Find a Tender vs Contracts Finder: where UK public contracts are published, and who wins them

Find a Tender is the UK government’s free service for public procurement notices. Since 24 February 2025 it carries the notices of every new UK procurement, above and below threshold, except below-threshold work in Scotland. Contracts Finder now carries the procurements that started before that date. It still published 25,544 contract awards in the 12 months to August 2026, by our count. This guide shows which UK portal publishes what, the 2026 thresholds, and who buys and who wins on Contracts Finder.

Find a Tender vs Contracts Finder: which UK portal publishes what

The start date of a procurement decides where its notices go. The Find a Tender service says: “From 24 February 2025, both above and below threshold notices about new UK procurements will be published on this service, except below threshold in Scotland” (Find a Tender). A procurement that started earlier keeps its old rules to the end. All further notices about it “must be of the types specified under the same legislation” (notice types).

What changed on 24 February 2025

The Procurement Act 2023 took effect for new procurements in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Find a Tender lists the Act, the Procurement Regulations 2024 and the Procurement (Wales) Regulations 2024 as the law for “new procurements from 24 February 2025”.

Find a Tender became the central digital platform. The government’s short guide for suppliers says that it “is free to use for everyone”. You register when you want to bid for a contract.

Notices now follow the whole life of a contract. The notice types run from UK1 (pipeline notice) to UK17 (payments compliance notice). For a bidder, three matter most. A UK4 tender notice advertises the opportunity. A UK6 contract award notice announces the award decision and starts a standstill period of at least 8 working days. A UK7 contract details notice follows the signature, within 30 days above threshold.

Below threshold, the Act sets two amounts. A “notifiable below-threshold contract” has an estimated value of at least £12,000 for a central government authority and £30,000 for other buyers (section 87). The buyer publishes a below-threshold tender notice before it advertises, and a contract details notice after it signs.

What Contracts Finder still publishes

Contracts Finder now carries the tail of the old rules. The government’s Contracts Finder guidance is PPN 019, updated on 31 March 2025 (gov.uk). Procurements started under the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 “must continue to be procured and managed under that legislation until such a time as the contract ceases to exist.” The guidance adds: “This includes call-offs from frameworks established under the PCRs.” It also says that “there should be no ongoing requirement to publish opportunity notices on Contracts Finder after 25 February 2025”.

In 2026, Contracts Finder is mostly a register of awards. Buyers in England and the non-devolved bodies publish there the awards of older procurements and the call-offs from older frameworks. Central government has 30 calendar days after the award to publish. Sub-central authorities and NHS trusts have 90 calendar days. The duty starts at £12,000 including VAT for central government and £30,000 for the others. New opportunities are on Find a Tender.

UK procurement thresholds in 2026

Most thresholds fell on 1 January 2026. PPN 023, published on 27 November 2025, sets new amounts for procurements that start on or after 1 January 2026. A contract with a central government authority is above threshold from £135,018, down from £139,688. For a sub-central government authority the threshold is £207,720, down from £214,904. Works contracts start at £5,193,000, down from £5,372,609 (Schedule 1).

Some gov.uk pages still show the older amount. On 2 October 2026, the gov.uk pages for Find a Tender and Contracts Finder say that high value contracts are “usually above £139,688, including VAT”. For a procurement that starts in 2026, use the PPN 023 amounts. A procurement keeps the amounts that were in force on the day it started. PPN 023 says: “The new threshold amounts do not affect any procurement commenced before 1 January 2026.”

Public Contracts Scotland: the Scottish portal

Scotland has its own portal and its own rules. Public Contracts Scotland gives “free access to public contract opportunities across Scotland” and “free registration as a supplier or buyer”. Buyers use it to “advertise your contract opportunities and awards”. Scottish below-threshold notices stay off Find a Tender. Scottish above-threshold notices go there too.

The law is Scottish. Find a Tender lists the legislation that applies in Scotland, among it the Public Contracts (Scotland) Regulations 2015 and the Procurement Reform (Scotland) Act 2014. Sell to State holds Public Contracts Scotland contract notices and award notices from February 2025.

