Is Find a Tender free to use?

Yes. Both Find a Tender and Contracts Finder are free public services, and their data is published under the Open Government Licence. Paid tools add filtering, matching and alerting on top of that free data rather than exclusive access to it.

Do all UK public contracts appear on these services?

Most, but not all. Contracts below the publication thresholds may not be advertised centrally, some purchases are made through existing frameworks or dynamic purchasing systems without a fresh notice, and devolved nations publish lower-value work on their own portals.

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

5 min read · last reviewed 22 Aug 2026

The UK runs two central procurement publication services, and almost every business that bids for public work needs to watch both. They overlap, but neither is a superset of the other — which is exactly why opportunities get missed.

Find a Tender (FTS)

Find a Tender is the UK's high-value notice service, launched in 2021 to replace the EU's Tenders Electronic Daily for UK procurements. It carries contracts at or above the procurement thresholds — broadly the larger, formally regulated opportunities across the whole UK, including Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

If you are chasing six- and seven-figure contracts and framework agreements, this is the primary source.

Contracts Finder

Contracts Finder carries lower-value opportunities, generally those above £12,000 for central government and £30,000 for the wider public sector, primarily in England. It also publishes award notices, which is where contract values, winning suppliers and contract end dates appear.

For most SMEs this is the more useful of the two day to day: the contracts are smaller, more local, and attract far fewer bidders.

Why watching only one is a mistake

A mid-sized regional supplier will find genuinely relevant work on both. High-value framework agreements appear on Find a Tender; the £40,000 council contract in your own town appears on Contracts Finder. The two services also differ in what data they include — for example, award notices on Contracts Finder routinely state contract start and end dates, while Find a Tender award notices frequently do not.

The devolved services

Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland each run their own portals — Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales and eTendersNI — which carry lower-value local opportunities that never reach the two UK-wide services. High-value notices from those nations do appear on Find a Tender, so you will see the large contracts either way, but not the smaller local ones.

How TenderClear uses them

TenderClear imports from both Find a Tender and Contracts Finder through their official open data APIs, normalises the different formats into one consistent record, and links every notice back to its original source page. Award notices are imported too, which is what powers contract expiry tracking.

Frequently asked questions

Is Find a Tender free to use?: Yes. Both Find a Tender and Contracts Finder are free public services, and their data is published under the Open Government Licence. Paid tools add filtering, matching and alerting on top of that free data rather than exclusive access to it.
Do all UK public contracts appear on these services?: Most, but not all. Contracts below the publication thresholds may not be advertised centrally, some purchases are made through existing frameworks or dynamic purchasing systems without a fresh notice, and devolved nations publish lower-value work on their own portals.