Contracts Finder - UK Government Tender Alerts

Contracts Finder is operated by the Crown Commercial Service (CCS), an executive agency of the Cabinet Office. It is the mandatory publication platform for English public sector procurement notices and covers the full contract lifecycle — from early market engagement and pre-procurement notices through to contract award details and spend data.

The portal publishes notices from over 3,000 contracting authorities, including central government departments like the Ministry of Defence and HMRC, NHS trusts and Clinical Commissioning Groups, local councils across England, universities, housing associations, and publicly funded arm’s-length bodies. Since the Procurement Act 2023 took effect in October 2024, Contracts Finder has also become the home for below-threshold transparency notices, giving suppliers earlier visibility into upcoming opportunities.

Central government departments are required to advertise all contract opportunities above £12,000 on Contracts Finder, while wider public sector bodies — including local authorities, NHS trusts, and housing associations — must publish contracts above £30,000. These thresholds were updated under the Procurement Act 2023 and apply to goods, services, and works contracts alike.

For contracts above the UK’s regulated thresholds (approximately £139,688 for goods and services, £5,372,609 for works), Contracts Finder works alongside Find a Tender Service (FTS). Above-threshold notices appear on both portals, but below-threshold opportunities — which make up the majority of published contracts by volume — appear exclusively on Contracts Finder. This makes the portal essential for SMEs and mid-market suppliers who may not have the capacity to compete for the largest contracts but can win meaningful business at the £20,000–£140,000 tier.

Contracts Finder publishes several notice types, each serving a different purpose in the procurement lifecycle. Contract notices are live opportunities currently open for bids — these are the primary notices suppliers monitor. Pipeline notices provide advance warning of upcoming procurements, often published months before the formal tender launches, giving suppliers time to prepare.

Pre-procurement engagement notices signal that a buyer is exploring the market before committing to a formal procurement — responding to these can influence the eventual specification. Award notices reveal which supplier won each contract, including the contract value, providing competitive intelligence. Under the Procurement Act 2023, buyers must also publish transparency notices for certain below-threshold contracts, expanding the volume of visible opportunities.

Contracts Finder uses a mix of CPV codes and free-text descriptions for categorisation, but its native search interface has significant limitations. There are no saved searches, no ability to create persistent keyword monitors, and no real-time push notifications. The filtering options are basic — you can search by keyword, location, and broad value range, but there’s no way to combine complex criteria or exclude irrelevant results systematically.

Teams relying on manual Contracts Finder checks typically visit the portal once or twice per day, but new notices are published throughout the day. This means opportunities can sit for 24–48 hours before being seen, eating into already tight response deadlines. For tenders with 10–14 day response windows — common at the below-threshold level — this delay is significant. The portal also lacks any integration with team collaboration tools, so sharing relevant opportunities requires copying links and pasting them into emails or chat.

The breadth of organisations publishing on Contracts Finder makes it one of the most diverse procurement portals in the world. Central government departments including the Ministry of Defence, Home Office, Department for Education, and HMRC publish regularly. NHS England and individual NHS trusts advertise everything from medical equipment to IT systems to facilities management.

Local councils across England — from London boroughs to rural district councils — publish contracts for highways maintenance, waste collection, social care, housing repairs, and professional services. Universities, further education colleges, police forces, fire services, and transport authorities all use Contracts Finder as their primary advertising channel. Understanding which buyer types publish contracts relevant to your business helps you build more targeted monitoring profiles.

Jorpex continuously ingests new Contracts Finder publications as they appear, applying your keyword, region, and value-range filters to every new notice. When a matching tender is found, it’s formatted and delivered to your Slack channel or email with the title, contracting authority, estimated value, submission deadline, and a direct link to the full notice.

Unlike manual checking, Jorpex monitors Contracts Finder around the clock, so you see matching opportunities within hours of publication rather than the next time someone remembers to check the portal. Combined with monitoring of Find a Tender, Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales, and eTendersNI, Jorpex gives you complete UK procurement coverage from a single notification feed. You can set up separate profiles for different business lines — one for IT services, another for facilities management — each with its own keyword set and Slack channel.