United Kingdom: Find a Tender Service

Find a Tender replaced the EU’s Tenders Electronic Daily from 1 January 2021 for high value contracts (usually above £118,000) in the UK’s public and utilities sectors.

Contracting authorities have legal obligations under the Regulations (The Public Procurement (AmendmentEtc.)(EUExit) Regulations 2020 and The Defence and Security Public Contracts (Amendment)(EUExit) Regulations 2020) to publish certain notices in relation to public procurements.

Available formats:
JSON
Excel
CSV
Access

Overview

Data date range:
Jan 2021 - Jul 2024
Update frequency:
Real time
Last retrieved:
Jul 2024 (retrieved monthly)
OCID prefix:
ocds-h6vhtk
License:
Open Government Licence for public sector information Version 3

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;
Language:
English
Retrieved from:
https://www.find-tender.service.gov.uk/apidocumentation/1.0/GET-ocdsReleasePackages

Data available

A contracting process has several stages: tendering, awarding, contracting and implementation. You can learn about the contracting stages in this tutorial.

Parties

Count of parties:
316,788

Planning

Count of planning activities:
989

Tenders

Count of tenders:
88,633
Count of tenderers:
0
Count of tender items:
137,266

Awards

Count of awards:
110,650
Count of suppliers:
168,950
Count of award items:
0

Contracts

Count of contracts:
105,008
Count of contract items:
1,791
Count of transactions:
0

Documents

Count of documents:
36,843

Milestones

Count of milestones:
48

Amendments

Count of amendments:
11,418

Find a Tender service uses the OCDS for European Union extension

Data quality

Summary

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.
  • For contracting processes with multiple lots and with non-unique award and contract identifiers, only one award and contract are reported in the OCDS data. The suppliers for all lots are listed in awards/suppliers, however for titles, values, dates and all other scalar fields of awards and contracts, only the values from the last award or contract are reported. In these cases, it is not possible to determine which lots resulted in an award, which supplier won each lot or the value of the award for each lot.
  • Some date fields are incorrectly formatted. In these cases you may need to cast dates to the correct format:
    • tender/milestones/dueDate
    • tender/tenderPeriod/endDate
    • tender/milestones/dueDate

The dataset has minor issues that should not interfere with most uses. They include:

  • In some cases, the tender/awardCriteria field is incorrectly formatted as an object rather than a string, for example: awardCriteria": {"criteria": [{"name": "Lowest price","type": "price"}]}
  • For contract award notices with multiple lots and that are related to a project and/or programme financed by European Union funds, the relatedLots property is missing from some planning/budget/finance objects.

Last reviewed: May 2021

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.

CSV

Each contracting process is represented as one row in the main.csv file. Other files link to it via the _link_main column.

The .csv files are archived using tar and compressed using Gzip. Windows users need 7-Zip, WinRAR or WinZip to decompress the .tar.gz file.

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