UK Public Tenders & Awards (Contracts Finder, Find a Tender)

Find new UK public-sector opportunities and contract awards in one run. The actor reads both official UK notice services through their open OCDS APIs and gives you one clean table:

• Contracts Finder: England's lower-value and below-threshold tenders and awards
• Find a Tender: UK-wide higher-value notices (Procurement Act 2023 and older regimes)

Filter by keyword, CPV code, buyer name, value, open deadline and SME suitability. Schedule it daily with Days back = 1 to get a daily digest of new opportunities in your sector.

Use it for

• Bid teams and SMEs: a daily list of new tenders that match your services, with deadline, value and a link to the notice.
• Market research: which councils, trusts and departments buy what, and at what value.
• Competitor tracking: recent contract awards in your sector and the organisations that won them.

Example input

{
  "keywords": ["cleaning", "facilities management"],
  "cpvCodes": ["9091"],
  "stage": "tender",
  "openOnly": true,
  "daysBack": 7,
  "maxResults": 200
}

Output fields

source, noticeId, ocid, stage (tender, tenderUpdate, award, contract, planning...), title, description, buyerName, buyerId, buyerTown, buyerPostcode, buyerRegion, buyerCountry, buyerWebsite, deliveryRegions, cpvCodes, cpvDescriptions, mainCategory, procurementMethod, status, valueAmount, valueCurrency, awardValue, awardCurrency, awardDate, suppliers, suppliersNotShown, tenderDeadline, contractStart, contractEnd, suitableForSme, suitableForVcse, publishedAt, noticeUrl, licence, licenceUrl.

Each saved notice is one charged event (notice). Notices that don't match your filters are read but not saved or charged.

How filtering works

• The APIs return every notice in the date window; the actor applies your filters and saves only the matches.
• Keywords match the title, description and buyer name (any keyword, not case sensitive).
• CPV codes are prefixes: 72 matches every IT services code, 90919 matches office and school cleaning.
• Value filters use the estimated value, or the awarded value when there is no estimate. Notices without a value are dropped when a value filter is set.
• Days back covers notices published (Contracts Finder) or published or updated (Find a Tender) in the window, up to 31 days. The same tender can appear more than once if it was updated (each update is its own notice with its own noticeId).

Limits

• Up to 31 days back per run. Requests are made one at a time with a pause between them, so a long window with no filters takes a few minutes.
• Values, CPV codes and deadlines are only as complete as the buyer made them. Some notices have no value or deadline.
• The bid documents themselves are not downloaded; follow noticeUrl to the official notice.

Data source and licence

• Contracts Finder OCDS search API (https://www.contractsfinder.service.gov.uk/apidocumentation/home) and the Find a Tender OCDS API (https://www.find-tender.service.gov.uk/Developer/Documentation). Both are public, documented and need no key. Their terms say content can be reproduced under the Open Government Licence and that they make content available "through feeds for other websites and applications to use".
• Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0 (https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/). Every row carries this attribution in the licence field, and each run saves a LICENCE record in its key-value store.
• This is an unofficial tool. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Cabinet Office, Crown Commercial Service, Contracts Finder or Find a Tender. Data is reformatted and filtered, provided as is, with no warranty: check the official notice before you rely on it or bid.

Personal data and responsible use

• Personal data is not covered by the Open Government Licence, so the actor removes it:
  • buyer and supplier contact points (names, emails, phone numbers) are never output
  • titles and descriptions are cleaned: email addresses (also name @ domain, name(at)domain and name at domain dot com forms) become [email removed]; phone numbers (after a label such as Tel or Phone, +44 style international numbers, and national numbers starting with 0, 7 digits or more, and labelled mobiles such as "Mob.") become [phone removed]; names after a contact label ("Contact:", "contact person", "please contact", "enquiries to") or a title (Mr, Mrs, Ms, Dr), with or without initials, become [name removed]. Names that start with a common first name and are followed by a surname ("Sarah Jones", "Gracie-Lee Bullock"), and a first name alone in brackets, also become [name removed] (this also hides people in place names, such as "[name removed] Hospital"). House-number street addresses ("30 Essington Way", with a following UK postcode) become [address removed]. CPV codes, OJ references and dates are left intact. This is pattern matching, so an unusual format can slip through, and it errs on the side of removing a little too much.
  • a supplier name is only shown when it clearly names an organisation: a legal suffix (Ltd, Limited, PLC, LLP, CIC, GmbH, AG ...), a public-body word (Council, NHS, Trust, University, School ...) or a company or charity register number on the notice. Names with a title (Mr, Mrs, Dr) or "t/a" / "trading as" are never shown. Other winners are counted in suppliersNotShown, so sole traders are not named.
• The actor is polite to the services: one request at a time, a pause of over a second between requests, and it waits when the API asks it to (429 Retry-After, or 5 minutes after a Contracts Finder 403 rate limit); if asked to wait more than 10 minutes it stops instead. It only follows paging links on the two official API hosts and stops when your spending limit is reached. It never works around limits.
• Use it to find and research opportunities. Don't use it to build contact lists of public officials or for unsolicited marketing.