Find a Tender and the national portals
Find a Tender is the UK central digital platform where public contract notices are published. How it works, what it misses, and the devolved and Irish portals.
Updated on September 5, 2026
Find a Tender is the official United Kingdom service on which contracting authorities publish their procurement notices: tender notices, amendments, contract award notices, transparency notices and the rest of the family. Since the Procurement Act 2023 came into force on 24 February 2025 it forms the front end of the central digital platform, and it is free to search.
How it works
The central digital platform has two halves. Find a Tender carries the notices. Alongside it sits a supplier information service, on which a company registers its core details, ownership and exclusion declarations once, and reuses them across every procurement rather than retyping them into each bid.
Which notices must be published depends on value, as set out on the page about thresholds. Above the Schedule 1 amounts, the full above-threshold notice set applies. Below them, an authority must still publish a below-threshold tender notice once the contract reaches £12,000 including VAT for central government or £30,000 including VAT for any other contracting authority (verified 2026-09-05, gov.uk below-threshold contracts guidance). The platform publishes open data under the Open Contracting Data Standard, which is what allows monitoring tools to aggregate it.
Find a Tender does not stand alone. Contracts Finder still holds notices for procurements that started before February 2025 and must run out under the old rules. Scotland publishes on Public Contracts Scotland, Wales on Sell2Wales and Northern Ireland on eTendersNI, each with its own devolved rules. Many English councils buy through shared e-tendering platforms such as ProContract, and NHS bodies use the Atamis health family system. Ireland is a separate jurisdiction entirely: notices go on eTenders and, above the EU thresholds, to TED.
What it means for a bidder
Find a Tender is the most complete single entry point for UK opportunities of any real size, and monitoring it by CPV code, keyword and region should be the backbone of any supplier's routine.
Know its limits. Purchases below the £12,000 and £30,000 triggers may never appear anywhere. Call-offs under an existing framework are generally not advertised, so the way in is to win a place on the framework itself. And work advertised only on a council's own e-tendering portal before award may reach you late.
The notice is a summary. The full tender pack is downloaded from the portal named in it, and that is where the real requirements are.
Example
A city council wants a four-year contract for maintenance of its heating installations, valued at around £290,000 including VAT. That exceeds the £207,720 sub-central threshold, so it publishes an above-threshold tender notice on Find a Tender with a link to its own portal for the documents. A building services SME picks it up through an alert on the heating maintenance CPV code and downloads the pack the same day.
Frequently asked questions
Is it free to use?
Yes for suppliers. Searching, alerts and the open data feed cost nothing.
Is every UK public contract on it?
No. Below-threshold purchases under the notification triggers, framework call-offs and procurements still running under pre-2025 rules on Contracts Finder are all outside it.
What about Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and Ireland?
Each has its own portal: Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales, eTendersNI and, in the Republic of Ireland, eTenders. Scoutee aggregates all of them alongside Find a Tender.