Find a Tender Service Explained: When It Matters and When It Doesn't

Most suppliers watching the Find a Tender service will never win a contract on it. Not because the contracts are not real. Because the contracts are not theirs. The Find a Tender service (FTS) is the UK's official e-notification portal for above-threshold public procurement: the deals large enough that the law forces buyers to advertise them to the whole market. Central government services contracts from around £139k. Council and NHS deals from around £214k. Construction works from £5.37m. If your typical contract is worth £60k, FTS is a spectator sport.

Most new suppliers get this geography backwards. They register on FTS because it sounds official, set up five keyword alerts, and spend six months drowning in £20m framework notices they could never deliver. Meanwhile the £80k and £150k contracts they could actually win sit on Contracts Finder and council portals, unread.

This guide explains what FTS is, where the thresholds sit, how the work is divided with Contracts Finder, and when each feed deserves your attention. If you are new to selling to the public sector, start with the complete supplier guide, then come back here for the plumbing.

What is the Find a Tender service? The UK e-notification system explained

Until Brexit, large UK public contracts were advertised in the Official Journal of the European Union through its TED portal. Every above-threshold tender from Aberdeen to Truro went into the same database as contracts from Athens and Warsaw. When the transition period ended on 1 January 2021, the UK needed its own legal noticeboard. Find a Tender is that noticeboard.

Be precise about what FTS is for, because it shapes how you should use it. FTS is not a matchmaking service. It is a compliance mechanism. Buyers publish there because the law requires it, in the format the law prescribes, on the timetable the law sets. The notices are written for auditors and lawyers first, suppliers second. That is why they read like legal documents: they are legal documents.

The mechanics are simple. Search is free and open, registration costs nothing, and a registered account lets you save searches and receive email alerts. Notices carry the buyer, the estimated value, the deadline, the CPV codes that classify the work, and a link to the buyer's own portal where the actual bidding happens. FTS tells you the contest exists. You still bid somewhere else.

The Procurement Act 2023, live since February 2025, made FTS more central to the market, not less. The Act runs its transparency regime through an expanded family of notices on the platform: pipeline notices, planned procurement notices, tender notices, award notices, contract change notices. We break the full set down in our guide to what the Procurement Act changed for suppliers. The practical upshot is that more of the buying cycle is now visible on FTS than ever before, including signals that land months before any tender exists.

But visibility is not relevance. Whether FTS deserves a daily slot in your routine comes down to one number: the value of the contracts you actually win.

Above threshold tenders: where the lines sit

Thresholds decide which noticeboard a contract legally belongs to. Here is the map for the current cycle:

Thresholds are revised every two years, so treat these as the current era's figures and check the live thresholds on gov.uk before you build a plan around them.

Two things jump out of that table.

First, the works threshold is enormous. A £4m school refurbishment, a £2m resurfacing package, a £3.5m leisure centre refit: all below threshold, none of them required to appear on FTS as a tender. The overwhelming majority of public construction contracts by count never touch it.

Second, the services thresholds catch mid-sized deals but miss the everyday spend of councils, trusts and universities. And below the line, the publication duty flips to a different service entirely. Central government contracts worth more than £12k, and sub-central contracts worth more than £30k, must be published on Contracts Finder instead.

Find a Tender vs Contracts Finder: the division of labour

The two national feeds split the market cleanly.

Find a Tender carries the legal notices for above-threshold procurement: the big contracts, the frameworks being established, and the award notices that follow them.

Contracts Finder carries the below-threshold market from £12k or £30k upwards, plus a mirror of most of the big notices. It is the larger feed by opportunity count and, for most smaller suppliers, the only one that matters day to day. We cover it end to end in the Contracts Finder guide.

Here is what most SMEs get wrong: they treat FTS as the premier league and aim there, when their entire winnable market sits below the threshold. The pattern shows up even in the biggest sector we track.

Read that against the thresholds table. The Digital and IT desk is the largest slice of spend we index: £3.88bn awarded, 35.1% of the total. Even there, roughly a third of contracts sit below the central government threshold entirely, another third sit in the £100k to £500k band that straddles the lines, and only 10% of awards cross £5m. The giant contracts dominate the headlines and the value totals. The contract count, which is what your win rate feeds on, lives lower down. Council spend skews further below the line still.

