How to use Contracts Finder: search, alerts, what it lists

Contracts Finder is the government’s search service for contracts worth over £12,000 (including VAT) with the government and its agencies, according to gov.uk. TenderWorthy is an independent service, not part of Contracts Finder or the government.

The short version: 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 (PPN 019, PPN 019 guidance).

This page is part of our guide on how to win public sector contracts. It explains what the service carries now, where new notices go instead, and how to set up a search and an alert.

What Contracts Finder still lists

Here is the position in the government’s own words, via the two PPN 019 documents. 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.

PPN 019 says nothing about the service’s future, so neither do we. What it does give you is a clear list of what the old-rules requirements still cover.

What is still published there

The PPN 019 update says it applies only to procurements that were commenced under the old rules (para 1), and that no new procurements will be conducted under them after 24 February 2025 (para 8(a)). In practice, you may see:

• Award notices for procurements already running. This includes procurements that were advertised and not yet awarded before 24 February 2025 (para 8(b)).
• Call-offs from older frameworks. Awards made under a framework agreement established under the old rules, and award notices for procurements let under existing dynamic purchasing systems (para 7).
• Below-threshold awards under the old rules. For these procurements the publishing duty applied to central government authorities for contracts of at least £12,000, and to sub-central authorities, NHS trusts and NHS foundation trusts at £30,000, both including VAT (para 5). Those are old-rules figures. They apply only to procurements started under the old rules.

The duties to publish for these procurements are unchanged (para 9).

Who PPN 019 doesn’t cover

Paragraph 4 of the PPN says it does not apply to:

• contracting authorities whose functions are wholly or mainly Scottish, Northern Irish or Welsh devolved functions;
• NHS health care procurement within the scope of the National Health Service (Procurement, Patient Choice and Competition) (No. 2) Regulations 2013;
• maintained schools, academies and sixth form college corporations.

A devolved Scottish authority, for example, isn’t covered by PPN 019. More on that below.

Which notices now appear on Find a Tender instead

New Procurement Act procurements, above or below threshold, only need their notices on Find a Tender, which is also the Central Digital Platform. The guidance says procurement notices will be published by all contracting authorities in one place (para 8).

The notice types you will meet there include the tender notice (UK4), contract award notice (UK6) and contract details notice (UK7).

Smaller contracts are covered too. Under section 87, a buyer must publish a below-threshold tender notice before advertising a notifiable contract to invite tenders. The guidance puts the lines at £12,000 for central government authorities and £30,000 for other authorities, including VAT (para 10), and says the notice must go on the platform before being published elsewhere (para 12). There are exceptions, set out in our Find a Tender vs Contracts Finder guide.

New frameworks and dynamic markets set up under the Act also need their notices on the platform. The PPN 019 guidance (Annex 2) says there is no requirement under the Act to duplicate below-threshold information on Contracts Finder. So a new tender can be published on Find a Tender alone.

For the side-by-side comparison, including the above-threshold values, see Find a Tender vs Contracts Finder.

Searching Contracts Finder

You don’t need an account to look. gov.uk says you can search for information about contracts worth over £12,000 (including VAT), see what’s coming up and look at past tenders. It also says you can still search and apply for contracts without an account.

We haven’t documented the search box’s operators or filters here, because gov.uk doesn’t publish them and we won’t guess. For how the search and filters behave, use the help on the service itself.

What we can suggest, as general advice rather than a description of the service:

• Search in the buyer’s words. Try several phrasings of the same job, such as “grounds maintenance” and “landscaping”.
• Know your CPV codes. If you need to find your CPV codes, do that first, then check the service’s own help to see whether and how its search uses them.
• Look at past tenders too. They show you who buys what and roughly when, which helps you plan.
• On every notice, check the deadline, the procedure and the buyer. Then read the notice against our first tender checklist.

Email alerts and saved searches

gov.uk says you can create an account to get email updates and save your searches. We haven’t verified how often alerts arrive or what the settings screen looks like, so check the service itself before you rely on timing.

Our suggestion, not a rule: keep a Contracts Finder alert while procurements started under the old rules are still running, and make your main alert a Find a Tender one. That way you catch both award notices from older procurements and new Act notices. Our guide to how to find tenders covers the trade-offs between free alerts and a paid service.

An alert tells you a notice matches your words. It doesn’t tell you whether you hold the insurance, accreditation or turnover the buyer wants.

Reading an old-rules notice

A procurement started under the old rules continues under them. The transitional guidance says such procurements must continue to be procured and managed under that legislation (para 4), and it names Contracts Finder as one of the places where notices may be published (para 5). So the notice you read may use old terms. A quick decoder:

• Selection questionnaire (SQ). Formerly the standard form for collecting supplier information. gov.uk’s e-learning says above-threshold supplier information will no longer be captured this way. Core details now sit on the platform, and a buyer collects anything else itself, for example through its own e-tendering system (guidance, para 39). Our glossary calls a buyer’s own questionnaire a procurement specific questionnaire (PSQ).
• MEAT. Formerly “most economically advantageous tender”, the wording of the old award-criteria regulation 67. The Act’s term is the most advantageous tender (MAT) (section 19).
• DPS (dynamic purchasing system). Formerly a supplier list that buyers ran. The Act’s guidance says it brings dynamic purchasing systems and qualification systems into a single commercial tool (para 7), the dynamic market.

Once you’ve decoded the terms, our guide to how to read a tender notice shows what to check first.

Contracts Finder or Find a Tender: which to watch?

Our suggestion: Find a Tender first, because that is where new Procurement Act procurements publish their notices. Contracts Finder second, as an extra view of notices linked to older procurements. If you work in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, add the devolved portal as well. gov.uk names them: Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales, and eSourcing NI or eTendersNI.

Devolved Scottish authorities are excluded authorities under the Act (s.2(5)(a)), so their notices follow Scottish rules. See our pages on tenders in Scotland, tenders in Wales and tenders in Northern Ireland. The Find a Tender vs Contracts Finder guide owns the full comparison.

Contracts Finder in our data

In the week to 10 Oct 2026 we saw 470 live tenders across Find a Tender and Contracts Finder (as of 10 Oct 2026). We merge the two feeds and remove duplicates by matching title, buyer and closing date (how we count). That is a count of what we saw, not a share of the market. Browse the live UK tenders we have today.

Or let us check them for you

Contracts Finder and Find a Tender are both government services you can use directly. If you’d rather not watch two sites, 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.