UK Tenders: Find a Tender + Contracts Finder Notices

What it does: returns UK public-sector procurement notices and contract awards (including the winning companies) from the two official UK government sources, Find a Tender (UK-wide, mostly higher-value contracts) and Contracts Finder (England, lower-value contracts). Both come from their documented OCDS APIs and share one flat schema: title, buyer, CPV codes, estimated value, tender deadline, contract dates, status, award value and a link to the official notice. Filter by keyword, CPV code, value range, date range and "still open".

Why use it instead of scraping the websites: it reads the official open-data APIs (Open Government Licence), so there is no HTML parsing to break. Both sources share one schema, so you don't need two tools. It also handles the sources' rate limit: when Find a Tender or Contracts Finder asks callers to pause (usually 2 minutes), the run waits and resumes instead of failing.

Use cases

• Find UK government contracts to bid on. Get a daily or weekly list of open tenders in your sector by CPV code and keyword, with deadline, estimated value and buyer.
• See who won. Pull award notices to track which suppliers win contracts from which buyers, and for how much.
• Watch the pipeline. Planning notices show what buyers intend to procure before the tender opens.
• Feed other tools. Results are plain JSON records, so they drop into a spreadsheet, a CRM, a Slack alert or an AI agent.

Tutorial: How to get new UK government tenders in your inbox every morning

Input

{
  "sources": ["find-a-tender", "contracts-finder"],
  "stages": ["tender"],
  "daysBack": 7,
  "keywords": ["software", "cloud"],
  "cpvCodes": ["72000000"],
  "minValue": 50000,
  "openOnly": true,
  "maxItems": 200
}

• sources: find-a-tender and/or contracts-finder (default both).
• stages: tender (opportunities, default), planning (pipeline and market engagement notices), award (contract awards).
• daysBack (1–31, default 7), or dateFrom / dateTo (YYYY-MM-DD, inclusive, at most 31 days apart). Find a Tender filters by the date a notice was last updated; Contracts Finder filters by the date it was published.
• keywords: keeps a notice if its title or description contains any of them (case-insensitive).
• cpvCodes: keeps a notice if any of its CPV codes falls under one of these. Trailing zeros widen the match: 72000000 matches all of 72xxxxxx (IT services) and 45 matches all construction work.
• minValue / maxValue (GBP): compared with the estimated value, or with the awarded value for award notices. Notices with no value are dropped when you set either one.
• openOnly: keeps only notices whose tender deadline is still in the future.
• maxItems (default 200), maxPagesPerSource (default 20; each page scans up to 100 notices).

Output

One record per notice. A real example (Find a Tender, fetched 2026-10-09; description shortened here):

{
  "source": "find-a-tender",
  "notice_id": "095775-2026",
  "ocid": "ocds-h6vhtk-0784ff",
  "tags": [
    "tender"
  ],
  "title": "The Provision of Investment Management Services for the Scottish Universities Fund Ignition Strategy",
  "description": "The Bank is seeking proposals from suitably qualified and authorised investment management firms to establish and manage a 15 million GBP segregated investment mandate for the delivery of the Scottish Universities Ignition Fund Strategy (\"the Mandate\").\nThe successful bidder will be expected to esta...",
  "status": "active",
  "published_at": "2026-10-09T15:37:16+01:00",
  "buyer_name": "Scottish National Investment Bank",
  "buyer_id": "GB-FTS-12628",
  "buyer_type": "Body governed by public law",
  "buyer_locality": "Edinburgh",
  "buyer_region": "UKM75",
  "buyer_country": "United Kingdom",
  "cpv_codes": [
    "66100000"
  ],
  "cpv_descriptions": [
    "Banking and investment services"
  ],
  "main_category": "services",
  "procurement_method": "Open procedure",
  "value_amount": 6500000.0,
  "value_amount_gross": null,
  "currency": "GBP",
  "tender_deadline": "2026-11-10T12:00:00Z",
  "is_open": true,
  "enquiry_deadline": null,
  "contract_start": null,
  "contract_end": null,
  "lots_count": 1,
  "suitable_for_sme": null,
  "suitable_for_vcse": null,
  "delivery_regions": [
    "UK"
  ],
  "award_value_total": null,
  "award_date": null,
  "award_supplier_count": 0,
  "url": "https://www.find-tender.service.gov.uk/Notice/095775-2026",
  "fetched_at": "2026-10-09T17:58:40Z"
}

