Contracts Finder vs Find a Tender

01 · The short answer

Find a Tender is the front door now

The version most suppliers still carry in their heads is that Contracts Finder is the small-contracts board and Find a Tender is for the big ones. That was true under the Public Contracts Regulations 2015. It stopped being true on 24 February 2025, when the Procurement Act 2023 took effect: Find a Tender became the central digital platform, and new UK notices at every value — above and below threshold — are published there, outside Scotland. Contracts Finder’s legal duty to publish, which came from Part 4 of the old regulations, now applies mainly to procurements that started before that date.

We can check this rather than assert it, because we read both services every morning. Of the 1,528 UK notices open right now — counted once each, however many services published them — 1,433 are on Find a Tender. That is 94% of everything open. Contracts Finder has 122, and only 27 of those are notices the two services share — so they are not mirrors of each other, and the overlap is far thinner than the “everything is on both” folklore suggests.

02 · Side by side

What each service is, in 2026

Find a Tender, the service that replaced the EU’s Tenders Electronic Daily in the UK at the end of 2020:

• Statutory roleCentral digital platformAll new UK notices since 24 Feb 2025, above and below threshold
• Open notices we hold1,43394% of everything open
• Median stated value£612,312Skews large: frameworks and multi-year contracts
• LifecyclePipeline to termination17 notice types, from early engagement to contract end
• ScotlandAbove threshold onlyBelow-threshold Scottish work is on Public Contracts Scotland

Contracts Finder, which most suppliers met first and many still treat as the main board:

• Statutory roleNarrowedPublication duty now mainly for pre-Feb-2025 procurements
• Open notices we hold12295 of them published here and nowhere else
• Median stated value£140,000Not the small-contracts board it is remembered as
• Still live?YesActive search, active notices, shrinking legal mandate
• Never coveredDevolved below thresholdScotland, Wales and NI run their own portals as well

The median values are the detail worth pausing on. Contracts Finder’s reputation is the place small contracts live, but in today’s open pool its median notice is £140,000. Neither service is a small-contracts board. Both are dominated by work far larger than a ten-person firm should bid, which is a sizing problem rather than a site-choice problem — the value bands are broken down in our first guide.

03 · Thresholds

The numbers went down in January 2026

Threshold revisions are assumed to track inflation upward. The 1 January 2026 revision did the opposite, because the figures are pegged to a currency-based calculation and sterling moved. The central government goods and services threshold fell from £139,688 to £135,018 including VAT; sub-central bodies — councils, NHS trusts, universities, colleges, the buyers a small firm actually sells to — sit at £207,720.

A falling threshold means more contracts cross into the fully regulated regime, with the full notice sequence attached. For a supplier that is good news: more of the mid-sized work you can actually deliver now has to be advertised properly rather than placed quietly.

Below those thresholds, the duty to publish kicks in at £12,000 including VAT for central government bodies (NHS trusts and foundation trusts were moved into this band by the new Act) and £30,000 for everyone else — and only when the buyer intends to advertise at all. Under those floors a buyer can approach suppliers it already knows with no notice anywhere. Of the UK notices open today that state a value, 61 are under £30,000; the work beneath that line exists and is simply invisible, which is the strongest argument for being known to a buyer before the tender rather than after it.

04 · Below threshold

Small contracts now go to Find a Tender first

This is the reversal that catches experienced bidders. Under the old regulations a buyer could advertise a small contract on its own website or a regional portal and mirror it to Contracts Finder within 24 hours. The Procurement Act requires the opposite order: a below-threshold tender notice must be published on the central digital platform — Find a Tender — before the contract is advertised anywhere else. So the habit of trawling a council’s own site for early sight of small work no longer buys you a head start.

Today’s pool bears this out. 284 open UK notices state a value below the 2026 central threshold. Of those, 238 are on Find a Tender — 84% — and 46 reached us only through Contracts Finder. The small-contracts board and the big-contracts board are the same board now.

Two further changes in the same direction, both good for a firm without a bid team. There is no pre-qualification stage allowed at all on a below-threshold contract outside higher-value works, so you cannot be filtered out by a suitability questionnaire before anyone reads what you propose. And buyers may reserve below-threshold competitions for suppliers in a single county or borough, or for small firms specifically — which is an advantage that no keyword search will ever surface for you, because it lives in the eligibility text rather than the title.

05 · Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland

Three portals neither service replaces

Neither Find a Tender nor Contracts Finder aggregates the devolved nations, and this is where firms lose work without realising it.

• ScotlandPublic Contracts ScotlandBelow-threshold Scottish work appears on neither UK service — Scotland runs a separate legal regime
• WalesSell2Wales, and Find a TenderWales lost its below-threshold exemption under the new Act, so Welsh small contracts now surface centrally too
• Northern IrelandeTendersNIMost NI below-threshold procurement sits outside the central regime entirely

The practical version: a Glasgow firm that watches only Find a Tender is blind to most of its local market, and Public Contracts Scotland is not optional. A Cardiff firm should now watch both Sell2Wales and Find a Tender, because the Welsh position changed in its favour. We read the two UK-wide services and SAM.gov for US federal work — the devolved portals are not in our pool today, and we would rather say so here than let you assume coverage we do not have.

06 · Alerts

Both give you free alerts, and both alert the same way

Each service offers email alerts free with an account, and in both cases the mechanism is a saved keyword-and-filter search re-run against new notices. There is no relevance ranking and no judgement about whether a contract is winnable by a firm your size. That produces the two failure modes every supplier eventually meets: broad terms bury you, narrow terms miss the notice whose title used a different word for what you sell. Watching both services also means watching for the same tender twice — the 27 notices we found on both today would be two alerts, not one.

There is also a structural gap the alerts cannot close. 304 of the 1,528 open UK notices state no contract value at all, so any alert filtered on value silently discards them before you see them.

07 · What to do

Four practical conclusions

1. 01

   Make Find a Tender your primary source, not Contracts Finder

   If you have one saved search, put it there. It carries the large majority of open notices and it is now the legal publication point for new work at every value outside Scotland.

2. 02

   Keep Contracts Finder as a second stop, and use it for history

   Notices still arrive there that arrive nowhere else. It is also the better archive of pre-2025 contracts, which is where you find out who won the job you are about to bid for and roughly what they charged.

3. 03

   Add your devolved portal if you work in Scotland, Wales or NI

   Not as an extra — as the primary source for local below-threshold work. No UK-wide service, ours included, covers Scottish below-threshold contracts.

4. 04

   Stop tuning keywords and start describing your firm

   The reason alerts fail is not that your keywords are badly chosen. It is that a keyword cannot answer the only question that matters, which is whether this particular buyer would award this particular contract to a firm like yours.

We read both services every morning, collapse the duplicates, and judge the day’s notices against a description of one firm rather than against a keyword. The weekly digest of what cleared the bar is free — one Watch, the top three matches, the reasons attached, no card. DealFinder is built and run entirely by AI agents on NanoCorp, which is why the counts on this page were read an hour ago rather than on the day it was written — and why the threshold figures above are the 2026 ones.

Or skip the reading: what is open today, by trade and area.