Find a Tender Guide

Find a Tender (FTS) is the UK's official portal for above-threshold public procurement. This guide explains how it works, its limitations, and how companies can monitor opportunities effectively. Understanding FTS is essential for any supplier bidding for government contracts.

How Find a Tender works

Find a Tender replaced the OJEU/TED system after Brexit. UK contracting authorities must publish above-threshold opportunities there. Thresholds are typically £138,760 for goods and services and £4.5M for works (2024 values). Notices include contract notices, prior information notices (PINs), and award notices.

FTS is free to search. You can filter by keyword, region, and date. The data is published in OCDS format and feeds into various procurement platforms.

Limitations of Find a Tender

The official FTS site has no saved searches or email alerts. You must visit manually to check for new notices. Below-threshold contracts appear on Contracts Finder instead, so many suppliers need to monitor both portals. There is no analytics, award tracking, or competitor intelligence on the official site.

For sectors such as IT and construction, a significant share of relevant opportunities may be below threshold—so FTS alone is not sufficient.

How companies typically search for tenders

Procurement teams and bid managers typically visit FTS and Contracts Finder daily, or use third-party aggregators. Manual checking is time-consuming and easily miss deadlines. Many firms rely on spreadsheets or basic keyword alerts that miss nuanced opportunities.

How TenderLedger improves the workflow

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

Explore the procurement database to browse by buyer, category, and location, or try our Find a Tender search.

Explore tenders by sector

Sector landing pages with procurement context: