A while ago I wrote about pulling EU tenders from TED into Google Sheets. The obvious follow-up was the UK.
UK notices stopped appearing on TED at the start of 2021. They now live on two UK government services, and which one a tender ends up on depends mostly on how big it is.
Two services, two audiences
Find a Tender handles the higher-value contracts, roughly the ones that used to go to TED.
Contracts Finder carries lower-value opportunities, mostly in England, along with plenty of award notices and early market engagement.
If you only check one, you'll miss things. A two-person IT consultancy will probably find more on Contracts Finder, while a facilities firm going after multi-year frameworks will spend most of its time on Find a Tender.
Both have open APIs
Both services publish notices as OCDS (Open Contracting Data Standard) JSON under the Open Government Licence v3.0. You can reuse the data commercially as long as you credit where it came from, and you don't need an API key.
There are a few things to watch:
- Find a Tender sends back HTTP 429 with a
Retry-Afterheader if you go too fast. Wait the number of seconds it gives you. - Contracts Finder uses HTTP 403 for the same thing, and its docs ask you to leave it alone for five minutes.
- Contracts Finder's search feed sometimes shows deadlines a few hours off from the notice itself. I only caught it when I compared a batch against the individual notices. If the deadline matters (and it always does), take it from the per-notice endpoint instead.
The search endpoints only filter by date and stage, so keywords, CPV codes and value filters are your job.
GET https://www.find-tender.service.gov.uk/api/1.0/ocdsReleasePackages?stages=tender&updatedFrom=2026-10-14T00:00:00&limit=100
GET https://www.contractsfinder.service.gov.uk/Published/Notices/OCDS/Search?stages=tender&publishedFrom=2026-10-14T00:00:00&limit=100
Page through with links.next. The deadline sits in tender.tenderPeriod.endDate and the estimated value in tender.value.
One thing that surprised me: on a typical week, each service only has a few dozen new tender-stage notices. That's small enough to pull everything and filter locally.
The lazy option
If you'd rather not maintain the plumbing yourself, I've wrapped all of this into an Apify actor: UK Public Tenders Tracker. It searches both services, filters by keyword, CPV prefix, value, region and deadline, and can return only what's new or changed since your last run, which is handy for a daily email or Sheets row. It costs $0.004 per tender, with no subscription.
The output fields are close to the TED version, so one sheet can hold both if you bid on either side of the Channel.
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the Cabinet Office, Contracts Finder or Find a Tender.
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