Sell2Wales, the portal searched for as eTenders Wales

Wales publishes its opportunities on Sell2Wales. The site lists “Public sector contract opportunities in Wales”, with search by keyword, location and notice type (Sell2Wales). We found no Welsh service called eTenders Wales. eTenders is the public procurement portal of Ireland (etenders.gov.ie), a different state.

New Welsh procurements follow the Act, with Welsh regulations. Find a Tender lists the Procurement (Wales) Regulations 2024 among the laws for new procurements, so their notices go to Find a Tender. Find a Tender names Sell2Wales as the source for below-threshold Welsh contracts of older procurements. Sell2Wales also has an open data page with notice data in XML, JSON, XLSX and CSV.

Northern Ireland: eTendersNI and eSourcing NI

Northern Ireland has two portals. eTendersNI “advertises opportunities for providing goods, services and works to Northern Ireland government department, agencies and arms-length bodies”. Find a Tender names eSourcing NI and eTendersNI as the Northern Ireland sources for below-threshold contracts of older procurements.

Under the Act, Northern Irish buyers publish above-threshold notices on Find a Tender. Below threshold, the notices are not required on Find a Tender “if Northern Irish rules apply”.

Contracts Finder awards before and after the Procurement Act

Contracts Finder now publishes about half as many contract awards as before the Act. In the 12 months before 24 February 2025, buyers published 53,684 contract awards there, 4,474 a month. In the latest 12 months, 1 September 2025 to 31 August 2026, they published 25,544, or 2,129 a month. March 2025 had 4,540 awards. April 2025 had 2,912.

The awards that remain come from older procurements and frameworks. Suffolk County Council awards school transport routes as mini-competitions under its dynamic purchasing system for passenger transport. UK Research and Innovation awards small contracts tied to a project number. Both kinds of notice still go to Contracts Finder.

Two cautions about the chart. Our Contracts Finder UK records are sparse before 2024, so the chart starts in January 2024. The latest months still fill up, because a sub-central buyer has 90 days to publish an award.

UK government procurement: who buys and who wins

The buyers that publish the most awards

On Contracts Finder, UK Research and Innovation published twice as many contract awards as the Ministry of Defence. In the latest 12 months, UKRI published 853 awards and the MoD 404. The ratio was the same in the year before the Act: 2,025 against 959. The count shows how often a buyer publishes. The size of the awards differs a lot: UKRI’s median award was £4,760, the MoD’s £542,801.

The buyer with the most awards is a council transport unit. Suffolk County Council Passenger Transport published 1,059 awards, 4.1% of the total, to 153 suppliers. In a random sample of 8 of its notices, 5 were school transport routes. Leicester City Council (617), National Highways (599), Buckinghamshire Council (494) and the Environment Agency (475) follow.

There is no separate NHS Contracts Finder. NHS England, NHS trusts and other NHS bodies publish on the same service. They published 3,157 awards in the latest 12 months, with a median of £108,044. NHS England published the most, 260.

The buyers with the largest awards

Ministries buy in larger pieces. Of the 44 buyers with at least 100 awards of £1,000 or more, HM Revenue & Customs had the largest median award: £960,680. UKRI had the smallest: £4,760.

Councils award small contracts, ministries award large ones

By type of buyer, a ministry’s median award is more than twice a council’s. Ministries and departments had a median award of £186,531 in the latest 12 months. Councils had £82,658. Councils publish the most often: 10,013 of the 25,544 awards. Their median hardly moved after the Act: it was £83,105 in the year before.

Who wins UK public contracts

Most winning suppliers win one award. In the latest 12 months, 8,024 suppliers won an award on Contracts Finder, and 4,638 of them (58%) won exactly one. In the year before the Act the share was 62%. In the same 12 months, Germany had 67% one-time winners and Ireland 71%. In the UK, suppliers with six or more awards are 10% of the winners and hold 54% of the awards.

IT resellers win the most often, and from the most buyers. Softcat won 411 awards from 163 buyers. Phoenix Software won 207 from 121, Insight Direct 144 from 85 and Civica 121 from 88. Two of the six Softcat notices we read name a framework, for example NHS Shared Business Services’ Digital Workspace Solutions 2. Engineering consultancies follow: WSP won 145 awards, Arup 122 and AECOM 116.

