United Kingdom: Find a Tender Service
Find a Tender service (FTS) is the central digital platform where all UK contracting authorities publish information relating to procurement.
On January 1, 2021 the FTS replaced the EU’s Tenders Electronic Daily for publishing notices for high-value contracts (usually above £118,000) in the UK’s public and utilities sectors. Under the Procurement Act 2023, the enhanced Find a Tender service was launched on 24 February 2025. It now serves as the central digital platform for public procurement by integrating notice publishing, sign-in and registration, and supplier information. FTS publishes both above and below threshold notices for new UK procurements, except for below threshold notices in Scotland. For procurements initiated before that date, only above threshold notices are published on FTS, typically for contracts exceeding £139,688 including VAT.
- Available formats:
- JSON
- Excel
- CSV
Overview
- Data date range:
- Jan 2021 - Apr 2025
- Update frequency:
- Real time
- Main language:
- English
- OCID prefix:
- ocds-h6vhtk
- 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:
- Apr 2025 (retrieved monthly)
- Retrieved from:
- https://www.find-tender.service.gov.uk/apidocumentation/1.0/GET-ocdsReleasePackages
Data available
Parties
- Count of parties:
- 391,523
Planning
- Count of planning activities:
- 1,852
Tenders
- Count of tenders:
- 109,176
- Count of tenderers:
- 0
- Count of tender items:
- 166,985
Awards
- Count of awards:
- 136,848
- Count of suppliers:
- 211,676
- Count of award items:
- 692
Contracts
- Count of contracts:
- 129,967
- Count of contract items:
- 2,333
- Count of transactions:
- 0
Documents
- Count of documents:
- 48,406
Milestones
- Count of milestones:
- 576
Amendments
- Count of amendments:
- 15,789
The data includes the following extension: European Union, document details, suitability, contract completion, links, budget breakdown, pagination, amendment rationale classifications. Also, the data includes some local extensions: Parties manual entered identifiers, awards date published, parties VCSE details
Data quality
The dataset has quality issues to take into account, notably:
- Some tenders and awards from the same contracting process are published under different OCIDs. In these cases, you may need fall-back to matching tenders and awards using other fields like buyer, title and value.
- Organization identifiers are not provided for most buyers and suppliers in the data, in these cases you may need to fall-back to using organization names to identify organizations.
- Some date fields are incorrectly formatted. In these cases you may need to cast dates to the correct format:
tender/milestones/dueDatetender/tenderPeriod/endDatetender/milestones/dueDate
- The total value of the top 1% of the fields
contracts/value/amountis higher than that of the remaining values, indicating the presence of extreme outliers in those fields. - The frequent repetition of specific award values suggests that some values may be misreported.
Last reviewed: Apr 2025
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.