01 · What is open today
1,534 UK notices are open right now
Every figure on this page comes out of the same pool our product reads, refreshed each morning from the two official UK sources. At the time this page was served there were 1,534 open notices with a deadline still in the future. Counted where each was published that is 1,451 on Find a Tender and 107 on Contracts Finder — which adds up to more than the total, because the same tender is routinely published on both and we count it once. The old rule of thumb was that Contracts Finder carried the small below-threshold notices and Find a Tender the large ones. That stopped being true on 24 February 2025: under the Procurement Act 2023, new UK notices at every value go to Find a Tender first, and Contracts Finder’s publishing duty narrowed to procurements that began earlier. We work through what that means for a small firm here.
1,219 of those notices state a contract value. That is the first thing worth knowing: 21% of UK notices do not tell you what the job is worth until you open the documents, and almost no US federal notice does at all. Any tool that filters on value is silently throwing away the ones that did not say.
02 · Size
The median contract is £600,000 — and that is not your contract
Owners give up on public work after reading three notices, because the three they happened to read were frameworks. Of the 1,219 open notices that state a value, here is how they actually fall:
- Under £25,000504%
- £25,000 – £100,00016814%
- £100,000 – £500,00034428%
- £500,000 – £2m26522%
- Over £2m39232%
218 of them are under £100,000. That band is where a firm of five to fifty people wins: small enough that the big consultancies do not bid, large enough to matter to your year, and usually a single named deliverable rather than a four-year framework with a bond attached. Bidding into the top band with no public-sector track record is how firms conclude that tendering does not work.
Practical rule: read the value first, and skip anything more than about ten times the largest job you have delivered. A buyer scoring financial standing will reach the same conclusion, later, after you have spent a week on the response.
03 · Why alerts flood you
Keyword alerts are the wrong instrument
Both portals will email you everything matching a keyword, free. The trouble is that buyers do not write titles for you. Search “training” and a £2.5m live-fire training building arrives. Search “managed services” and you get a roofing framework whose specification happens to use the phrase. Search “IT services” without a word boundary and “Internal Audit Services” matches. We know because we shipped all three of those mistakes into our own pages and had to fix the matcher.
The opposite problem is worse and nobody warns you about it. Of the 1,534 UK notices open today, only about 74 can be claimed by any of the nine professional-service trades we track — IT support, software, web, digital marketing, training, consultancy, research and evaluation, cyber security, data and analytics. So the honest picture for a small services firm is not a firehose. It is a handful a week, buried in a few thousand notices about groundworks, catering and clinical equipment. A keyword alert cannot find a handful; it can only widen or narrow, and both settings fail.
What works instead is reading. Not reading every notice yourself — reading the shortlist against a description of your own firm, so the question asked of each notice is “could this firm win this” rather than “does this string appear”.
04 · The clock
You get about 31 days, and you will lose half of them finding out
Across the open UK notices the median response window — publication to deadline — is 31 days. The spread is what matters:
- 14 days or less to respond302%
- 15 to 30 days63541%
- 31 days or more86957%
Thirty days sounds comfortable until you notice that the clock starts on publication, not on the Friday you check the portal. A firm that sweeps the sites fortnightly is routinely meeting a notice with nine days left, which is not enough time to ask the buyer a clarification question, get an answer, and write something better than a boilerplate response. The single largest improvement available to most small firms is not better bid writing. It is hearing about the right notice on day one.
05 · Who buys
Councils, trusts and colleges, not Whitehall
The buyers publishing most often into the current open pool:
- Post Office Limited28
- Ministry of Defence14
- City & County of Swansea13
- Derry City and Strabane District Council13
- London Borough of Haringey12
- NHS England12
- Newry, Mourne and Down District Council (NMD)12
- Caerphilly County Borough Council11
District councils, NHS bodies, universities and colleges, arm’s-length agencies. These are organisations with a procurement officer and no in-house digital team, which is exactly the shape of buyer a small IT, web or training firm can serve. They also repeat: a buyer who published a £40,000 website last year will publish the support contract this year, and the incumbent’s name is in the public award notice.
06 · What to do
Six things, in order
- 01
Write down what you sell in sentences, not codes
Two or three lines: the service, the sectors you have delivered it in, the smallest job worth your time. Every filter you will ever set is derived from this, and CPV codes are a poor translation of it — a marketing agency does not know its division and should not have to.
- 02
Set your floor before you look
Decide the smallest contract worth a week of your time, and the largest you could deliver without borrowing. Most firms discover their band is £25,000 to £150,000. Everything outside it is noise, however exciting the title.
- 03
Read the award notices, not just the tenders
Public award notices name who won, and often at what price. Ten minutes there tells you which buyers buy what you sell, who you are up against, and what the going rate is — before you have written a word.
- 04
Ask the buyer a question, in writing, early
Clarification windows close before the deadline. A specific question marks you as a serious bidder and the answer is published to every bidder, which means the reply to your question shapes the field.
- 05
Register once on each portal, then stop visiting them
You need the accounts to download documents and submit. You do not need to browse. The browsing habit is what makes tendering feel like a second job.
- 06
Reduce your intake to a handful a week you have a real reason to read
By trade, area, value floor and deadline — and then by judgement, because the first four filters cannot tell a live-fire training building from a training contract.
07 · When you do not need us
The honest comparison
The data behind everything above is free and public, and always will be. If you have an hour a week and one narrow, unambiguous service — you install a specific product, you hold one framework place — the portals’ own free alerts are genuinely sufficient, and you should use them. If you employ someone whose whole job is bidding, buy breadth: the large subscription services index far more sources than we do, including ones we have no plan to add.
DealFinder is for the case in between, which is most firms: nobody bids full-time, the service is described in sentences, and the cost of missing the right notice is a quarter of the year’s revenue. We read the day’s notices against your firm and send the handful that cleared the bar, with the reason attached and the ones we rejected named. The weekly digest is free — one Watch, top three matches, no card. DealFinder is built and run end to end by AI agents on NanoCorp, which is how a guide like this can quote figures read an hour ago instead of figures from the year it was written.
You can also just look: what is open today, by trade and area.
Start with your own firm
Describe what you sell and where you work. We read today’s notices against it and show you the matches with the grounds.