Field	Meaning
source	find-a-tender or contracts-finder
notice_id, ocid	Source notice id and the Open Contracting id (the same procurement keeps its ocid across notices)
tags	OCDS release tags, e.g. tender, planning, award, contract
title, description	Notice text. Descriptions are cut at 3,000 characters; email addresses and phone numbers in them are replaced with [email removed] / [phone removed]
status	OCDS tender status as published, e.g. active or complete
published_at	Notice publication time
buyer_*	The contracting authority: name, id, type, locality, NUTS/ITL region, country
cpv_codes, cpv_descriptions	All CPV codes on the notice and its items
value_amount, value_amount_gross, currency	Estimated value net and gross of VAT, when the buyer published it
tender_deadline, is_open, enquiry_deadline	Submission deadline, whether it is still in the future at fetch time, and the clarification deadline
contract_start, contract_end	Contract period (from the first lot when the notice has lots)
lots_count, main_category, procurement_method	Procurement details
suitable_for_sme, suitable_for_vcse	Contracts Finder suitability flags (null on Find a Tender)
delivery_regions	Where the work is delivered
award_value_total, award_date, award_supplier_count	For award notices: total awarded value, latest award date, number of suppliers
suppliers	Award notices: the winning suppliers that are clearly organisations, each with name, companies_house_number (when the notice gives one) and scale (sme / large when given)
suppliers_withheld	Award notices: how many winning suppliers were not named, because they may be individuals (see Limits)
url	The official notice page

FAQ

How do I get UK government tenders as JSON or CSV? Run the Actor with the filters you want. Results land in an Apify dataset, which you can download as JSON, CSV or Excel, or read through the Apify API.

What is the difference between Find a Tender and Contracts Finder? Find a Tender is the UK-wide service and carries mostly higher-value notices. Contracts Finder covers England and carries lower-value ones. This Actor reads both and returns them in one schema; the source field says where each record came from.

How do I get only IT or software tenders? Set cpvCodes to ["72000000", "48000000"] (IT services and software packages), or use keywords, or both. A notice must then match the CPV filter and the keyword filter.

Can I see which company won a contract? Yes. Set stages to ["award"]. Each record has award_value_total, award_date and a suppliers list. Suppliers that may be individuals are counted but not named (see Limits).

How do I get new tenders every day? Create an Apify schedule that runs the Actor daily with daysBack: 2. daysBack counts calendar days in UTC including today, so 1 means today only and a morning run would miss most of yesterday. With 2 each notice appears on two consecutive runs; use source plus notice_id to skip the ones you have already seen. Find a Tender also filters by the date a notice was last updated, so an amended notice can come back later.

Does it cover Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland? Find a Tender is UK-wide, so their higher-value notices are included. The devolved portals (Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales, eTendersNI) are not sources of this Actor.

Does it return contact details? No. Contact names, emails, phone numbers and addresses are never returned. Each record links to the official notice.

Pricing

Pay per event:

• $0.005 per run (start).
• $0.002 per notice returned, so $2 per 1,000 notices.

You only pay for notices that match your filters. Notices scanned and filtered out are free. Set a maximum charge per run in Apify to cap spend.

Limits

• Date range: at most 31 days per run. For longer histories, run once per month.
• Each source/stage pair stops after maxPagesPerSource pages (100 notices each, default 20). The log tells you when that happens.
• Both sources rate-limit callers and ask for a pause of about 2 minutes when the limit is hit. The run waits up to 4 times per page and then moves on with what it has, so wide date ranges can take several minutes.
• Values, deadlines, CPV codes and regions are only present when the buyer published them.
• The same procurement can appear on both sources and at several stages. Records are de-duplicated per source and notice id, not across sources (use ocid to group).
• No contact names, emails, phone numbers or addresses are returned.
• Supplier names are returned only when the supplier is clearly an organisation: it has a Companies House or registered-charity number on the notice, the notice marks it as a large enterprise, its name carries a legal-entity suffix (Ltd, Limited, PLC, LLP, CIC, GmbH, AG, Oy, Inc and similar), or it is a public body (council, NHS, university, college, police...). Other suppliers may be sole traders, i.e. people, so they are counted in suppliers_withheld but not named. Their names are on the official notice (url). In award notices from 1–3 and 7–9 October 2026, 93 of 469 suppliers (20%) were withheld. The share varies by day and source (8%–42%) and is highest for local care and taxi frameworks.
• Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. This Actor is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Cabinet Office, Find a Tender or Contracts Finder.