How to use Contracts Finder well

Contracts Finder is the UK government's free register of public-sector contract opportunities in England, mostly below the Find a Tender thresholds — which in practice means it carries a large share of the work small firms can genuinely win. It rewards being used properly. Here is how to get the most from it, and where its edges are.

Searching so it works for you

The search box matches words, not meaning, so the craft is in the terms: search the words a procurement officer would type, not your trade's jargon — "grounds maintenance" and "grass cutting" both, "cleaning services" rather than your brand of it. Use the filters that narrow honestly: location and distance, published date, and contract value bands. CPV codes (the EU-inherited category numbers) are supported and worth learning for your trade — a CPV search catches notices whose titles say nothing useful.

Alerts: useful, with expectations set

A free account lets you save searches and receive daily email alerts. Do it — it beats manually checking. But know what alerts are: word matches. They cannot tell a £2m national framework from a £40k local job, and they know nothing about your capacity, region or accreditations, so expect to triage. If the triage is what you want automated, that is the job Tenderoo does — scoring each notice against your company rather than your keywords.

The data most suppliers ignore: awards

Contracts Finder publishes award notices — who won, and usually at what value. That is free competitive intelligence: search your trade, filter to awarded contracts, and you learn which buyers buy what you sell, what they pay, and who you are up against. It is also where re-tender timing hides: a three-year contract awarded in 2023 is a 2026 opportunity, and pre-engaging that buyer before the notice appears is how incumbents get beaten.

For the technically inclined: the API

Contracts Finder has a free public API (OCDS-format notices, no key required for reads) — it is what tools like ours ingest. If you have a developer, a small script can pull your trade's notices into a spreadsheet daily. If that sounds like a project you don't want, that is essentially what you'd be paying any tender platform to run for you.

The gaps to know about

Higher-value regulated procurements live on Find a Tender, not here; Scotland and Wales have their own portals; and some councils still advertise only on their regional portal, so belt-and-braces means registering there too. And the buyer's own portal is where you actually download documents and submit — Contracts Finder is the advert, not the tender. Read how to bid for council contracts for the path from notice to submitted bid.