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Everything ends on 31 March
One date carries 157 times the contracts of a normal day. It happens every year, and the replacement work reaches the market in a ten-week window.
· figures as at the date of writing
4,858 UK public contracts end on 31 March 2027.
The median day between now and October 2027 ends 31 contracts. 31 March 2027 carries 157 times that, and 13.9% of every contract expiry in the next fourteen months.
The financial year
31 March is the last day of the UK public financial year, and contracts are written to it. The pattern holds across the corpus:
| 31 March | contracts ending |
|---|---|
| 2022 | 9,615 |
| 2023 | 10,022 |
| 2024 | 9,531 |
| 2025 | 11,214 |
| 2026 | 7,819 |
| 2027 | 4,858 |
The later years are lower because the contracts that will end then have not all been awarded yet. 2027 will keep climbing as awards land; the mature years put the eventual figure near 10,000.
Month ends alone do not account for it
Every last-day-of-month in 2027, for comparison:
| date | contracts ending |
|---|---|
| 31 January | 640 |
| 28 February | 580 |
| 31 March | 4,858 |
| 30 April | 732 |
| 31 May | 729 |
| 30 June | 976 |
| 31 December | 847 |
The next largest dates in the whole forward book are 31 March 2028, with 3,274, and 31 July 2028, with 2,511. 31 July is a secondary cluster. 31 March is the primary one in every year the corpus covers.
Who
1,113 separate buyers have at least one contract ending that day.
| buyer | contracts ending 31 Mar 2027 |
|---|---|
| Ministry of Defence | 133 |
| Nottingham City Council | 115 |
| Department for Education | 91 |
| Ministry of Justice | 89 |
| NHS England | 87 |
| East Riding of Yorkshire Council | 80 |
What
By CPV division, the largest blocks are health and social care (627), business and professional services (577), software and information systems (427), construction work (406) and IT services (325).
When the replacements reach the market
1,799 contracts started on 1 April 2026. 718 of them — 40% — first appeared on the four services between January and March 2026, in the ten weeks before the work began.
860 first appeared on 1 April 2026 or later, once the contract had already started. A process whose only published notice is an award notice enters the public record after the award is made, so for those the record begins after the work does.
As of 20 August 2026, six open tenders record a contract start of 1 April 2027. On the 2026 pattern, most of the rest arrive between January and March.
What this means for a bidder
The re-tendering does not spread evenly across the year. It concentrates in the first quarter, for work starting the following April, and it concentrates hardest in March — the month in which 433 of 2026’s 1 April starts were first published.
Contracts already inside their final stretch are on expiring contracts. Live tenders, ordered by deadline, are on open tenders.
Figures as at 20 August 2026, drawn from the 523,630 contracts in the corpus that carry an end date. Source notices from Contracts Finder, Find a Tender, Public Contracts Scotland and Sell2Wales under the Open Government Licence v3.0. End dates are as published and are not adjusted for extensions exercised after the notice; see why you cannot add up contract values for how far published fields can be trusted. Corrections and additional context: contact.