How do I find government contracts?

The public sector is made up of numerous organisations run by the government – this includes local councils, emergency services, armed forces, and the NHS. Each of these organisations relies on the private sector to supply them with a wide range of goods, works, and services, and spends around £300 billion on procurement each year.

To ensure there is a competitive marketplace, contracts must be published publicly, and be accessible to any supplier. This means whenever a public body has a procurement need, they have to advertise the contract online using any of the numerous publishing platforms (also known as advertising portals) available to them – details of these can be found at the end of this post.

The Problem with Finding Tenders

You could try and search for notices yourself using the websites above, but due to the sheer number of sources, especially for low-value notices, it would take a significant amount of effort to find suitable notices.

Even if you did find notices this way, the problems associated with CPV (Common Procurement Vocabulary) codes mean they might not actually be as relevant as you had hoped. There is a CPV code for every product or service, and while buyers should use them to let suppliers know what they are looking for, many notices are coded incorrectly. This means they won’t appear in searches and you could miss out on these opportunities.

Tenders Direct allows you to avoid these issues by sourcing and reviewing every UK and ROI notice, then making them available to you in one accurate and easy-to-search database. If you would like more information about the use of CPV codes and other issues you could encounter, please see our post ‘Why does Tenders Direct reclassify tenders?’

Tenders Direct – How does it work?

We are able to provide full coverage of every tender published in the UK and ROI thanks to our team of Sourcing Specialists, who scour every source to find every tender published. Our Classification Specialists then review each of these notices for accuracy, and re-classify them according to product, service, and industry. This Peer Review Process not only ensures you have access to every tender published; it also eliminates irrelevance so you only ever see notices that match your search criteria.

To help you stay ahead of the competition and have more time to prepare your bids, our tender alert service eliminates the need for manual searches by notifying you as soon as relevant opportunities are published. Our Account Managers work with you to learn about your business, identify your needs, and develop your unique alert profile – ensuring you receive notifications tailored specifically to your requirements.

With a Tenders Direct subscription, we guarantee you will never miss a tender.

FREE Market Overview

Discover how many public sector contracts your business could be bidding for.

Request free report

Tender Publishing Platforms UK

Contracts Finder - for English contracts worth over £10,000 with the government and its agencies.

Public Contracts Scotland – for all Scottish public procurement.

Sell2Wales – for all Welsh public procurement.

eSourcing NI – for all public procurement in Northern Ireland.

Tenders Electronic Daily (TED) – for high-value tenders published in European Union countries.

Find a Tender – for all high-value notices published across the UK.

Public Buyer Specific – low-value tenders, which make up the majority of all public contracts, can be published on the buyer’s own website or through a third-party service such as myTenders – meaning there are hundreds of sites used to publish notices.