Procurement glossary · Notices and finding work
Find a Tender service
The UK government service that publishes public procurement notices above threshold, including planned procurement notices, tender notices and contract award notices. It replaced the UK's use of the EU Official Journal. It is free, it is the legal place of publication, and it is the authority on what a notice actually says.
Also called FTS.
What it means in practice
Find a Tender is where the notice legally lives. Everything else, including every paid tender alert service, is a layer on top of it that reformats and redistributes what it publishes.
That matters when a date is in dispute. Summaries drift, aggregators lag, and consultancy pages describing a framework are one refresh behind by definition. When a deadline or a scope question decides whether you bid, the notice on Find a Tender and the documents it links to are the only thing worth relying on.
Alerts on Find a Tender are free and you should set them, by CPV code and by keyword, for your sector and region. A paid service can still earn its place through better filtering and earlier soft intelligence, but not by telling you something the free source did not already publish.
Where suppliers get caught
Paying for alerts and then planning around the aggregator's summary rather than opening the notice. Aggregators truncate, and they normalise dates and scopes into their own fields. The clarification deadline, which is often the real constraint, is frequently the thing that gets lost in that translation.
Common questions
Is Find a Tender free?
Yes. Searching it and setting alerts costs nothing. It is the official publication service for UK public procurement notices above threshold.
What is the difference between Find a Tender and Contracts Finder?
Find a Tender carries above-threshold notices and is the legal place of publication for them. Contracts Finder carries a broader range including lower value opportunities and awards. Suppliers chasing smaller contracts should watch both, because a great deal of accessible work never appears on Find a Tender at all.
Related terms
If a tender in front of you turns on this, send us the documents and the deadline and we will tell you honestly whether it is worth bidding. Call 020 3668 5488, or read the rest of the UK procurement glossary.