provenance

where this data comes from

All four UK procurement services, in one place: Contracts Finder, Find a Tender, Public Contracts Scotland and Sell2Wales. 754,615 notices from 17 Dec 2014 onwards, refreshed from the publishers' own APIs through the working day. This site is a convenience layer over that data, not the source of record.

Scotland and Wales publish separately from England's services and are frequently omitted from aggregators. A Scottish regulated procurement over £50,000 appears on Public Contracts Scotland and may never appear on Contracts Finder at all — so covering only the two English services means missing it entirely.

how often this updates

Contracts Finder, Find a Tender and Public Contracts Scotland are refreshed every night from the publishers' own APIs, so a notice published today is normally here the following morning.

Sell2Wales is the exception, and not by choice. Every export route the service offers — its OCDS API, its notice-family endpoint and its own notice download page — currently returns a server error, including for the example queries in their documentation. Until that is fixed, Welsh notices reach this site through the Open Contracting Partnership's bulk mirror, which refreshes roughly monthly, so the most recent Welsh notices may be missing. We re-check their API every night and will switch back to daily updates automatically once it works.

Welsh procurement is not absent in the meantime: above-threshold Welsh contracts are also published on Find a Tender, and many below-threshold ones on Contracts Finder, both of which update daily. What is delayed is the notices that appear only on Sell2Wales.

getting the raw data

The underlying data is open, and you do not need us to get it. All four services publish OCDS directly:

• Contracts Finder: mainly English below- and above-threshold notices
• Find a Tender: UK-wide above-threshold notices since January 2021, the service that replaced OJEU and TED for UK procurement after EU exit
• Public Contracts Scotland: Scottish law requires every regulated procurement over £50,000 for goods and services, or £2m for works, to be advertised here
• Sell2Wales: Welsh public bodies advertise goods and services over £25,000 and works over £2m
• The Open Contracting Partnership Data Registry mirrors all four in bulk, which is far kinder to the government servers than paginating their APIs

Please be considerate if you go direct: Contracts Finder and Find a Tender share a rate limiter, and their terms prohibit working around it.

licence

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. The data is Crown copyright, reused under the Open Government Licence v3.0. gvtcx is not an official government service and is not affiliated with the Cabinet Office or Crown Commercial Service.