How to find government contracts in the UK

The four portals that carry most UK notices

Find a Tender is the central UK service for higher-value procurements. Since the Procurement Act 2023 regime came into force in February 2025, it carries a wider set of notice types than before: planned procurement notices, tender notices, transparency notices, contract award and contract details notices, and contract change notices. If you only monitor one source, this is the one with the biggest contracts on it.

Contracts Finder publishes contracts from English central government, the wider English public sector and UK-wide bodies, including a large volume of lower-value opportunities and award information. Public Contracts Scotland is the equivalent portal for Scottish councils, health boards, universities and Scottish Government, and Sell2Wales does the same job for Welsh public bodies. Northern Ireland buyers commonly advertise through eTendersNI, the Northern Ireland eSourcing portal, alongside Find a Tender.

Because the portals overlap rather than nest neatly, a single opportunity can appear on two of them with different reference numbers, and a Scottish or Welsh contract below the central threshold may never reach Find a Tender at all. A supplier who works UK-wide and only checks one portal is structurally missing work.

Thresholds: what has to be advertised, and where

Above the procurement thresholds (broadly £139,688 including VAT for central government goods and services, £214,904 for most other contracting authorities, and £5,372,609 for works, as set for the 2026/27 period, and always check the current figures, which are refreshed every two years), a competitive tender notice normally has to be published on Find a Tender.

Below those thresholds the rules are lighter but not absent. English contracting authorities are generally required to advertise contracts above £12,000 for central government and £30,000 for sub-central bodies on Contracts Finder, and to publish award details afterwards. Scotland and Wales operate their own lower-value publication duties through their national portals.

The practical consequence for a small business is that the most winnable work, sub-threshold contracts small enough that large bidders ignore them, lives disproportionately on Contracts Finder, Public Contracts Scotland and Sell2Wales rather than on Find a Tender. Below the advertising duty, buyers may simply approach three suppliers directly, which is why being registered and visible to local buyers still matters.

Searching effectively instead of exhaustively

Keyword searching on procurement portals is unreliable on its own because buyers title notices in their own internal language. A groundworks package can be listed as "civils enabling works", a cleaning contract as "soft FM services", and a care package as "supported living framework, Lot 3". Search on several plain terms rather than one, and cross-check by CPV code where the portal supports it.

It is usually more productive to filter by buyer and geography first, then read titles. Pick the twenty or thirty authorities you could realistically deliver for, such as your county council, neighbouring districts, the local NHS trust, the two nearest universities and the housing associations on your patch, and scan everything they publish. Buyer-led searching surfaces contracts that keyword-led searching hides.

Also read award notices, not just open tenders. An award notice tells you who won, at what value, and often when the contract ends. That is the single best predictor of what will be retendered and roughly when, which gives you months of lead time instead of the three or four weeks a live notice allows.

Setting up alerts you will actually read

Each portal offers its own email alerts, and they are worth switching on, but broad alerts tend to become noise that gets filed unread. Narrow them by geography and by a handful of specific service terms, and accept that you will miss the occasional oddly-titled notice rather than drown in irrelevant ones.

123 Tenders aggregates 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 instead of running three separate searches. Contracts already awarded and approaching their end date are surfaced separately in Renewal Radar, which is where the early-warning value sits.

Whatever tooling you use, verify every detail against the official published notice before you commit time or money to a bid. Aggregated data can be incomplete or out of date, and the buyer's own notice and documents are the only authoritative version.

A weekly routine that works

Block thirty minutes a week. Scan new notices for your sector and region, log anything plausible with its deadline, and check award notices for contracts you lost or never saw so you know who holds them. Then diary the end dates: a contract ending in fourteen months is a conversation you can have with that buyer now, long before the notice appears.

Once you have a shortlist, qualify hard. Most small firms lose more money to bidding for the wrong contracts than to writing weak answers. Read the specification and the evaluation criteria before you write anything, and be willing to walk away from work you cannot evidence.