UK Tenders Scraper: Contracts Finder & Find a Tender Notices
Pricing
from $3.00 / 1,000 notices
Search UK tenders and public sector contract notices from Find a Tender and Contracts Finder in one schema: buyer, value, CPV codes, dates, region. New-notice alerts for daily schedules and a renewals mode for contracts ending soon. Not affiliated with the Government.
UK Public Contracts Lookup (actors/contracts-lookup). Newest first.
Alert mode takes ocids: 1 to 200 OCIDs, to send only the new notices of the procurements you track (exact match on the row's ocid, combined with any other filter; a repeated OCID counts once). The alert is otherwise unchanged: the same 14-day window, store, one send per notice, charges and digest, and a Contracts Finder amendment is still not sent again. RUN_SUMMARY.ocids gives requested and matchedProcesses. Find a Tender's older-regulations notices from its daily files have no OCID and cannot be tracked this way; one procurement can have different OCIDs on Find a Tender and Contracts Finder. All other modes refuse ocids before anything is read.
Contracts Finder coverage in renewals, renewals alerts and buyer profiles is now taken over its expected days: weekdays that are not bank holidays in England and Wales, plus any weekend or bank-holiday day whose file was read. Contracts Finder publishes files for working days, so a weekend or bank-holiday day with no file no longer counts against the 85% minimum. A working day with no file still counts as missing, and so does a weekend or bank-holiday day whose file could not be read. coverage.cf keeps daysInWindow (calendar days) and adds daysExpected and quietDaysWithoutFile; percentRead is daysRead / daysExpected. Find a Tender, which publishes a file each day, is unchanged.
When coverage is below 85%, the status message and reason give the shortfall in days, for example "Contracts Finder: 210 of 253 expected day files read (83.0%, 85% needed: 6 more days were needed)".
In buyer profiles and the renewals modes, which read their daily files within a 25-minute limit, a daily file request that fails with a network error, a server error (5xx) or a "too many requests" answer (429) is tried once more after about 2 seconds (bulkRetries in RUN_SUMMARY). Search and alert do not retry. bulkErrors counts the requests that ended with neither a file nor a "no file for that day" answer (403 or 404): those that still failed after the retry where there is one, and any other answer such as 400. A day with no file is not retried.
lookbackMonths still accepts 1 to 24, so saved Tasks keep working, but a value above 12 is then cut to 12 (a run with "sources": ["cf"] still reads up to 24 months): RUN_SUMMARY.lookbackClampedFrom gives the value asked for, and the status message says "Look-back cut from 24 to 12 months while Find a Tender is read from its daily files." This cuts Contracts Finder too: an existing renewals alert or saved Task set to 24 months on the default sources now reads 12 months of Contracts Finder as well, so a contract first published 13 to 24 months ago whose end date later moves into the window is not sent. To keep 24 months of Contracts Finder, use "sources": ["cf"] (Contracts Finder only). A Contracts Finder-only run of 24 months may not finish within the 25-minute limit: unread days then count as missing, and a renewals alert below 85% coverage sends nothing (this release has not measured that case). In a measured run, 12 months of both services' day files took about 17 minutes; 24 months did not finish within the 25-minute limit and fell below 85% coverage. Renewals uses Find a Tender's API only for today, and for yesterday until its file is out, and only for Procurement Act notices: an older-regulations notice is read from its daily file only (an API record is skipped and counted in sources.fts.ftsLegacyFromApiSkipped), so it reaches renewals a day later than a Procurement Act notice.pipeline: planning notices (Find a Tender UK1 to UK3 and older prior information notices; Contracts Finder and, if chosen, Public Contracts Scotland planning notices), sorted by futureNoticeDate, soonest first. expectedFrom and expectedTo keep notices whose expected date falls on those UK days; otherwise it is a search, with the same window, filters, row and price.noticeType (the Find a Tender Procurement Act form, UK1 to UK17; null for older forms, Contracts Finder and Public Contracts Scotland) and futureNoticeDate (when the buyer expects its next notice, usually the tender; null where none is given).expectedFrom and expectedTo before anything is read; nothing is charged.maxItems. A buyer that publishes only on Find a Tender now gets a charged profile ($0.10) instead of a free "no notices". A profile run below 85% day-file coverage for either service makes no profile and is not charged. A renewals run with "sources": ["fts"] whose Find a Tender API gave no answer charges its rows but not the run fee (the run fee follows Contracts Finder day files read or API answers).ftsFilesSince). They are counted in ftsBeforeAlertFloor and not sent or charged. Start a new alertId to receive them. Contracts Finder rows are not affected. Because that time is the end of the last earlier run, Find a Tender notices published while that run was going (up to about 25 minutes) are left out too, and so are older-regulations notices published later that same day (their daily file gives the date only): never charging a contract twice is preferred to never missing one.ocid null and, as publishedAt, the UK publication date at midnight UTC (0.1.20 and earlier read them from the API, with an OCID and a time), and a renewals alert sends and charges such a notice once. Their end date is read only where the notice states one; a notice that states only a duration gives no row. An older-regulations award and its modification notice are now always separate rows, where 0.1.20 and earlier joined them by OCID; so a renewals alert sends and charges an older-regulations modification notice (F20) as a new row even when its dates equal the award's. For such a notice published between 00:00 and 01:00 UK summer time the shown publishedAt can be up to an hour later than the real time. A Find a Tender API release that names neither the Procurement Act nor an EU directive as its legal basis gives no renewals row from the API (counted in ftsLegalBasisUnknown); the next run reads it from its daily file. Two same-day versions of one such notice tie on publishedAt and release number (a Find a Tender release number is its notice id's year), so the first read is kept.ftsLegalBasisUnknown).Find a Tender daily files that hold their notices inside a folder are read again. Find a Tender re-published at least two day files that way: the 28 Oct 2026 file, re-published around 2 to 3 Nov; and the file of one day between 4 and 14 Oct, re-published before 28 Oct. Until this release such a day gave no Find a Tender notices from its file: the run summary counted them in sources.fts.skippedEntries. Searches covering those days were missing them. An alert that had already read the day before it was re-published keeps what it sent and does not receive those notices again. An alert whose first run came after a day was re-published (for 28 Oct: created after about 06:45 UTC on 3 Nov) never received that day's notices; from this release it receives the matching ones on its next run, charged as new, as a late delivery, while the day is inside its 14-day window.
If you searched 28 October 2026 or the affected October day between the re-publication and 4 November, run the search again to get the full results. Contracts Finder and Public Contracts Scotland were not affected, and nothing was charged for notices that were not returned.