Find a Tender vs Contracts Finder: the difference (2026)

Find a Tender and Contracts Finder are both official government services for finding public sector contracts. They overlap, and neither is going to be the whole picture on its own. This page is part of our guide on how to win public sector contracts.

The short version: Find a Tender is now the Central Digital Platform, the single place where buyers publish notices under the Procurement Act 2023. Contracts Finder is a search service for contracts worth over £12,000 that still carries notices for procurements started under the old rules. You can search both without paying, and you only need to register on the Central Digital Platform when you want to bid.

Find a Tender is now the Central Digital Platform

Find a Tender replaced the EU’s Tenders Electronic Daily for high value UK contracts on 1 January 2021. On 24 February 2025 it changed role. Under the Procurement Act 2023, the Central Digital Platform is at find-tender.service.gov.uk, the same address as before (para 1).

What that means for you:

• One place for notices. All contracting authorities publish their procurement notices on the platform (para 8).
• One place for your details. Suppliers register once and store core supplier information on it: basic details, economic and financial standing, connected persons and exclusion grounds (para 59).
• Old accounts. Existing users had to re-register. If you used the same email address, your saved searches carried over.

The supplier guide says Find a Tender is free to use, that you can search and set up alerts at no cost, and that you should not pay to view opportunities in the public sector.

What Contracts Finder is for now

Contracts Finder is described on gov.uk as a place to search for contracts worth over £12,000 (including VAT) with the government and its agencies, find out what’s coming up and review past tenders. You can create an account to get email updates and save searches. You can still search and apply for contracts without one.

What changed in 2025 is where notices must go. Since 24 February 2025 the Procurement Act hasn’t required any notice to go on Contracts Finder: new procurements, above or below threshold, only need notices on Find a Tender. Contracts Finder still carries notices for procurements started under the old rules, such as award notices and call-offs from older frameworks (PPN 019 guidance).

For below-threshold contracts, the notice must be published on the central digital platform before being published elsewhere (paras 11 and 12).

Procurements that started under the old Public Contracts Regulations 2015 continue under them, and the transitional guidance names Contracts Finder as one of the places where notices for those may need to be published (paras 4 and 5).

In practice, if you want notices from both regimes, watch both. We do, and we remove the duplicates.

Which should you watch?

Our suggestion, not a rule:

1. Start with Find a Tender. It is where Procurement Act notices are published, and registration there is what you need to bid.
2. Add Contracts Finder if you want a second view. You can search it without an account, and it carries notices for procurements started under the old rules, such as award notices and call-offs from older frameworks.
3. Add your devolved portal if you work in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. Welsh authorities must still publish on the platform (guidance para 9), so their local portal is an extra view. Only devolved Scottish authorities, and, below threshold, transferred Northern Ireland authorities and schools, can publish without using the platform.
4. Keep an eye on your local council’s own tendering portal. That is where the documents and your submission may live.

If that sounds like a lot of tabs, it is. That is the main argument for a single filtered feed, whether you build one with saved searches or use a service.

Common mix-ups

• “Find a Tender is only for big contracts.” The platform also carries below-threshold notices from £12,000 or £30,000, depending on the buyer.
• “You must register to look.” You don’t. The supplier guide says you only need to register when you want to bid.
• “My old searches are gone.” If you used the same email address when you re-registered, your saved searches were pulled through to the new account.
• “Anything over £139,688 is high value.” Not any more. Use the Schedule 1 table below.

The thresholds that decide where notices appear

Above threshold

The values below are in Schedule 1 of the Act, as revised from 1 January 2026. They include VAT, and the thresholds guidance says the main thresholds are revised every two years, on 1 January of each even year.

* The light touch figure is not on the two-yearly cycle, though it may be updated for other purposes (thresholds guidance, paras 11 and 12).

Central government authorities include government departments and NHS trusts and NHS foundation trusts (Procurement Regulations 2024, Schedule 2; below-threshold guidance para 10), so the £135,018 figure applies to them as well as the £12,000 one. Councils and most other public bodies are “other authorities”.

Below threshold

Smaller contracts have their own rules. Under section 87, a buyer must publish a below-threshold tender notice before advertising a notifiable contract to invite tenders. The guidance puts the thresholds at £12,000 for central government authorities and £30,000 for other authorities, including VAT (para 10), with NHS trusts and NHS foundation trusts in the central government group.

There are exceptions. Devolved Welsh central government authorities use £30,000 (s.87(4)(a)(ii)). Transferred Northern Ireland authorities and schools are outside these below-threshold rules (guidance paras 6 and 9), and Scottish councils are outside the Act.

For a small firm, this is the useful band. A £40,000 council contract that would never have reached the old Find a Tender service can now appear on the Central Digital Platform. That example is hypothetical, to show the effect of the £30,000 line.

Why the gov.uk start pages say £139,688

Both Find a Tender and Contracts Finder start pages on gov.uk still say high value contracts are “usually above £139,688, including VAT”, as of 11 Oct 2026. That isn’t one of the current Schedule 1 values. It also ignores the split between central and other authorities. If you’re checking whether a contract is above threshold, use the table above, not the start page.

Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland

Where the buyer is matters more than which site you use.

• Scotland. Devolved Scottish authorities are excluded authorities under the Act (s.2(5)(a)), so they follow Scottish procurement legislation. A devolved Scottish authority is one whose functions are exercisable only in or as regards Scotland (s.2(6)). Public Contracts Scotland is the Scottish portal named on gov.uk.
• Wales and Northern Ireland. The guidance says devolved Welsh and transferred Northern Irish authorities are regulated by the Act, with differences (para 16). Sell2Wales, eTendersNI and eSourcing NI are the local portals gov.uk names.

For live notices in each nation, see our pages on tenders in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The full list of portals is at every UK tender portal.

Do you need to register on both?

To search: no. You don’t need an account on Find a Tender to look at opportunities. The supplier guide says you only need to register at the point you want to bid. Contracts Finder says you can search and apply without an account.

To bid under the Act: yes, on the Central Digital Platform. Registration is free: you create a GOV.UK One Login, add your organisation, and get a unique identifier, which you give to the buyer before a contract is awarded to you. For notifiable below-threshold contracts, suppliers must also be registered and give their identifier (guidance, para 74).

You don’t need to wait for a tender to do this. Registering and completing your core supplier information now means you’re ready when one appears.

Setting up alerts on each

On Find a Tender, you can set up alerts for tenders of interest. On Contracts Finder, an account gets you email updates and saved searches.

Both work as searches. They’ll tell you when a notice matches your words or codes. They have no way of knowing whether you hold the insurance level, accreditation or turnover the tender pack asks for. That is the gap between “found” and “can bid”, and it’s where a lot of wasted effort goes.

Our tender eligibility checker is coming soon. Until then, tell us your trade and postcode to join the free weekly list of live tenders, starting soon. For the wider picture on the free options, see free government alerts vs a paid service, or our guide to other places tenders are published.

What we see in the data

In the week to 10 Oct 2026 (as of 10 Oct 2026), we saw 470 live tenders across both sites, from 338 distinct buyers (how we count). We merge the two feeds and remove duplicates by matching title, buyer and closing date, so one tender shows once.

Once you’ve found a notice, our guide to how to read a tender notice shows what to check first. For the whole route from finding to getting paid, see how to win public sector contracts.

If you’d rather not watch two feeds by hand, tell us your trade and postcode to join the free weekly list of live tenders, starting soon. On Pro (£49/month), notices that fit your trade and area are checked against what each states about insurance, certifications and location, and you get an email each morning on days with new matches.