Find a Tender: How to Find and Win UK Public Sector Tenders

Find a Tender is where UK public sector buyers advertise their contracts and report who won them. Since the Procurement Act 2023 came into force, it is also where suppliers register before they can bid, so every company selling to the UK public sector needs to know how it works.

This guide explains what Find a Tender publishes, how the new regime changed the notices you will see, how to register and set up alerts, and how to take a tender notice through to submission. It also uses a full financial year of contract data to show where the opportunities sit. If you are new to public procurement, our overview of the stages of the tender process is a useful primer before the UK specifics.

What is Find a Tender?

Find a Tender (often shortened to FTS, for Find a Tender service) is the UK Government’s public procurement notice service, provided by the Cabinet Office. It replaced the EU’s Tenders Electronic Daily (TED) for UK notices on 31 December 2020, at the end of the Brexit transition period.

On 24 February 2025 an enhanced version went live as the central digital platform for public procurement under the Procurement Act 2023, and its role widened. Before, Find a Tender carried higher-value (above-threshold) notices, while lower-value opportunities in England went to Contracts Finder. Under the Act, every procurement in scope is published on Find a Tender whatever its value, and suppliers keep their registration details there too.

The service is free for everyone. Buyers publish notices directly or through an e-tendering system (the platform calls these eSenders), and anyone can search and read notices without signing in.

Which buyers publish there? Contracting authorities in England, Wales and Northern Ireland running procurements under the Procurement Act 2023: central government departments and their agencies, local councils, NHS bodies, universities and utilities among them. Scotland has its own procurement legislation, but Scottish above-threshold notices also appear on Find a Tender (more on the devolved portals below).

How the Procurement Act 2023 changed Find a Tender

The Act applies to new procurements started from 24 February 2025. Procurements that began under the previous rules, such as the Public Contracts Regulations 2015, continue under those rules until they finish, which is why older notice formats will appear on the platform for some time yet.

A notice for every stage

The Act replaced the old notice forms with a set of UK notices that follow a contract from planning to termination:

• Pipeline notice (UK1): larger contracting authorities list the contracts they expect to advertise.
• Preliminary market engagement notice (UK2): the buyer wants to talk to the market before it settles the requirement.
• Planned procurement notice (UK3): advance warning that a tender is coming, which can allow a shorter tendering period.
• Tender notice (UK4): the live opportunity, inviting tenders or requests to participate.
• Transparency notice (UK5): the buyer intends to make a direct award without competition.
• Contract award notice (UK6): the buyer has chosen a winner. Publication starts a standstill period of eight working days before the contract can be signed.
• Contract details notice (UK7): the contract has been signed, with the supplier, value and dates. Required for above-threshold contracts and for below-threshold contracts as well.
• Later-life notices (UK9 to UK17): contract performance, contract changes, terminations, dynamic markets and payments compliance. There is no UK8.

For suppliers, the practical effect is more visibility at both ends of a contract. Pipeline and planned procurement notices give you warning before a tender opens, and contract details, change and performance notices show what happened after the award.

New procedures and new vocabulary

Above-threshold contracts are now competed through either the open procedure (a single stage that any supplier can bid in) or the competitive flexible procedure, where the buyer designs its own process, for example with a shortlisting stage, negotiation or product demonstrations. Direct award without competition is allowed only in defined circumstances, and buyers can still set up frameworks and dynamic markets.

The language of tender documents changed too. Buyers now set conditions of participation (proportionate tests of a supplier’s legal and financial capacity or technical ability) and evaluate tenders against award criteria to identify the most advantageous tender. These terms appear in every Act procurement, so mirror them in your response.

Supplier registration on the central digital platform

The biggest change for suppliers is registration. To take part in a procurement under the Act, you need to:

1. Sign in with GOV.UK One Login and create your organisation’s account on Find a Tender.
2. Complete your core supplier information: basic details about your organisation, economic and financial standing, connected persons (such as people with significant control) and information relevant to the exclusion grounds.
3. Share it with the buyer. The platform generates a share code (or a file) that you give to the buyer, usually by pasting it into the buyer’s e-tendering system against the opportunity.

You only need to register when you want to bid, but do it before your first live tender: in open and competitive flexible procedures your information has to be confirmed before the tendering period closes. Since 1 April 2026, buyers also ask the winners of below-threshold contracts to confirm their registration and give their unique identifier. Update the record whenever something changes, such as a new director or a fresh set of accounts.

What a year of Find a Tender contract data shows

We analysed every contract published in a Procurement Act contract details notice (UK7) on Find a Tender in the 2025-26 financial year, from 1 April 2025 to 31 March 2026, using Find a Tender’s open data in the Open Contracting Data Standard format. Each contract counts once. (Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Source: Find a Tender, Cabinet Office.)

The first financial year under the Act was dominated by smaller contracts. Part of that is timing: a below-threshold contract can be signed soon after a need arises, while a large open or competitive flexible procedure takes months to reach a contract, and the number of Act contracts published each month grew through the year as more procurements finished. Part of it is a lasting change: lower-value contracts that buyers in England used to report on Contracts Finder are now published on Find a Tender, which makes it the main public record of smaller public sector work as well.

