How to find public-sector tenders for your business

The UK public sector buys almost everything: IT support, cleaning, construction, catering, care, consultancy, vehicles, print, training. The contracts are out there, but the notices are scattered across several publishing systems, and if you only watch one of them you will miss work you could have won. This guide covers where tenders actually appear and how to search them properly.

Who is buying

Five groups of buyers account for most public-sector spend:

• Councils. Everything from waste collection, highways and social care placements to software, agency staff and building maintenance. County, district, unitary and borough councils all buy separately, and so do many of their arm's-length companies.
• The NHS. Trusts, integrated care boards and national bodies tender clinical and non-clinical services, equipment, IT, estates, cleaning and catering.
• Central government. Departments and their agencies buy at every scale, from national programmes to small research and consultancy contracts.
• Housing associations. Repairs and maintenance, compliance services, grounds and cleaning, IT and resident services, often tendered on long cycles and split into lots.
• Education. Individual schools rarely run a full tender themselves; multi-academy trusts, colleges and universities do, and many buy through education frameworks instead.

Where the notices are published

Find a Tender is the UK's official notice service. Since the Procurement Act 2023 went live in February 2025, new procurements are published there, including many below-threshold contracts that previously only appeared on Contracts Finder. If you check one national source, make it this one.

Contracts Finder still matters. Procurements that started under the old rules carry on under them, and frameworks let under the old regime run for years, so live opportunities and useful award history remain there. Search both for now.

Buyer portals. The national sites tell you an opportunity exists; the buyer's own e-procurement portal is where you actually bid. Councils often share regional portals, housing associations and universities commonly use systems such as ProContract, In-Tend or Delta, and the NHS runs its tendering through Atamis. When a notice interests you, register on its portal straight away, because registration can involve a verification step you do not want to discover on deadline day.

Frameworks. A large share of public work never appears as a standalone tender because it is called off from a framework or a dynamic market. Framework operators such as Crown Commercial Service and the sector purchasing consortia periodically open their agreements to new suppliers. Getting onto the right framework is a tender in itself, and worth treating as one.

Search by CPV code, not just keywords

Notices are tagged with CPV codes, a standard classification attached to every notice, and searching by code catches tenders whose titles would slip past a keyword search. A few of the top-level codes, to show the shape of the system:

• 45000000, construction work
• 72000000, IT services
• 90910000, cleaning services
• 55500000, canteen and catering services
• 79400000, business and management consultancy
• 85000000, health and social work services

The quickest way to find yours is to open a few notices for work you could have delivered and note the codes they carry. Buyers do not always tag consistently, so run keyword searches for your services as well, and expect noise and gaps in both directions.

Keep a routine, or automate it

Alerts from Find a Tender and Contracts Finder are free and worth setting up. Their weakness is that they match words, so they cannot tell you whether a tender is worth your time. A £2m national framework and a £40k local contract can arrive in the same digest, and neither alert knows your capacity, your patch or your accreditations.

A workable manual routine is a fixed weekly slot: scan the alerts, discard the obvious misses, and log anything plausible with its deadline and the portal it lives on. The discipline matters more than the tooling.

This is also the problem Tenderoo was built for. It watches the official sources continuously and scores each notice against your actual business, so what reaches you is a short list ranked by fit rather than a keyword dump. You can look your company up for free and see your strongest current match.

Before you bid, get the basics ready

Whichever route surfaces a tender, buyers will expect the paperwork for your sector to be in place: insurance at the levels the contract states, health and safety accreditation for site-based work (an SSIP scheme such as CHAS), Cyber Essentials where you would handle public data, DBS checks for work around children or vulnerable adults, and any licences or registrations your trade requires. Two or three referenced examples of similar contracts help at selection stage. Having these lined up before the right notice lands is the difference between bidding and watching the deadline pass while paperwork catches up.