Contracts Finder Guide

Contracts Finder is the UK Government's portal for public sector procurement. It includes both above and below-threshold opportunities from central government, NHS, and local authorities. This guide explains how it works, its limitations, and how to use it effectively for tender discovery.

How Contracts Finder works

Contracts Finder publishes opportunities from UK public bodies. For many SMEs, below-threshold contracts (under £138,760 for goods/services) are where most relevant opportunities appear—and they're only on Contracts Finder, not Find a Tender. Above-threshold notices also appear on FTS, so there is overlap for larger contracts.

You can search by keyword, location, and value. The site is free to use. Data is published in OCDS format and feeds into procurement platforms.

Limitations of Contracts Finder

The official site has no saved searches or email alerts. You must visit manually to check for new opportunities. There's no analytics, award tracking, or competitor intelligence. For sectors such as software development and consulting, many relevant contracts are below threshold—Contracts Finder is essential.

Combining Contracts Finder with Find a Tender gives full UK coverage, but monitoring both manually is inefficient.

How companies typically search for tenders

Bid managers and business development teams typically visit Contracts Finder daily, run keyword searches, and manually track opportunities of interest. Without alerts, it's easy to miss new notices or deadlines. Many firms use third-party aggregators to consolidate FTS and Contracts Finder in one place.

How TenderLedger improves the workflow

TenderLedger aggregates Contracts Finder data so you can search, filter, and set up alerts. We combine it with Find a Tender for complete UK coverage. You get procurement analytics, award tracking, and competitor intelligence without switching between portals.

Browse by sector: IT tenders, healthcare, facilities management. Or explore the procurement database.

Explore tenders by sector

Sector landing pages with procurement context: