Guide
How to find government contracts.
Government contracts are published on official portals — one per country, sometimes one per agency. The hard part isn't access; it's finding the few that fit what you sell without checking a dozen sites every morning. Here's the process.
Find contracts in five steps.
1
Know where tenders are published
Each government posts notices on an official portal — SAM.gov in the US, TED in the EU, GeBIZ in Singapore, and hundreds more. They're free to read but single-country and built for compliance, not search.
2
Define what you sell, not what you search
Translate your offering into the buyer's language. A managed-hosting vendor wants "cloud hosting", "data centre", and "IT infrastructure" notices — not a single keyword. Write the shortlist down before you search.
3
Search across portals at once
Rather than logging into each portal, search an aggregator that indexes them together. Sell to State runs plain-English search across 194 markets, so you find contracts by what you sell, not by which site posted them.
4
Qualify before you bid
Open the buying agency and the past winners to read award history — who they pay, how much, and how often. A contract a single incumbent has held for ten years is a different bet than an open category with rotating winners.
5
Set an alert and stop checking portals
Save your search as an alert scoped to your sectors and target buyers. New matching contracts reach you within minutes of posting, so discovery becomes passive.
Most suppliers lose contracts they never saw. The notices are public, but spread across portals in different languages with different search syntax, and the relevant ones are buried under thousands that aren't. The fix is coverage plus filtering: index every portal once, then filter to your sectors and buyers.
Award history is the part new bidders skip and experienced ones lead with. Before writing a response, check whether the buyer has bought this before, who won, and at what value. That tells you the realistic price, the likely competition, and whether the tender is genuinely contestable.
Frequently asked questions
Where are government contracts published?
On official government portals — one per country and sometimes one per agency. SAM.gov covers US federal contracts, TED covers the EU, GeBIZ covers Singapore, and there are hundreds more. Notices are free to read but each portal is single-country and hard to search across.
How do small businesses find government contracts?
Start by listing what you sell in the buyer's terms, then search across portals instead of one at a time. Sell to State indexes 194 markets, so a small supplier can search by offering, filter to buyers it can realistically serve, and set alerts — without a research team checking portals by hand.
Is it free to find government contracts?
Reading official portals is free. The cost is time — checking each portal, in each language, every day. Sell to State is free to browse across 194 countries; one flat subscription unlocks the full dataset, alerts, export, and API.
How do I know if a contract is worth bidding on?
Check the award history. If one incumbent has won every prior round, the category is hard to break into; if winners rotate and values are in your range, it's contestable. Sell to State attaches award history to every buyer and supplier so you can qualify before you write a response.
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