UK Find a Tender API and Contracts Finder API: search both, get daily alerts

Two portals, barely overlapping

On a test day, only 2 of 197 Contracts Finder notices also appeared on Find a Tender. If you want the full picture of what the UK public sector is buying and awarding, you need both.

Call the APIs yourself

Find a Tender, one day of releases, 100 per page:

curl -s "https://www.find-tender.service.gov.uk/api/1.0/ocdsReleasePackages?updatedFrom=2026-10-09T00:00:00&updatedTo=2026-10-10T00:00:00&limit=100"

Contracts Finder, same day:

curl -s "https://www.contractsfinder.service.gov.uk/Published/Notices/OCDS/Search?publishedFrom=2026-10-09T00:00:00&publishedTo=2026-10-10T00:00:00&limit=100"

Both return an OCDS package: releases[] plus links.next, a URL with a cursor for the next page. In our test on 2026-10-12 the first FTS release was 095872-2026, tagged ["award", "contract"], titled "Space Technology Solutions"; the first CF release was a tender, "CA18543 - Northampton College - Media planning & Buying Services". The parts you will read most:

release.tag                       ["tender"], ["award", "contract"], ["planning"] …
release.tender.title / .description
release.tender.value.amount       estimated value (check amountGross for incl. VAT)
release.tender.tenderPeriod.endDate   deadline for tenders
release.tender.items[].additionalClassifications / classification   CPV codes
release.parties[]                 buyer and suppliers, each with roles[]
release.awards[].suppliers / .value

Quirks to plan for

• Date is the only server-side filter. There is no keyword, CPV or region parameter, so you download every notice in your window and filter locally.
• Find a Tender's limit is per ~2-minute window, not per minute. We got "Rate limit of 12 exceeded. Please retry after 120 seconds." after 16 requests spaced 6 seconds apart. Three days of notices fit in the budget; a week of FTS takes about 4 minutes.
• Versions. FTS filters by update time, so a tender and its later updates arrive as separate releases. Keep the latest per procurement and notice type, or you will double count.
• Notice types. Under the Procurement Act 2023 notices are coded UK1 to UK17 (pipeline, planned procurement, tender, award…), alongside older forms. Map them to the stages you care about.
• Personal data. Contact names, emails and phone numbers sit in parties[].contactPoint and sometimes in descriptions; strip them if you store or forward data.
• Attribution. The Open Government Licence v3.0 asks for: Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Search both portals without code

1. Open UK Tenders API: Find a Tender + Contracts Finder on Apify.
2. Set filters: keywords, notice types (planning, tender, award), CPV codes, regions, value in GBP, buyer names, "Only open tenders", SME or VCSE suitability. Filters combine with AND; values inside one filter combine with OR.
3. Choose Published in the last N days (default 3) or exact dates.
4. Click Start. Export CSV or Excel, or use the Tenders and Contract awards views.

Keywords match whole words in the title, description, main CPV description and lot titles, and cloud* matches "cloud" and "cloud-based". The actor paces itself under Find a Tender's limit, waits out any 429 and continues, and keeps only the latest version of each notice by default. If one portal is down, the other's notices are still delivered and the status message says what is missing.

A tender from a real run on 2026-10-04, shortened:

{
  "noticeId": "093436-2026",
  "source": "Find a Tender",
  "noticeUrl": "https://www.find-tender.service.gov.uk/Notice/093436-2026",
  "noticeTypeLabel": "Tender notice",
  "title": "Commercial Asset Management System",
  "buyerName": "Oxford City Council",
  "legalBasis": "Procurement Act 2023",
  "cpvMain": "48100000",
  "cpvMainDescription": "Industry specific software package",
  "deliveryRegionNames": ["South East"],
  "estimatedValue": 1800000.0,
  "estimatedValueInclVat": 2160000.0,
  "deadline": "2026-11-05T12:00:00Z",
  "daysUntilDeadline": 32,
  "isOpen": true,
  "contractStart": "2027-06-01",
  "contractEnd": "2032-05-31",
  "matchedKeywords": ["software"]
}