Some suppliers win dozens of awards from one or two buyers. Neales Taxis won 142 awards and Care-Line Homecare 122, each from at most two buyers. The notices we read are single transport routes and single homecare placements.

Tender alerts UK: what each portal sends

Find a Tender and Contracts Finder send free email alerts. To find new government tenders UK-wide, register on the official services:

• Find a Tender: with an account you can “save search criteria” and “sign up for notifications via email”.
• Contracts Finder: “You can create an account to get email updates and save your searches. You can still search and apply for contracts without an account” (gov.uk).
• Public Contracts Scotland: free registration as a supplier.
• eTendersNI: “to ensure you receive notifications, you must register as a supplier organisation”.

Sell to State counts new UK tenders in one daily email. It holds open notices and awards from Find a Tender, Contracts Finder and Public Contracts Scotland. A saved search sends one email a day with the number of new open and awarded tenders that match it. You also see who won each buyer’s past contracts, at what stated value, and how often the same supplier wins.

Find a Tender API and Contracts Finder API

Both services publish their notices as open data under the Open Government Licence. Find a Tender says: “You can download notices in Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS) JSON format using our API” (data and API). The same notices are on data.gov.uk as daily XML files.

The Contracts Finder API has an OCDS search method. It is Published/Notices/OCDS/Search, with filters for the publication dates and the stage, plus daily CSV files (Contracts Finder API). Sell to State reads every stage of this feed and of the Find a Tender API once a day. To query them with the other live countries, use the Sell to State API.

How we counted the UK awards

Records and source

• The counts below use only the Contracts Finder award records that Sell to State held on the snapshot date. They do not include Find a Tender, Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales, eTendersNI or eSourcing NI notices.
• One record is one award from the Contracts Finder API: a buyer, a supplier, an award date and, where the notice gives it, an amount in pounds. When a notice names several suppliers, our import keeps the first one.
• On the snapshot date we held 121,794 UK award records. 117,787 remain after we remove duplicates and dates after the snapshot. Records before 2024 are sparse.

Windows and cleaning

• Two 12-month windows: the year before the Act (24 February 2024 to 23 February 2025) and the latest 12 months (1 September 2025 to 31 August 2026). Germany and Ireland use the same latest window.
• Our import stored some awards twice. One notice, amount and date is one award, so we removed 3,566 duplicate records (12%) from the latest window and 84 from the earlier one.
• We checked the 40 largest supplier names for names that cover many unrelated contracts. We found none. The widest, Softcat with 163 buyers, is an IT reseller, and the six of its notices we read are all IT purchases.
• We merged buyer names across spellings, such as “UK Research & Innovation” and “UK Research and Innovation”. Buyer types come from the buyer names; we read the 15 largest names of each type. We left out BIP Solutions Limited from the median ranking: a company name appears as the buyer on 113 notices, so the real buyers are hidden.

Values and snapshot

• Values are the stated amounts in pounds. When several winners share one notice and one amount, we split the amount. We cap each award at the 99.9th percentile of its window: £320,030,616 in the latest window, which touched 25 awards.
• The snapshot date is 2 October 2026. This research is based on the award data behind Sell to State.

Where to go next

See the buyers, suppliers and awards on the United Kingdom page. For European tenders, read our guide to TED. Plans are on the pricing page.

UK public contracts in 2026: the short version

For new public contracts UK buyers advertise, start at Find a Tender. Since 24 February 2025 it carries every new procurement, except below-threshold work in Scotland. Contracts Finder keeps the awards of older procurements and frameworks, about half as many as before the Act. On Contracts Finder, UK Research and Innovation published twice as many contract awards as the Ministry of Defence.

Download the charts

Free to reuse. Give a link to this article.

• V1 — Most UK procurement thresholds fell on 1 January 2026. (PNG, 2400 px)
• V2 — Which UK portal publishes a notice depends on its start date. (PNG, 2400 px)
• V3 — UKRI published twice as many awards as the MoD. (PNG, 2400 px)
• V4 — Ministries’ median award is more than twice the councils’. (PNG, 2400 px)
• V5 — 58% of the UK’s winning suppliers won one award. (PNG, 2400 px)
• V6 — Contracts Finder awards fell by half after the Procurement Act. (PNG, 2400 px)