United Kingdom: Contracts Finder
Contracts Finder is used by all non-devolved public sector contracting authorities to publish information about contracts over certain thresholds (£10,000 in Central Government and £25,000 in the wider public sector and the NHS). It is also used by Public Sector Contractors to advertise opportunities in their supply chains.
Under regulations 106,108, 110 and 112 of the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 (PCRs 2015); Contracting authorities must ensure that any procurement opportunities and contract awards above the thresholds are published on Contracts Finder.
- Available formats:
- JSON
- Excel
- CSV
Overview
- Data date range:
- Nov 2016 - Dec 2024
- Update frequency:
- Real time
- Main language:
- English
- OCID prefix:
- ocds-b5fd17
- License:
-
Open Government Licence v3.0
You are free to:
- copy, publish, distribute and transmit the Information;
- adapt the Information;
- exploit the Information commercially and non-commercially for example, by combining it with other Information, or by including it in your own product or application.
You must (where you do any of the above):
- acknowledge the source of the information in your product or application by including or linking to any attribution statement specified by the Information Provider(s) and,
- where possible, provide a link to this licence.
- Publication policy:
- https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-contracting
- Last retrieved:
- Dec 2024 (retrieved monthly)
- Retrieved from:
- https://www.contractsfinder.service.gov.uk/apidocumentation/Notices/1/GET-Published-Notice-OCDS-Search
Data available
Parties
- Count of parties:
- 1,007,769
Planning
- Count of planning activities:
- 20,074
Tenders
- Count of tenders:
- 526,426
- Count of tenderers:
- 0
- Count of tender items:
- 526,350
Awards
- Count of awards:
- 373,421
- Count of suppliers:
- 489,527
- Count of award items:
- 0
Contracts
- Count of contracts:
- 0
- Count of contract items:
- 0
- Count of transactions:
- 0
Documents
- Count of documents:
- 1,055,124
Milestones
- Count of milestones:
- 14,333
Amendments
- Count of amendments:
- 0
Contracts Finder follows the OCDS for the European Union Profile. They make use of the OCDS for the European Union Extension to publish this information._ _They also use the Tender Date Published and Budget Breakdown extensions. They also created some local extensions, such as Awards Date Published, Party Details VCSE and Tender Suitability.
Data quality
The dataset has quality issues to take into account, notably:
- A minority of suppliers are assigned the same identifier. If an award has multiple suppliers, this error causes only one supplier to be retained in the data.
- Some releases contain non-UTF-8 characters which we replaced as part of the data processing
- Important fields are sometimes empty, like supplier names.
- A minority of date fields are unrealistic. Fields affected include
awards/date,planning/budget/budgetBreakdown/period/startDate,planning/budget/budgetBreakdown/period/endDate,tender/contractPeriod/startDateandtender/contractPeriod/endDate. - Document format is recorded as a document type in a minority of releases.
- Some document URI’s are invalid and point to addresses that are only resolvable to internal users.
Last reviewed: Nov 2022
Access data
This OCDS dataset is available for download in JSON, Excel or CSV format. You can download the data for contracting processes in a specific year or for all time.
JSON
Each contracting process is represented as one line of JSON text in the .jsonl file.
The .jsonl file is compressed using Gzip. Windows users need 7-Zip, WinRAR or WinZip to decompress the .gz file.
Excel
Each contracting process is represented as one row in the main sheet. Other sheets link to it via the _link_main column.
Excel files can have at most 1,048,576 rows. If a year is missing, it had too many rows. Download the CSV files, instead.