Where UK construction tenders actually live, and how to see them in one place

You searched for council building work, found Contracts Finder, ticked something that looked like construction and switched on alerts. Since then you have had forty emails a week about IT support frameworks and domiciliary care, and the £180,000 school roof two miles from your yard went to a firm from the next county.

That is not a search problem. The UK does not have one tender feed. It has four national ones sitting on top of several hundred buyer-run portals, and the statute underneath them changed on 24 February 2025. This page is what each system is, which band of work a firm with two vans can realistically win inside it, and how to set the filters so the emails are worth opening.

One country, four procurement systems

The Procurement Act 2023 came into force on 24 February 2025 and replaced the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 for contracting authorities in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Scotland did not adopt it. Devolved Scottish authorities still run on the Procurement Reform (Scotland) Act 2014 and the Public Contracts (Scotland) Regulations 2015, which is why advice written for England is wrong for a quarter of the country and why a Scottish contractor who registers only on Find a Tender sees a fraction of what is out there.

Wales and Northern Ireland sit inside the 2023 Act but keep their own front doors. So the national layer looks like this.

Nothing in that table costs money. The commercial tender alert services sold to contractors are aggregating exactly these five feeds and adding a search interface.

Find a Tender is now the spine

Find a Tender replaced Tenders Electronic Daily in the UK on 31 December 2020, so its first job was the old OJEU one: publishing the big stuff. Since 24 February 2025 it does considerably more than that. It publishes both above and below threshold notices about new UK procurements, with below threshold Scottish contracts as the standing exception, and it is the public face of the Central Digital Platform.

Sign in with a GOV.UK One Login and two things become available that make it a working tool rather than a noticeboard. You can save search criteria, and you can sign up for notifications by email against those saved criteria. That is the entire free alerting product for UK public construction work, and it takes about four minutes to switch on.

The newer Summarised Search groups every notice from a single procurement together so you see the current state rather than a scatter of documents, and splits into three tabs:

• Opportunities, described on the service as upcoming pipelines and active tenders. This is where you live.
• Contracts, the awarded ones, active and expired. Useful in a way people miss: it tells you who currently holds the maintenance contract on the estate you want, and roughly when it runs out.
• Commercial tools, meaning framework agreements, dynamic markets and dynamic purchasing systems. Worth a monthly look, because a dynamic market takes joiners throughout its life rather than only at a four-yearly window.

The Opportunities tab carries three notice types that have no equivalent in most countries' procurement systems, because the Act made them compulsory rather than optional. Under section 93, a contracting authority that expects to pay more than £100 million under relevant contracts in the coming financial year must publish a pipeline notice within 56 days of the start of the financial year, listing every public contract over £2 million it intends to advertise across an 18 month reporting period. A preliminary market engagement notice tells you an authority is about to talk to the market before the specification is written. A planned procurement notice, published between 40 days and 12 months ahead of the tender notice, both warns you the job is coming and tells you the tendering period will be cut to 10 days when it lands. Those are legally compelled advance warnings, published free, and they are the reason to check the Opportunities tab rather than only reading alert emails.

Contracts Finder, and the date to put in your diary

Contracts Finder still runs. It carries contracts worth over £12,000 including VAT with government and its agencies, and it holds the searchable history: awarded contracts, who won, at what value. Its filters are good, and better than people expect. You get keyword search with AND, OR and exact phrase, procurement stage from early engagement through to awarded contract, location of contract by region or by postcode with a 5 to 50 mile radius, value, industry CPV code, and a notice suitability filter. Signed in, you can save a search.

It is also on a clock. Regulation 5 of the Procurement (Amendment) Regulations 2026 discontinues publication on Contracts Finder in favour of the central digital platform. The Procurement (Amendment) (No. 2) Regulations 2026, SI 2026/746, in force 1 July 2026, moved that date from 1 October 2026 to 1 May 2027.

The practical reading for a contractor: keep Contracts Finder for the postcode radius search and for looking up who holds an existing contract, but build your saved searches and email alerts on Find a Tender, because those are the ones that will still be delivering in May 2027.

The band you can actually win

Public procurement talks in thresholds, and the thresholds decide which rulebook applies rather than which jobs are worth your time. The current set took effect on 1 January 2026 under SI 2025/1200, sits in Schedule 1 to the Procurement Act 2023, and is revised every two years against the WTO Government Procurement Agreement. All figures include VAT.

Read the works line again, because it is the single most useful number on the page. A works contract only crosses into the above threshold regime at £5,193,000. Everything underneath that, which is to say the overwhelming bulk of school roofs, council house voids, care home refurbishments, car park resurfacing, boiler replacement programmes and drainage schemes, is a regulated below threshold contract.

That is a different rulebook, and it is a friendlier one.

Below threshold, section 87 sets when the authority has to advertise at all. A below threshold tender notice is required above £12,000 including VAT for central government authorities, and above £30,000 including VAT for other contracting authorities including councils. Below those figures an authority can go straight to suppliers it already knows, which is why getting onto a council's small works list matters as much as watching the notices, and is covered in approved contractor lists.

Two sections then do real work for a small firm. Section 85 says that where an authority invites tenders for a regulated below threshold contract, it may not restrict the submission of tenders by reference to an assessment of a supplier's suitability to perform the contract, and it spells out that suitability includes legal and financial capacity and technical ability. In plain terms: on a below threshold job, the authority cannot bar you at the door for being small or new. That protection stops for works contracts valued at £135,018 or more for central government and £207,720 or more for other authorities, so it bites hardest in exactly the band a two van firm bids in.

