Guide · 8 min read
Find a Tender: a supplier's guide to the UK service
Find a Tender is the UK government's central service for publishing public contract notices, and since the Procurement Act 2023 regime came into force in February 2025 it carries far more than it used to. If you sell to the public sector and you have never opened it, you are almost certainly missing work that is sitting there in plain sight. This guide covers what appears on it, who is obliged to publish there, how to register and search without wasting your evenings, and how it fits alongside Contracts Finder and the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish portals.
What Find a Tender publishes
Find a Tender is the central noticeboard for higher-value public procurement across the UK. It replaced the UK's use of the EU journal after Brexit, and it now runs under the Procurement Act 2023 rules. Most of what you will see is above-threshold work, which in practice means the larger contracts and the frameworks that sit behind a lot of public spending.
The Act widened the range of notices considerably. Alongside the tender notices you would expect, buyers publish planned procurement notices before a competition starts, preliminary market engagement notices when they want to talk to suppliers first, transparency notices when they intend to award without competition, and contract award, contract details and contract change notices afterwards. Each of those is useful to a supplier for a different reason.
The early notices matter most if you are trying to get ahead. A planned procurement notice or a market engagement exercise is an invitation to be known before the specification is written, which is worth more than a polished submission three weeks before a deadline.
Who has to publish there
Contracting authorities across the UK use Find a Tender for procurements above the relevant threshold. That covers central government departments and their agencies, local authorities, NHS bodies, universities, police and fire services, housing bodies and a long tail of other public organisations.
The thresholds are set in the Act and refreshed every couple of years, and they differ for goods and services, works and light touch services, and between central government and other authorities. Rather than working from a number you read somewhere, check the current figures on gov.uk before you rely on them, because they move.
Below those thresholds, the duty to publish generally shifts to Contracts Finder for English and UK-wide bodies, and to the national portals in Scotland and Wales. That is why a supplier who only watches Find a Tender sees the big contracts and misses most of the winnable ones.
Registering as a supplier
You do not need an account to read notices, and it is worth browsing for a week before you commit to anything. Registering gives you saved searches and email alerts, which is the point at which the service starts working for you rather than the other way round.
The Act also introduced a central digital platform with a supplier information service, so that core details about your business can be provided once and reused across procurements rather than retyped into every questionnaire. Getting your company details, registrations, insurances, accounts and any exclusion-related declarations in order once will save you real time later.
Whatever you register, keep it current. Out of date insurance figures or a stale registered address is the sort of small inconsistency that makes an evaluator doubt the rest of your submission.
Setting up alerts that stay readable
Alerts fail for one of two reasons. Set them too broad and you get a daily digest you stop opening after a fortnight. Set them too narrow and you miss a contract because the buyer called it something you never thought of.
The fix is to run several deliberately different searches rather than one clever one. Have a geographic search covering the areas you can actually deliver in, a CPV code search for your core categories, and two or three keyword searches using the words buyers use rather than the words you use. Soft FM, civils enabling works and supported living framework are all real ways of describing work a small firm would advertise very differently.
Read award notices as well as live tenders. An award notice tells you who won, roughly what it was worth and often when the contract ends, which gives you months of warning before the retender rather than the three or four weeks a live notice allows.
How it fits with the other portals
Contracts Finder carries lower-value contracts from English central government, the wider English public sector and UK-wide bodies, plus award information. For most small firms it is the more productive of the two, simply because the contracts are smaller and the field is thinner.
Public Contracts Scotland is the portal for Scottish councils, health boards, universities and the Scottish Government, and Sell2Wales does the same job for Welsh public bodies. In Northern Ireland, buyers commonly advertise through eTendersNI, the Northern Ireland eSourcing portal, alongside Find a Tender. The portals overlap rather than nest neatly, so the same opportunity can appear twice with different reference numbers, and plenty of devolved work never reaches Find a Tender at all.
If you work across borders, there are several sources to watch. 123 Tenders indexes notices from Find a Tender, Contracts Finder and Public Contracts Scotland into one searchable list, so you can filter by sector and region in one place. Always open the official notice before you commit time to a bid, because the buyer's own documents are the only authoritative version.
Frequently asked questions
- Is Find a Tender free to use?
- Yes. Reading notices, searching and registering for alerts are all free. You may still need an account on the buyer's own e-tendering portal to download documents and submit a response.
- What is the difference between Find a Tender and Contracts Finder?
- Find a Tender carries above-threshold procurements from across the UK. Contracts Finder carries lower-value contracts and award information from English and UK-wide public bodies. Small firms usually find more winnable work on Contracts Finder.
- Do I have to be on Find a Tender to bid?
- You need to see the notice, and you normally need to register on whichever e-tendering system the buyer names in it. An account on Find a Tender itself is optional but useful for alerts and saved searches.
- Does Find a Tender cover Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland?
- For above-threshold procurement, yes. Lower-value work in those nations is generally advertised on Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales and eTendersNI instead, so check those too if you deliver there.
- How current are the thresholds quoted online?
- Thresholds are reviewed every two years and change. Treat any figure you read, including on this page, as a starting point and confirm the current level on gov.uk before relying on it.
The official source
Rules, registration routes and published notices change, so check the current position at the official Find a Tender service on gov.uk before you rely on anything you read here.
This guide is general information about UK public procurement, not legal or financial advice. Thresholds, rules and portal requirements change: always check the official notice, the buyer's own tender documents and current government guidance before you rely on anything here.