Who should live on FTS every day

FTS earns a daily slot for a specific kind of supplier. Construction majors and tier one contractors chasing works above £5.37m. National IT integrators bidding multi-year platform deals. FM outsourcers hunting bundled portfolios across dozens of sites. Firms whose growth plan runs through frameworks, because framework establishment notices are above-threshold by design and land on FTS first. If you recognise your business in that list, FTS is your primary feed, and every notice is a legal document with a clock attached.

Now the counterexample. An SME cleaning firm wins contracts worth £50k to £200k a year, one site or a small portfolio at a time. The sub-central threshold is £214k. Almost nothing this firm can deliver will ever appear on FTS as an open tender. What it will find there instead is £30m bundled facilities deals won by the same handful of national players, year after year. An SME watching FTS full time is reading about other people's contracts and calling it pipeline.

There is one exception, and it matters. Award notices. Every above-threshold award on FTS names the winner, the value and the dates. Those giant bundles get delivered through subcontractors, and every incumbent's contract end date is the best single predictor of the next opportunity in that account. For a small firm, FTS is nearly useless as an opportunity feed and quietly valuable as an intelligence source. That distinction is the whole point of this article.

How to combine both feeds without drowning

The honest answer to "which one should I watch" is both, filtered hard. This is where most suppliers' systems fall apart.

Keyword alerts are the standard tool and they are terrible. "Cleaning" returns street cleansing, data cleansing and gutter maintenance. "Software" returns licence resellers and a leisure centre booking system. Run keyword alerts across both national feeds plus a couple of regional portals and you have built a machine that emails you 60 irrelevant notices a week until you stop opening them. Then you miss the one that mattered.

The fix is to stop filtering by keyword and start filtering by sector and buyer.

That is what the desk model exists for. Each desk merges Find a Tender and Contracts Finder into a single sector view: open tenders above and below threshold, recent awards with winners and values, the buyers who actually spend in your sector, and the contracts approaching expiry. One page, both feeds, no keyword roulette.

And one layer deeper: even a perfectly filtered alert only fires when the tender is published, which is late. By publication the specification is written and the front runner has often already shaped it. Awards, expiry dates and buyer behaviour tell you what is coming six to twelve months earlier. That argument gets its own article: tender alerts are too late.

Frequently asked questions

Is Find a Tender free to use?

Yes. Searching is open to everyone, and a registered account, which adds saved searches and email alerts, costs nothing. Cost is not the constraint on FTS. Relevance is.

What replaced OJEU for UK tenders?

Find a Tender replaced OJEU and its TED portal for UK above-threshold notices on 1 January 2021, when the Brexit transition period ended. UK buyers now publish their legal notices on FTS instead of sending them to the EU journal.

What are the Find a Tender thresholds?

Around £139k for central government goods and services, around £214k for sub-central bodies such as councils and NHS trusts, and £5.37m for works. The figures are revised every two years, so check gov.uk for the live numbers before you plan around them.

Do below-threshold contracts appear on Find a Tender?

Not as open tenders, in general. Below-threshold opportunities are published on Contracts Finder, which must carry central government contracts above £12k and sub-central contracts above £30k. Since the Procurement Act 2023 went live, some lower value activity does surface on FTS through the new notice types, but Contracts Finder remains the working feed below the line.

Should an SME register on Find a Tender at all?

Yes, but as an intelligence source rather than an opportunity feed. Award notices tell you who holds the big contracts, at what value, and when they end: exactly what you need for subcontracting approaches and pre-tender positioning. Just do not expect to find many tenders there that you can bid on directly.

The above-threshold market is moving right now

None of this is theory. There are 232 open tenders in the feeds AtlasRevenue tracks at this moment, sitting alongside 1,567 awards that show who won the last round and when their contracts expire. AtlasRevenue merges Find a Tender and Contracts Finder into 28 sector desks and watches them continuously, so you read one page instead of two noticeboards. Run a scan and see what is moving above and below the threshold in your sector today.