How to Set Up Contracts Finder Alerts for UK Tenders

Contracts Finder is the central government service where public sector buyers in England, and UK-wide bodies, publish contract opportunities and some award details. It focuses on lower-value work, the contracts that sit below the thresholds where a full tender notice on Find a Tender is required. An alert is simply a saved search that emails you when a new notice matches your criteria, so you stop refreshing the site by hand. It suits small and mid-sized suppliers who bid for council, NHS, school, and central government work and cannot afford to check a portal every morning. Registration and alerts are free. The publication rules are worth knowing, because they define what actually reaches you. Under GOV.UK guidance, central government must publish qualifying opportunities from 12,000 pounds including VAT, and sub-central bodies plus NHS trusts from 30,000 pounds including VAT. Below those figures, a lot of buying happens quietly and never appears. Our Contracts Finder overview explains the portal and its notice types in more depth.

Go to contractsfinder.service.gov.uk and create a supplier account. You can browse notices without signing in, but saving a search and receiving email alerts both require a registered, confirmed account. Registration takes a couple of minutes and asks for your name, email, and a password. After you submit the form, the service sends a confirmation email with a link you must click to verify the address. Alerts do not start until that step is done, so if nothing arrives after you set up a search, check that you confirmed the account and look in spam for the verification message. Use a shared or role-based inbox rather than one person's address if several colleagues track opportunities, because alerts follow the account, not the team. Keep the login details somewhere your bid team can reach them. It also helps to have your basic company details to hand before you start bidding, since the same information gets reused across notices: your company number, your main CPV categories, the regions you can deliver in, and the contract value range you can realistically take on. You do not need any of that to register or to receive alerts, but having it settled makes the search you build next far sharper. Once the account is live, you manage every saved search and its email settings from one dashboard, which is where the next two steps happen.

Run a search first, then save it, because the alert inherits whatever filters are active. Contracts Finder lets you narrow by keyword, CPV category, location by region or county, contract value band, publishing organisation, and notice type. The trap is being too broad or too narrow. A single generic keyword like cleaning floods you with irrelevant notices, while one hyper-specific phrase misses work that a buyer described differently. A more reliable approach is to combine two or three CPV codes that cover your services with a region filter and a sensible minimum value, then add a short keyword only to refine. Save several focused searches rather than one catch-all: one per service line, or one per region, each with its own alert. Give each a clear name so the dashboard stays readable. A worked example makes this concrete. A commercial cleaning firm in the North West would not just search cleaning. It would select CPV 90910000 for cleaning services and 90919200 for office cleaning, filter the location to North West England, set a minimum value that reflects the jobs it wants rather than every small caretaking contract, and leave the keyword blank or set to a single distinguishing term. That search catches the relevant notices whether the buyer wrote cleaning, janitorial, or facilities hygiene, because the CPV code carries the meaning that a keyword alone would miss. Save it, name it something like North West office cleaning, and repeat the pattern for each service line or region you cover. If you serve the health sector, our guide to NHS tender alerts covers the CPV codes and buyers that matter there. For the wider picture of finding UK work, see the UK public sector tenders guide.

With a search saved, open it from your dashboard and switch on email notifications. Contracts Finder then emails you when new notices match that saved search, sent as a daily summary rather than a message per notice, so you get one digest instead of a stream. You can hold several saved searches at once, each with its own alert, and you can pause, edit, or delete any of them from the same screen. Review the emails for the first week and tighten the filters if the volume is wrong: too many results means the search is broad, none usually means it is too narrow or the value band is too high. Treat the alert as a first-pass filter, not a shortlist. It tells you a notice exists; you still read the specification, check the deadline, and make the bid or no-bid call. Compared with checking the portal by hand, a saved-search alert is the difference our page on manual versus automated monitoring describes in detail.

This is where suppliers get caught out. Contracts Finder alerts watch new opportunity notices on Contracts Finder, and nothing else. Three gaps matter. First, higher-value work. Above-threshold procurements are published on Find a Tender, a separate service with its own account and its own alerts, so a Contracts Finder search never surfaces the larger contracts. Our Find a Tender versus Contracts Finder comparison shows exactly which notices land where. Second, the devolved nations. Scotland publishes on Public Contracts Scotland, Wales on Sell2Wales, and Northern Ireland on eTendersNI, and none of that flows into Contracts Finder. If you sell across the UK you need alerts on each, as our UK devolved portals guide explains. Third, the matching itself. Contracts Finder aligns on keywords and CPV codes, so a relevant notice written with different words or filed under an unexpected code simply will not trigger your alert. This last gap is quieter than the other two and does more damage, because you never see what you missed. A buyer who codes a groundworks package under a general construction CPV, or describes a software need as a digital transformation programme, sits outside a saved search built on the obvious terms, and the alert stays silent while the deadline passes. Widening your keywords helps a little but also drags in noise, so most suppliers end up running several overlapping searches and still worry they have a blind spot. The table below maps the main UK services and how you get alerts from each, which is the first step to closing those gaps deliberately rather than hoping one saved search covers everything.

The rules underneath these portals moved on 24 February 2025, when the Procurement Act 2023 came into force. New procurements now run through the Central Digital Platform, which powers an enhanced version of Find a Tender, and suppliers register once on that platform to share core company details across notices. The GOV.UK factsheet sets out how it works. The practical effect for alerts is that the centre of gravity is shifting toward Find a Tender and the Central Digital Platform, while Contracts Finder continues to carry opportunities from procurements that started under the old Public Contracts Regulations 2015 and is being wound down over time. During this transition period, the safest assumption is that no single portal alert sees everything: some new below-threshold notices publish through the new platform, some legacy activity still runs through Contracts Finder, and the devolved services sit outside both. Set up alerts on both Contracts Finder and Find a Tender, and revisit them as the transition progresses rather than trusting a setup you configured a year ago.

Free portal alerts work, but they leave you stitching together several accounts and still missing anything phrased outside your keywords. That is the problem Jorpex is built for. Instead of a keyword match on one portal, Jorpex monitors Contracts Finder, Find a Tender, the Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish services, and more than 50 public procurement sources in total, then uses embedding-based semantic matching so a notice surfaces against what your business actually does, not just the exact words a buyer typed. Matches arrive with the buyer, estimated value, and deadline, delivered to Slack, Microsoft Teams, or email as realtime, daily, or weekly digests, and disqualifier filters keep out the work you cannot bid on. It runs in 17 languages, which matters if you also chase work abroad. We are honest about the line: Jorpex finds and ranks opportunities, it does not write your bid or register your company for you. If a stack of single-portal alerts is fraying, compare it against automated tender alerts, set up UK procurement Slack alerts, or see how we rank against rivals in our best tender alert services roundup. Plans start at 49 dollars a month with a 14-day free trial.