Contracts Finder: How It Works and When to Use It Instead of Find a Tender

For a decade, Contracts Finder was the first place a small business looked for public sector work in England. The Procurement Act 2023 changed that: new procurements now publish on Find a Tender, and Contracts Finder is winding down to the notices left over from the old rules. It is still widely searched, though, and it still holds useful data, so it pays to know exactly what it covers today.

This guide explains what Contracts Finder is, how it differs from Find a Tender and when each one applies, how to search it and set up alerts, and what a year of its award data shows. For the main service, read it alongside our Find a Tender guide. If public procurement is new to you, start with our explainer on what a tender is.

What is Contracts Finder?

Contracts Finder is a free GOV.UK service for finding information about public sector contracts. It launched on 26 February 2015, when the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 required buyers in England, and UK-wide public bodies, to publish their lower-value opportunities and awarded contracts in one place.

Under those regulations, publication on Contracts Finder was required for:

• Central government departments and their agencies: contracts worth £12,000 or more, including VAT.
• Other public bodies, such as local councils and NHS trusts: contracts worth £30,000 or more, including VAT.

Above the procurement thresholds, opportunities also went to Find a Tender (and before 2021 to the EU’s TED). Below them, Contracts Finder was often the only public record. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland run their own portals for devolved buyers.

Contracts Finder publishes four kinds of notice: early engagement, future opportunities, live opportunities and awarded contracts. Anyone can search them, and a free account adds saved searches and email updates.

Contracts Finder vs Find a Tender: which one applies?

The deciding question is when the procurement started.

In practice:

• To find new tenders, search Find a Tender. Every procurement under the Act, from a small council contract to a major government programme, is advertised there. Government guidance is that there is no ongoing requirement to publish opportunity notices on Contracts Finder after 25 February 2025.
• To track awards under older arrangements, keep watching Contracts Finder. Frameworks and dynamic purchasing systems set up under the 2015 regulations keep running until they expire, and buyers continue to report their call-off contracts on Contracts Finder.

The 1 May 2027 change

Regulations made in March 2026 replace Contracts Finder with the central digital platform for the notices that the 2015 regulations still require. That change was due on 1 October 2026 and has been deferred to 1 May 2027. After that date, even old-regime notices are due on Find a Tender. The legislation changes where buyers must publish; it does not set a date for switching off the Contracts Finder website.

What Contracts Finder award data shows for FY2025-26

Our analysis covers every awarded-contract notice that appeared on Contracts Finder between 1 April 2025 and 31 March 2026 (the UK’s 2025-26 financial year), drawn from the service’s OCDS open data feed. Each award is counted a single time, however often its notice was updated. Source: Contracts Finder, Cabinet Office, used under the Open Government Licence v3.0. The whole year falls after the Act came into force, so these figures describe the notices still published under the old rules, which is a narrower set than lower-value public procurement as a whole.

About half of the awards were call-offs: orders placed under frameworks and dynamic purchasing systems that were set up before the Act and are still running. That confirms what Contracts Finder has become. Much of what appears there now is spending under existing arrangements, which is useful for seeing who holds a framework place and wins work through it. New competitions open on Find a Tender. SMEs won a substantial minority of the awards where the supplier’s size is recorded.

A typical award runs for around a year. Many of these contracts will be re-procured soon, and because any new procurement falls under the Act, the next opportunity for that work will be advertised on Find a Tender. Contracts Finder tells you who holds it today.

How to search Contracts Finder and set up alerts

The search page works without an account:

1. Search by keyword for the product or service you sell, then refine.
2. Filter by procurement stage. Choose awarded contracts to see who is winning work in your category, or opportunities and future opportunities for anything still being advertised under the old rules.
3. Add location, value and CPV filters. You can search by region or within a distance of a postcode, set a value range, and filter by Common Procurement Vocabulary (CPV) code.
4. Save the search. With a free account, saved searches send you an email when new notices match.
5. Download the results. Export a search as CSV or XML to build your own list of buyers, incumbents and contract end dates.

Because new opportunities now appear on Find a Tender, set up the same keywords and CPV codes there as well. Our guide on how to find more RFPs and tenders covers keeping several sources manageable.

How to respond to an opportunity

A Contracts Finder notice describes the requirement and links to the buyer’s documents, usually in an e-tendering system where you register and submit. The steps are the same as for any public tender:

Qualify first. Check the requirement, evaluation criteria, contract terms and deadline against your capacity before committing a team. A short go/no-go checklist keeps the decision consistent.

Map every requirement. List each question, mandatory requirement and format rule, and give each one an owner, so a missing mandatory document cannot sink an otherwise strong bid.

Answer the evaluation criteria in order. Evaluators score against the published criteria and weightings. Our guide to writing a tender response walks through structure, evidence and tone, and the tender bidding process guide covers the stages from capture to debrief.

Submit early. Deadlines are strict, and lower-value tenders often have short response windows.

If the notice says the procurement is run under the Procurement Act 2023, you will also need to be registered on the central digital platform, which our Find a Tender guide explains step by step.

On lower-value public sector bids, many of the same questions come back tender after tender. AutoRFP.ai drafts those repeat answers from the content your team has already approved and shows where each one came from, so reviewers can check a response quickly and spend their time on the questions specific to that buyer.

Using awarded contract data to plan your pipeline

Even as it winds down, Contracts Finder holds years of award notices: buyer, supplier, value, procedure and contract dates for lower-value contracts in England. That history is useful for:

• Spotting incumbents. See which suppliers hold the contracts and framework call-offs you want, and with which buyers.
• Timing your approach. Contract end dates show when work is likely to be re-procured, and the re-procurement will be advertised on Find a Tender under the Act.
• Sizing a market. Award values and counts by buyer show where spending in your category is concentrated.

Build a short list of target buyers from the award data, then follow their pipeline and tender notices on Find a Tender. Our guide to tender management covers running that pipeline as a process, and how to win a bid covers converting it.

Devolved nations

Contracts Finder covers England and UK-wide bodies. The devolved administrations run their own portals:

• Scotland: Public Contracts Scotland. Scotland has its own procurement law and is outside the Procurement Act 2023.
• Wales: Sell2Wales. The Act applies in Wales, alongside Welsh regulations.
• Northern Ireland: eTendersNI and eSourcing NI. The Act applies, with some exemptions for below-threshold contracts under Northern Irish rules.

Where Contracts Finder fits now

Contracts Finder has moved from the front door for lower-value work to a record of contracts awarded under the old rules. Use it for incumbent and renewal research, and use Find a Tender for every new opportunity.

Whichever service a tender comes from, the response work is the same, and it rewards teams that reuse their best answers. AutoRFP.ai keeps those answers in a library that maintains and improves itself as your team approves new responses, then drafts each tender from it with the sources shown. See how it works on our RFP software page.