Section 86 adds a duty. Before inviting tenders, the authority must have regard to the fact that small and medium sized enterprises may face particular barriers in competing, and consider whether those barriers can be removed or reduced. That is a lever you can pull in writing when a below threshold tender asks for three years of audited accounts and £10 million of public liability cover.

Contracts your council can keep inside your county

Here is the provision that gets the least attention relative to what it is worth. Because below threshold contracts fall outside the UK's international trade agreement obligations, an authority is free to restrict who may bid by where they are based, and government policy actively encourages it. PPN 005, published 17 February 2025, sets out how.

An authority may reserve a below threshold procurement by supplier location, either UK wide to support domestic supply chains, or by county, metropolitan or non-metropolitan, or by borough for London. It may additionally reserve to small and medium sized enterprises and to voluntary, community and social enterprises. On the second point the guide is unambiguous:

"the reservation for SMEs and VCSEs cannot be applied independently of the location reservation, which must always apply when reserving under this policy"

PPN 005: Guide to reserving below threshold, Cabinet Office, 17 February 2025

Where an authority uses it, the below threshold tender notice says so on its face, in a line of the form "This contract is reserved for suppliers based in" followed by the UK, the county or the borough. That is a phrase worth putting into your keyword alert, because a reserved notice is a competition with the national players removed from it before you start writing.

The move this suggests is not a search, it is a phone call. Ring your district or borough council's procurement team and ask two questions: whether they are reserving below threshold procurements by location under PPN 005, and which portal their works notices are published on. Both have short factual answers, and the second one leads directly into the next problem.

The layer under the portals

Find a Tender and Contracts Finder are the notice layer. They tell you a job exists. The documents layer, where the invitation to tender actually sits and where you upload your submission, is a different piece of software, chosen by each buyer, and you need an account on each one.

Add the buying consortia that publish their own opportunities on top, principally ESPO and YPO, and you have the shape of it.

The failure mode this creates is specific and it costs people real jobs. An alert lands on Thursday for a below threshold roofing tender with a ten day return. You open it, find the documents sit on a ProContract instance you have no account on, start registration, wait on an email verification, discover the company details section wants a Companies House number, a VAT number, insurance certificates and two references, and by the time you are through it you have two working days to price a roof. The tender did not beat you. The registration did.

So do the registrations cold, on a wet afternoon, before anything is live. Take your travel radius, list the councils, NHS trusts, housing associations, universities and further education colleges inside it, and open each one's procurement page. Every one of them names the portal it uses. Register on each portal once, set the CPV or category codes on each account, and switch on that portal's own alerts, which are usually better targeted than the national ones because the buyer set the categories.

That list is a couple of hours of work and it does not go stale quickly. Councils change eSourcing supplier every several years, not every season.

Alerts that are not noise

Three filters, applied together, turn the feed from unreadable to useful. Applied separately, none of them works.

One: CPV codes, and specifically division 45. The Common Procurement Vocabulary is the classification every UK portal uses, and construction work is division 45. Ticking the whole of 45000000 is what produces the flood. Tick the groups that are your trade instead.

One code outside division 45 is worth adding for anyone doing planned or reactive maintenance: 50700000, repair and maintenance services of building installations, sits in division 50 and catches a large volume of council and housing association contracts that a division 45 filter alone will miss. A groundworks firm filtering only on 45 will also miss sewer and drain clearance contracts, which councils and water companies code in division 90 alongside their other environmental services.

Two: geography, set to how far you will actually travel. Contracts Finder does this properly with a postcode plus a radius from 5 to 50 miles, which is the closest any of the portals gets to how a contractor thinks. Find a Tender works on region, so pick your region plus the ones you border. Setting geography to England is the same as not setting it.

Three: a value band with a floor and a ceiling. The floor stops sub £10,000 furniture and signage jobs. The ceiling is the more important one and people leave it off. If your largest completed job is £250,000, a £4 million leisure centre refurbishment is not an opportunity, it is an evening you will not get back. A sensible starting band for a firm turning over under £1 million is £25,000 to £500,000.

Save that combination as a named search, one per trade area if you work in two, and turn email notification on. Then keep the Opportunities tab bookmarked separately, because pipeline and planned procurement notices are visible there months before anything reaches an alert.

An hour and twenty minutes, done once

A two van groundworks and drainage firm based in Wakefield, turnover around £340,000, doing school and housing association work. This is the whole setup.

That is roughly an hour and twenty minutes, most of it in step 6 and step 7, and it is done once. The three saved searches then run themselves. The first reserved below threshold notice within 40 miles of WF1 arrives as an email with the national competition already excluded from it.

The step people skip is number 2, and it is the one that compounds. Registering on the Central Digital Platform through Find a Tender stores your core supplier information once: legal name, registration numbers, address, connected persons, and the standard exclusion grounds declarations. You get a unique supplier identifier, and that identifier and the stored information are reused across bids rather than retyped into every tender. Sell2Wales asks you to paste it into your company details. It is the difference between a tender being a form you finish and a form you start.

What it costs

Every portal named here is free to a supplier. Find a Tender, Contracts Finder, Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales and eTendersNI charge nothing to register, search or set alerts, and ProContract, In-tend and Delta are free to register on as a supplier. The paid tender alert services resell these feeds.

On AEC Stack there is no monthly subscription. The platform fee is 2.5% of each invoice processed through the platform, taken when the invoice is paid, so a quiet month costs nothing. The tenders you decide to price sit in the same place as the quotes you send and the invoices that follow them, which is what makes a win rate a number you can read rather than a feeling.

Set the three filters, register on the platform once, and give yourself the hour on the portals. Then see what the rest of the UK rulebook expects of you before the first tender lands, on the UK rules page.