I Digital Market Intelligence Support service",
  "description": "A digital and fintech insight agency is required to help NS&I monitor the external competitor landscape…",
  "status": "active",
  "buyerName": "NS&I",
  "buyerId": "GB-PPON-PJNT-9481-WXVY",
  "buyerLocality": "London",
  "buyerPostcode": "SE1 9HA",
  "mainCategory": "services",
  "procurementMethod": "Open procedure",
  "cpvCodes": ["79310000"],
  "cpvDescriptions": ["Market research services"],
  "buyerRegionCode": "UKI44",
  "regionCodes": ["UKI44"],
  "regionNames": ["London"],
  "valueAmount": 125000,
  "valueAmountGross": 150000,
  "valueCurrency": "GBP",
  "publishedDate": "2026-10-07T16:37:10+01:00",
  "tenderDeadline": "2026-11-02T12:00:00Z",
  "enquiryDeadline": "2026-10-22T11:00:00Z",
  "contractStart": "2026-12-08T00:00:00Z",
  "contractEnd": "2027-12-07T23:59:59Z",
  "contractDurationDays": 364,
  "lotsCount": 1,
  "suitableForSme": true,
  "aboveThreshold": true,
  "noticeUrl": "https://www.find-tender.service.gov.uk/Notice/094926-2026",
  "submissionUrl": "https://app.panacea-software.com/nsandi/eRFX-Suppliers/OpenReq.aspx?requirementId=86e03043-…",
  "ocid": "ocds-h6vhtk-078325",
  "releaseId": "094926-2026",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-10-08T09:52:44+00:00"
}

Other row types: award rows add awardedSuppliers, awardValue and awardDate; planning rows usually have a value but no deadline yet.

How much does it cost to scrape UK tenders?

This Actor uses pay-per-result pricing: you pay a small fixed price for each notice saved to your dataset, and notices filtered out by your criteria are free. A typical daily monitor for one sector returns 5–50 new notices, so it costs cents per day. There is no separate charge for compute: you pay per notice saved (plus Apify's tiny standard per-run start fee, if shown on the pricing tab). You can cap spending per run with Apify's maximum cost per run setting, and the Actor stops cleanly at your limit.

Tips

• CPV codes are hierarchical. 72 matches every IT service code; 72267 matches software maintenance and its children. Full 8-digit codes like 80000000 are handled correctly (education, not "everything starting with 8").
• Use "Title only" keyword search for precise results; "Title + description" is broader.
• Region filter: use ITL/NUTS codes (UKI, UKM, UKL22) or ITL1 names (London, Scotland, Wales, North West). By default it matches the delivery location, which includes nationwide notices that list your region. Set Region applies to = Buyer location only to get only buyers based in that region. Notices without region data are excluded when you filter by region.
• Run time: both portals list notices newest first, so the Actor stops as soon as it has your Max results newest matching notices. A default run (open tenders, 50 results) usually finishes in under 30 seconds. Narrow filters over a long window (e.g. one region and CPV code over 14 days) have to scan every notice in the window: about 1–3 minutes for 3 days, 3–5 minutes for 7 days and 8–10 minutes for 14 days, because the Actor deliberately stays under the portals' shared rate limit (about 10 requests a minute).
• Scheduled monitors: set Days back to 2–3 for a daily schedule. Each run scans the whole window, so a short, overlapping window is faster, and monitor mode still never returns the same notice twice.
• Long windows (e.g. 90 days) take longer because both portals rate-limit requests; the Actor throttles itself automatically.
• Statuses: with Only open tenders on, notices past their deadline or cancelled are dropped.

FAQ

Is scraping UK tender data legal? This Actor doesn't scrape web pages. It reads the official, documented, key-free OCDS APIs published by the UK Cabinet Office. The data is licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0, which allows copying, publishing and commercial use with attribution ("Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0"). Notices can name buyer officers, so buyer contact points are off by default. If you turn them on, you are responsible for using that personal data in line with UK GDPR (e.g. only for responding to the procurement).

How fresh is the data? It's live. Each run queries the portals' APIs directly, and new notices typically appear within minutes of publication.

Does it cover Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland? Yes, for notices published to Find a Tender (Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales and eTendersNI above-threshold notices flow there). Sub-threshold notices that appear only on the devolved portals are not included yet.

Why do some notices have no value or deadline? Buyers don't always publish them (e.g. pipeline and planning notices). The fields are null rather than guessed.

Can I get the full original data? Yes. Turn on Include raw OCDS release.

What happens if one of the portals is down? The Actor retries with back-off. If Contracts Finder or Find a Tender is still unavailable after a few minutes, the run carries on with the other portal, says so in the run's status message, and lists the problem under sourceErrors in the RUN_SUMMARY record. In monitor mode, notices you missed are picked up on the next run, as long as Days back covers the gap.

Does it cover EU tenders? No. Since Brexit, UK notices are published on Find a Tender and Contracts Finder, not on the EU's TED. For tenders and contract awards from the 27 EU member states, the EEA and Switzerland, use our companion Actor, EU Tenders Scraper (TED). It has the same flat output, monitor mode and pay-per-result pricing.

Something's broken or you need a field? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab. We monitor runs daily and aim to fix portal changes within 48 hours.

Other public procurement data

This Actor is part of a public-tenders family:

• 🇬🇧 UK Government Tenders Scraper (this Actor): Find a Tender and Contracts Finder.
• 🇪🇺 EU Tenders Scraper (TED): EU, EEA and Swiss public tenders, awards and planning notices from Tenders Electronic Daily, with EUR value conversion.

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Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. This Actor is not affiliated with the Cabinet Office, Crown Commercial Service or GOV.UK.