Cabinet Office / Crown Commercial Service
Public Contracts (Contracts Finder)
Every UK public-sector tender and contract award published on Contracts Finder — what was bought, for how much, and which supplier won. The public record of who wins public money, with many contracts flagged as suitable for smaller suppliers.
At a glance
- Publisher
- Cabinet Office / Crown Commercial Service
- Updates
- Updated daily
- Cost
- Free — open data
- Last checked
- 2026-07-21
Professional & B2B servicesConstruction & tradesBusiness & companies
What your business can use it for
- Sales prospectingFind public-sector buyers and live tenders in your category and area — including contracts flagged as suitable for smaller suppliers — so you can chase the work that fits you.
- Market analysisSee who wins contracts in your sector, from which buyers and at what value — competitor and market intelligence straight from the public record.
- Customer & supplier checksCheck a company's public-contract track record — what they have won, from whom and for how much — before you partner with or supply them.
Works with data you already have
- Company numbersCompany numbersSuppliers and buyers registered with Companies House carry a CRN; take the identifier where the scheme is GB-COH and zero-pad to 8 digits
- Supplier or buyer namesBusiness namesMatch on the named supplier or public-body buyer; expect some cleaning
- Supplier postcodesPostcodesSupplier addresses carry a postcode you can join to any postcode-keyed dataset
How to get it
- Search notices — Contracts FinderPortalNo account needed to search or download. Tenders you can bid for and award notices naming the winner, buyer and value.
- Contracts Finder APIAPIFree, no key. Returns notices in the Open Contracting standard for bulk analysis; a daily-file harvest is one common approach.
What's involved in using it
- It comes as a running stream of daily files — one per day, hundreds of them across a few years — rather than a single download, so covering a period means gathering and combining them all.
- Each file is very wide and mostly empty, with hundreds of columns, so it has to be trimmed down to the handful that matter before it is workable.
- The winning supplier's company number — the key to linking a contract to other business data — is only present some of the time and sits among several other kinds of identifier.
The technical detail, for whoever sets it up (5)
- Contracts Finder mainly carries lower-value contracts. Higher-value public tenders are published on Find a Tender, held separately — so this is not the whole procurement picture.
- Charities and public bodies use other identifiers, so filter to Companies House matches before joining.
- Notices come in stages — a tender notice advertises the work, an award notice names the winner and value. Use the award notices for who-won analysis.
- A full history means harvesting day by day back to 2015.
- Public-procurement rules changed in February 2025 and newer notices also appear on a separate Central Digital Platform, not covered here.
Ask us about Public Contracts (Contracts Finder)
Ask a factual question about Public Contracts (Contracts Finder) — what it covers, how often it changes, whether it matches the records you keep — and we will answer, free. Or tell us what you are trying to work out, and we will tell you what it would take to get this data working next to the numbers you already have.