How to find public tenders in the United Kingdom

Finding a UK public tender is not a matter of typing three words into Google. Notices are spread across a national platform, three devolved portals and several hundred buyer-side e-sourcing systems, and each source has its own search logic. This guide explains where notices appear, how to filter them and how to automate the watch without drowning in noise.

Where notices are published, by contract value

Publication duties follow the estimated value of the requirement, inclusive of VAT under the Procurement Act 2023. The thresholds below apply from 1 January 2026 (verified 2026-09-05); the thresholds page has the full table.

Scotland runs its own regime: contracts from £50,000 excluding VAT for goods and services, and £2,000,000 for works, are regulated procurements that must be advertised on Public Contracts Scotland. In Ireland, contracts from €50,000 excluding VAT for goods and services, and €200,000 for works, go on eTenders, and the EU thresholds trigger publication in the Official Journal.

The practical consequence: the smaller the contract, the harder it is to find, and the more accessible it is to a small business. Large contracts are visible everywhere, and competition on them is fierce.

The sources you need

Find a Tender

Find a Tender is the UK's central digital platform, live since 24 February 2025 for procurements under the Procurement Act 2023. It carries the whole notice lifecycle: pipeline and planned procurement notices, preliminary market engagement notices, tender notices, below-threshold tender notices, contract award notices, contract details notices and contract change notices. Suppliers register once, and the platform holds the core company information you would otherwise retype for every bid. It exposes a free API in the OCDS open data standard.

Contracts Finder

Contracts Finder remains the place to look for lower-value opportunities advertised by English public bodies, and it holds the archive of contracts started before the Act came into force, which is where you find who won what and when the incumbent contract ends. It also has a free OCDS API.

The devolved portals

• Public Contracts Scotland carries the notices of every Scottish public buyer, with its own tendering system, PCS-Tender, behind it.
• Sell2Wales does the same for Welsh buyers.
• eTendersNI covers Northern Ireland, where the deadline is often only inside the attached documents rather than in the notice fields.
• eTenders is the Irish national portal, for anyone bidding across the border.

Buyer e-sourcing portals

Publishing a notice and running the tender are two different things. Most buyers advertise centrally and then run the exercise on their own e-sourcing portal, which is where you download the tender pack, ask clarifications and upload your bid. The market runs on a handful of systems: ProContract, used by around two hundred English councils and by the London Tenders Portal, In-tend, Jaggaer, Delta eSourcing, Proactis and Atamis, which also powers the NHS and Department of Health family of opportunities. Registering on the portals of your ten target buyers is not optional: some low-value opportunities appear nowhere else.

Filter by structure, not by keywords

Portal search is literal, not semantic. If you search for "cleaning" and the notice says "janitorial services", you miss it. Three structured filters avoid this trap.

CPV codes

The Common Procurement Vocabulary has 45 divisions and more than 9,400 codes, and at least one is mandatory on every notice. A filter on division 72 (IT services) or 45 (construction work) catches everything in that field regardless of wording. See CPV codes: understanding the nomenclature and choosing yours.

Notice type

A raw feed mixes tender notices, corrections, contract award notices and planned procurement notices. Only tender notices and below-threshold tender notices are live opportunities. Filtering on notice type, then sorting by publication date, isolates what is genuinely new. Keep the award notices in a second list: they tell you who won, at what price, and when the contract is due to be recompeted.

Region and portal categories

Every notice carries a delivery location, so a region filter cuts the volume immediately for any business with a travel radius. There is no national list of trade descriptors, but each e-sourcing portal keeps its own supplier category tree, and those categories drive the alert emails it sends you. Tick them carefully at registration and keep them aligned with your CPV list.

Why Google and ChatGPT are not enough

Google indexes some notice pages, but buyer portals very poorly, because their content sits behind search forms and sessions. A query such as cleaning tender site:find-tender.service.gov.uk may surface a notice, but it will never cover the platforms. Google is useful for discovering sources, not for a daily watch.

General-purpose assistants such as ChatGPT or Perplexity have the same problem, only worse: they have partial access to the platforms and mostly return expired opportunities. They are, however, very useful after discovery: summarising a notice, extracting the award criteria, listing the synonyms a buyer would use, or suggesting CPV codes. Use them to prepare and analyse, not to search.

Setting up alerts

A watch only survives if it is automated. Three levels, from simplest to most complete:

1. The platforms' own alerts. Find a Tender, Contracts Finder, Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales and eTenders all offer saved searches with email alerts. You need one per platform.
2. Google Alerts on procedural phrases combined with your trade and area, set to "as it happens". Useful as a complement, insufficient on its own.
3. A monitoring tool that aggregates the national platforms and the buyer portals, removes duplicates and filters on your CPV codes. This is the only option that covers below-threshold work published on a single council portal.

The guide Setting up an effective tender watch walks through the configuration of a search profile.

Checklist to get started

• Identify 3 to 10 CPV codes, from the broadest to the most specific.
• Register as a supplier on Find a Tender and complete your core company information once.
• Create saved searches on Find a Tender and Contracts Finder, filtered on notice type, CPV and region.
• Add the devolved portal that covers your area, and eTenders if you sell into Ireland.
• Register on the e-sourcing portals of your ten target buyers: council, NHS trust, university, housing association, police or fire service.
• Record the actual wording of the notices you find, to enrich your synonym list.
• Block fifteen minutes a day to sort new notices.

Once sources and filters are in place, your time shifts from searching to bidding, which is where it should go. Scoutee aggregates these sources and applies these filters for small businesses that do not want to monitor ten platforms by hand.