Small and medium-sized enterprises won around half of the contracts where the supplier’s size is recorded, so the platform is far from a large-supplier preserve. The second figure is the one to plan around. Below the thresholds the Act does not oblige buyers to run a competition, and a large share of contracts were awarded directly. A supplier that only reacts to tender notices rarely sees that work, so being known to the buyer before the need arises counts for a lot: answer preliminary market engagement notices, keep your platform registration current, and follow up on contract end dates.

A typical contract is modest and runs for about a year, so much of this work comes back to market quickly. For a growing supplier that is good news: there are many winnable contracts, each one builds the track record that larger evaluations ask for, and the contract details notices tell you when each one is due to end.

How to search Find a Tender and set up alerts

Searching is open to anyone. The search page combines keywords with filters, and a well-built saved search does most of the monitoring for you.

1. Start with keywords. Separate words to match any of them, use + to require all of them, and put phrases in quotes.
2. Add CPV codes. Buyers classify every notice with Common Procurement Vocabulary (CPV) codes. Pick the codes that describe what you sell, then add neighbouring codes, because buyers do not always choose the most specific one.
3. Filter by notice type and stage. Tender notices (UK4) are the live opportunities. Add pipeline (UK1), preliminary market engagement (UK2) and planned procurement (UK3) notices to see what is coming, and contract details notices (UK7) to see what was awarded.
4. Narrow by location, value and suitability. Filters cover contract location, value (including or excluding VAT), whether the buyer marked the opportunity as suitable for SMEs or VCSEs, and publication and closing dates.
5. Save the search and switch on emails. Sign in, save the search and choose to be emailed when new notices match it. Keep separate saved searches for live tenders and for awards in the same codes.

Review your searches every few months. The opportunities that slip past are usually the ones a buyer filed under a code you never selected.

How to respond to a Find a Tender notice

A tender notice tells you what the buyer wants, how it will run the procurement and where to get the documents. The response itself happens in the buyer’s own e-tendering system, linked from the notice, so you will usually need an account there as well.

Decide whether to bid. Read the conditions of participation, the award criteria and their weightings, the contract terms and the timetable before committing anyone’s time. A structured go/no-go decision keeps your team on the tenders it can win.

Check the conditions of participation. If the buyer asks for a minimum turnover, a level of insurance or an accreditation you do not hold, good writing will not recover the bid, so find out on day one.

Build a requirements list. Pull every question, mandatory requirement, schedule and response format into one tracker so each item has an owner and a deadline. A compliance matrix is the standard tool for this.

Ask clarification questions early. Tender documents set a deadline for questions. Buyers usually share the answers with every bidder, so keep checking the e-tendering system for clarifications until the closing date.

Write to the award criteria. Evaluators score what each criterion asks for, against the published weightings. Our guide to writing a tender response covers structure and evidence, and the article on tender writing best practices covers style.

Submit with time to spare. Upload your response, with your core supplier information share code, well before the deadline. Late submissions are normally rejected, and a portal problem on the final afternoon is an avoidable way to lose.

Learn from the outcome. Under the Act, bidders whose tenders were assessed receive an assessment summary explaining how they scored, and the contract award notice opens the standstill period. Feed what you learn into the next bid.

This is where AutoRFP.ai fits into a UK tender workflow. It answers your own go/no-go questions against the tender pack before anyone starts writing, then drafts each response from content your team has already approved, with the source behind every answer visible to the reviewer.

Using contract data to plan your pipeline

Award and contract notices are the most useful part of Find a Tender for planning, and the most overlooked. A contract details notice records the buyer, the supplier, the value, the procedure and the contract dates. Read across a category, those notices tell you:

• Who buys what you sell, and how often they go to market.
• Who the incumbents are, and how many contracts they hold with each buyer.
• When contracts end, so you can build a relationship with the buyer before the next tender notice appears.

Pipeline notices add the forward view: larger buyers list the contracts they plan to advertise, and planned procurement notices flag specific tenders. Combine both with contract end dates and you can see your pipeline months before the competition does. When you are ready to convert those leads, our guide on how to win a bid sets out the process step by step.

Find a Tender data is also published as open data in the Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS) format, under the Open Government Licence v3.0, if you want to analyse it at scale.

Find a Tender, Contracts Finder and the devolved portals

Find a Tender is the main UK service, but it is not the only one to watch:

• Contracts Finder carries notices for procurements started under the previous regulations, mainly awards and call-offs from older frameworks.
• Scotland: Public Contracts Scotland. Scotland is outside the Procurement Act 2023, and below-threshold Scottish opportunities are published there.
• Wales: Sell2Wales, the Welsh digital platform. Welsh buyers follow the Act together with the Procurement (Wales) Regulations 2024.
• Northern Ireland: eTendersNI and eSourcing NI. The Act applies there too, although below-threshold contracts governed by Northern Irish rules are exempt from some notices.

If you also bid overseas, the same habits transfer: our AusTender guide covers the Australian Government equivalent.

Make Find a Tender part of a repeatable bid process

Every supplier sees the same notices. The teams that win more often handle each one the same way: they qualify quickly, map requirements before writing, and draft from answers that have already scored well in earlier bids.

AutoRFP.ai supports that last step for UK public sector bid teams. It drafts each tender answer from your approved content and past submissions, shows the sources behind it, and flags any question your content cannot support for your team to answer. Our RFP software page shows the full workflow.