Worked examples with real numbers

1. Open software and cyber security tenders, last 7 days

{
  "keywords": [
    "software",
    "cyber security"
  ],
  "noticeTypes": [
    "tender"
  ],
  "onlyOpen": true,
  "publishedWithinDays": 7,
  "maxItems": 100
}

On 2026-10-04: 27 open tender notices, all from Find a Tender (5 older versions merged). They ranged from Durham County Council's internal audit management system (£170,000, deadline 5 November) and The Careers and Enterprise Company's digital products support (£15.6 million) to Merthyr Tydfil County Borough Council's CymruSOC 2.0 framework (£90 million).

2. Who won UK IT contracts in the last 3 days?

{
  "noticeTypes": [
    "award"
  ],
  "cpvCodes": [
    "72",
    "48"
  ],
  "publishedWithinDays": 3,
  "maxItems": 200
}

130 award notices: 88 from Find a Tender and 42 from Contracts Finder, which shows why reading only one portal misses a lot. They named 153 supplier entries: 79 large companies and 70 SMEs. Award values summed to £1.66 billion, but treat sums with care: framework agreements publish their ceiling, not actual spend.

3. A daily alert for London and the South East

{
  "keywords": [
    "software",
    "cyber security",
    "cloud*"
  ],
  "noticeTypes": [
    "tender"
  ],
  "onlyOpen": true,
  "regions": [
    "London",
    "South East"
  ],
  "minValueGbp": 50000,
  "publishedWithinDays": 2,
  "onlyNew": true
}

Schedule it for weekday mornings and send the dataset to email, Slack, Google Sheets or a webhook. In our alert test (tenders and planning notices in London and the South East above £50,000, 3-day window) the first run found 105 notices, the next 0, and after we removed 3 from the alert memory exactly those 3 came back.

Regions: London, South East, South West, East of England, East Midlands, West Midlands, North East, North West, Yorkshire and the Humber, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, England, or ITL/NUTS codes such as UKI, TLJ or UKM7. Nationwide notices are included by default. CPV: 72 IT services, 48 software, 45 construction, 79 business services, 85 health and social care, 90 waste and cleaning, 80 education and training.

What each row contains

Honest limits

• Not every UK portal. Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales and eTendersNI are not read. Their above-threshold notices also appear on Find a Tender; smaller ones do not.
• Long windows are slow. Find a Tender's rate limit means about 6 minutes per 10 days of notices.
• Data as published. Some notices have no value, a value only per lot, or a region only for the buyer (the region filter then falls back to the buyer's region). Some procedures only publish a request-to-participate deadline.
• Supplier names withheld when they might be a person. A name is shown only with a company or organisation marker (Ltd, LLP, PLC, CIC, Council, Trust, University…); otherwise nameWithheld: true. In our 3-day IT awards test, 8 of 153 supplier entries (5%) were withheld.
• No contact persons. Emails and phone numbers are never output and are scrubbed from descriptions.

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Not affiliated with the Cabinet Office or Crown Commercial Service.

All input fields

Generated from the actor's live input schema (build 1.0.3).

Call it from code

Start a run and get the results in one HTTP request with the Apify API (your token is under Console, Settings, API & Integrations):

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/adamhaleworks~uk-tenders-find-a-tender-contracts-finder/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"keywords":["software"],"noticeTypes":["tender"],"onlyOpen":true}'

The run's Output tab offers 2 ready-made views; every view exports to CSV, Excel, JSON or XML:

• Tenders: publishedDate, title, buyerName, noticeTypeLabel, deliveryRegionNames, cpvMain, deadline, daysUntilDeadline, estimatedValue, suitableForSme, source, noticeUrl
• Contract awards: publishedDate, title, buyerName, noticeTypeLabel, supplierNames, awardedValue, awardDate, contractStart, contractEnd, noticeUrl

What it costs

With the planned price, filtered-out notices, older versions and notices already delivered in "only new" mode would not be charged. The London and South East alert above would have cost $0.16 on its first run and $0 on a quiet day.

FAQ