UK Contracts Finder: government tenders and awards by keyword

UK public sector tenders and contract awards from Contracts Finder by keyword, stage, value and date: buyer, title, description, value, CPV, region, deadline, contract period, SME suitability, awarded supplier and links, from the official OCDS API. Up to 50 searches a run. Pay per notice.

Why this scraper

• Only delivered results are charged. Inputs that fail come back as clear error records at no cost.
• Straight from the Cabinet Office's own OCDS API, the open data behind contractsfinder.service.gov.uk, under the Open Government Licence. Measured on the platform: 240 open tenders for two search terms in 92 seconds for one cent; the source itself is slow, the actor is not.
• One row per notice in the Open Contracting shape, flattened: buyer, title and description, estimated value, main and additional CPV codes with their description, delivery region, procurement method, goods, services or works, bid deadline, contract start and end, whether the buyer marked it suitable for SMEs or voluntary organisations, and for awards the winning supplier, the awarded value and the award date.
• Stages map to the buying cycle: tender for open opportunities, award for who won, planning for early market engagement; a value range filter drops what is too small or too large to bid on.
• Newest first with a per-search ceiling and a default window of the last 90 days, so a daily run returns only what is new.

Who this is for

Put search terms in queries (up to 50 per run), set stages (default tender), optionally publishedSince (YYYY-MM-DD), valueFrom and valueTo in pounds, and maxNoticesPerQuery (default 100). Built for bid teams and sales teams that sell to UK councils, NHS trusts, universities and agencies, for market research on public spending by category and region, and for lists of buyers and winning suppliers.

Who this is not for

Contracts Finder covers England and, partly, the wider UK for contracts above 12,000 pounds (central government) or 30,000 pounds (other bodies); Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own portals and the large above-threshold notices also appear on Find a Tender. The keyword search is the source's own and matches broadly, so a term can return notices that mention it only in passing. valueGbp is empty when the buyer publishes no estimate, never guessed. The source answers slowly, a page of 100 in one to two minutes, and refuses searches over its whole archive, which is why a run without publishedSince looks back 90 days. The contact person named on a notice is not read.

Input example

{
    "queries": [
        "software",
        "cleaning services"
    ],
    "stages": [
        "tender"
    ],
    "maxNoticesPerQuery": 100
}

Output example

• noticeId
• ocid
• title
• description
• buyerName
• stage
• noticeStatus
• publishedDate
• deadline
• contractStart
• contractEnd
• valueGbp
• currency
• cpv
• cpvDescription
• additionalCpv
• region
• procurementMethod
• procurementMethodDetails
• category
• suitableForSme
• suitableForVcse
• awardedSupplier
• awardValueGbp
• awardDate
• url
• query

Error codes: INVALID_QUERY, NO_RESULTS, BLOCKED.

One delivered row looks like this:

{
  "noticeId": "MT238218",
  "ocid": "ocds-b5fd17-0ef77028-82a3-4664-830f-1408fc3afa4e",
  "title": "Contract for the Provision of Hire Vehicles",
  "description": "Provision of three hire vehicle for use by Members of Authority staff to travel to and from MWDA's facilities.\r\nFurther details are provided in the Specification within the Tender documents.",
  "buyerName": "Merseyside Waste Disposal Authority",
  "stage": "tender",
  "noticeStatus": "active",
  "publishedDate": "2026-09-24",
  "deadline": "2026-10-26",
  "contractStart": "2026-12-01",
  "contractEnd": "2029-11-30",
  "valueGbp": 48600,
  "currency": "GBP",
  "cpv": "34100000",
  "cpvDescription": "Motor vehicles",
  "additionalCpv": [],
  "region": "North West",
  "procurementMethod": "open",
  "procurementMethodDetails": "Open procedure (below threshold)",
  "category": "services",
  "suitableForSme": true,
  "suitableForVcse": false,
  "awardedSupplier": null,
  "awardValueGbp": null,
  "awardDate": null,
  "url": "https://www.contractsfinder.service.gov.uk/Notice/2fc5a2e0-854f-43ec-b88b-0eafbb58d740",
  "query": "cleaning services",
  "status": "ok"
}

Related actors from steadydata

• eu-tenders: the same for EU-wide notices on TED
• company-career-site-jobs: who a winning supplier is hiring
• google-news: press coverage of a buyer or a contract

Pricing

Pay per event: one notice-listed event per delivered result. No charge for inputs that fail, no separate platform-usage surcharge.

Free Apify plan: this actor delivers up to 25 rows per run for accounts on the Apify free plan, and then stops with a message. That limit is set by us, not by Apify. It exists so the actor keeps paying for itself for the people who do pay. Any paid Apify plan runs it at full size, billed per delivered row, with failed rows never charged.

Reviews: if this actor saves you time, a short review on this page is the one thing that helps most. Ratings are what other buyers look at first, and we have no other way to ask.

FAQ

Is personal data collected? No. Rows carry the public body, the notice and, on awards, the supplier company. The contact person with phone and email that notices carry is not read.

How do I see who won? Set stages to award: those rows carry awardedSupplier, awardValueGbp and awardDate. The ocid is the same for the tender and its award, so the two can be joined.

How do I get only new opportunities every morning? Run with publishedSince set to yesterday and your search terms. Searches with nothing new come back as a free NO_RESULTS row.

Why does a search for cleaning return a vehicle contract? Because the keyword search is the source's own and matches any of the words anywhere in the notice. Combine a term with valueFrom or check cpv on the row to keep what fits.

Why is the run slow? Contracts Finder itself takes one to two minutes per page of 100 notices. The actor waits, retries a gateway error on a fresh connection, and charges only for what arrives.

What does a run cost when a search finds nothing? Nothing. NO_RESULTS, INVALID_QUERY and BLOCKED rows are free; only delivered notices are charged.

What happens when the source changes? Sources change from time to time; that is the nature of this work. The actor is monitored daily and fixed fast, and while it is broken you are not charged, because only delivered results cost anything.