Find a Tender vs Contracts Finder: what's the difference?

The UK has two official websites for public-sector tenders, and it is genuinely confusing to work out which one you should be watching. The short answer for 2026: new tenders go on Find a Tender, older activity and legacy frameworks live on Contracts Finder, and a working supplier should search both. Here is why, and what each actually contains.

Find a Tender

Find a Tender (often shortened to FTS) launched in January 2021 as the UK's replacement for the EU's OJEU journal, which is where high-value British public contracts were advertised before Brexit. For its first few years it only carried above-threshold notices, meaning the larger contracts.

That changed with the Procurement Act 2023, which went live in February 2025. Under the Act, Find a Tender is the central noticeboard for the new regime. Notices for procurements started under the new rules are published there, and that now includes many below-threshold contracts that would previously have appeared only on Contracts Finder. The Act also introduced a central supplier registration, so you can enter your core company information once rather than re-keying it for every buyer.

The thresholds that decide which procurement rules apply are revised every two years. As a rough guide, most council services contracts cross the main threshold at a little over £200,000 including VAT, and works contracts at around £5.4 million. Check the current figures on GOV.UK rather than relying on any article, this one included.

Contracts Finder

Contracts Finder is older, and under the previous rules (the Public Contracts Regulations 2015) it was where lower-value contracts had to be advertised: broadly anything over £12,000 for central government and over £30,000 for councils, NHS bodies and the wider public sector.

It has not been switched off, for a practical reason: procurements that began before February 2025 continue under the old rules from start to finish. A framework awarded in 2024 can run for four years, with call-offs and extensions along the way, and all of that activity stays in the old system. Contracts Finder is also a large archive of award notices, which is useful intelligence: who won what, at what value, and when it comes up for renewal.

So which one do you search?

Both, for now. In practice:

• Find a Tender for new opportunities. This should be your primary search and your primary alert.
• Contracts Finder for legacy notices, and for research. Award history there tells you which buyers in your area buy your service, who the incumbent is, and roughly when the contract expires. That is your pipeline for the next two years, published in plain sight.

Both sites are free, both offer email alerts, and both let you filter by region and CPV code (the classification codes attached to every notice). Set alerts up on both and treat the overlap as a feature rather than a nuisance.

The bit that catches people out: you rarely bid on either site

Finding the notice is only step one. In most cases the notice points you to the buyer's own e-procurement portal, and that is where you register, download the ITT documents, ask clarification questions and submit your response. Councils often share regional portals; housing associations, universities and other bodies use systems such as ProContract, In-Tend or Delta; the NHS tenders through the Atamis platform.

This matters for deadlines. Portal registration can involve a verification step, and discovering that at 4pm on submission day is a bad experience. When a tender interests you, register on the relevant portal the same day you find the notice.

What the Procurement Act changed for suppliers

Beyond the noticeboard consolidation, a few changes in the 2023 Act are worth knowing:

• One supplier profile. Core business details are entered once on the central platform and reused across procurements.
• Pipeline notices. Larger buyers publish advance pipelines of planned procurement, giving you sight of contracts months before the tender lands.
• Assessment summaries. When you lose, you are entitled to a summary of how your bid was assessed against the winner's. Ask for lessons, in writing, every time.
• 30-day payment terms flow through the supply chain, which matters if you plan to subcontract or be one.

None of this changes the fundamentals: the buyers still publish notices, the notices are still scattered, and the supplier who watches consistently sees more opportunities than the one who checks in occasional bursts. Pick your sources, set your alerts, and make checking them a routine.