The UK government publishes thousands of contract awards every year, each one revealing who won, how much they won, and when the contract ends. For suppliers selling to the public sector, this data is a goldmine of competitive intelligence and future pipeline.
But finding it is another story. Award notices sit scattered across Contracts Finder, the Find a Tender Service, devolved portals, and hundreds of council websites. This guide shows you where to search, how to track awards efficiently, and how to turn that data into qualified sales opportunities.
UK government contracts awarded span tech, health, defence, infrastructure, and dozens of other sectors. You can search for award notices on portals like Contracts Finder and the Find a Tender Service. When a public body finishes evaluating bids and picks a supplier, it publishes an award notice. That notice tells you who won, how much the contract is worth, how long it runs, and which authority issued it.
Why does any of this matter to you? Because award data is more than a historical record. It shows you which buyers are actively spending, which suppliers keep winning, and when contracts are coming up for renewal. If you sell to the public sector, this is the intelligence that shapes your pipeline.
The scale here is significant. The UK public sector spends around £400 billion annually. Recent awards include a £1.84 billion technology framework split among 81 suppliers, and AI-related contracts have grown sharply, with deals going to firms like IBM and CDW. So the opportunity is real, and the data to find it is publicly available.
Here's the tricky part: there's no single website that captures every UK government contract award. The data sits across central government portals, devolved administration sites, and individual council pages. If you want full coverage, you'll likely end up checking multiple sources.
Contracts Finder is the main portal for contracts with central government and English public bodies. It covers contracts worth over £12,000 including VAT. You can filter by "Awarded contract" to see completed procurements, including the winning supplier, contract value, and buyer details.
This is usually the first place to start. Most central government awards end up here, though timing can vary.
The Find a Tender Service handles higher-value contracts. After Brexit, it replaced the Official Journal of the European Union for UK procurement. Contracts above certain thresholds, typically over £139,688 for central government goods and services, appear here instead of Contracts Finder.
If you're looking for larger deals, this is where you'll find them.
Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland each run their own procurement portals:
If your target market includes buyers outside England, you'll want to check each of these separately. They don't feed into Contracts Finder automatically.
Many councils publish their own contract registers directly on their websites. A borough council might post an award on its site that doesn't appear on Contracts Finder for weeks, or doesn't appear at all if it falls below the publication threshold.
This fragmentation is one of the biggest headaches for anyone trying to track awards comprehensively.
Contracts Finder is the most commonly used portal, so let's walk through how to actually search it. The interface is fairly straightforward, though it has some quirks.
Start by selecting "Awarded contract" from the notice status dropdown. This filters out live opportunities and early engagement notices, showing only completed procurements. From there, you can narrow by location, contract type, and publication date range.
Type keywords related to your products or services into the search box. The system searches contract titles and descriptions. For more precise results, try using CPV codes.
CPV stands for Common Procurement Vocabulary. It's a standardised classification system where each code represents a specific category of goods, works, or services. For example, 72000000 covers IT services. Using the right CPV code often returns cleaner results than keyword searches alone, especially for common terms that appear in unrelated contracts.
You can search by organisation name to see a specific buyer's award history. This helps you understand which authorities actively procure in your space. You can also search by supplier name to track competitor wins, which is useful for competitive intelligence.
Contracts Finder lets you export search results, which is handy for one-off research. However, the export functionality is basic. For ongoing tracking, you'll either repeat searches manually or set up alerts, which brings its own set of challenges.
Who actually wins government contracts? The answer varies by sector, but a few patterns emerge.
You can identify the top contractors in your sector by analysing award data. Look at who wins contracts with your target buyers and in your product categories. This shapes your positioning and helps you spot potential partners or competitors to watch.
Searching for awards once is useful. Tracking them continuously is where the real value lies. But manual tracking across multiple portals gets time-consuming fast.
Contracts Finder lets you save search criteria so you can return to the same search without re-entering filters. This saves effort, though you still have to check manually and remember to do it regularly.
Most portals offer email alerts for new notices matching your criteria. The catch? Native alerts can be noisy. You might get notifications for irrelevant contracts because your keywords matched something unrelated. Or you might miss relevant ones because your search terms weren't quite right.
Alert quality depends heavily on how well you've configured your filters, and even then, results can be inconsistent.
The real pain point is monitoring multiple portals at once. Checking Contracts Finder, Find a Tender, devolved portals, and council websites individually can take hours each week. And if you miss a day, you might miss something important.
This is where a centralised platform adds value. Stotles aggregates data from over 1,000 portals into a single feed. AI-powered relevance scoring filters out noise, so you see the awards that actually matter to your business. You can track competitors, monitor target buyers, and receive alerts without the manual effort.
Tip: Rather than setting up alerts on five different portals, consider using a single platform that pulls everything together. You'll save time and reduce the risk of missing important awards.
Award data isn't just historical information. It's a source of forward-looking sales intelligence. The most effective public sector sales teams use awards to build pipeline before tenders are even published.
Every award notice includes a contract end date. That date tells you when the buyer will likely re-procure. If a contract expires in 18 months, you have time to build relationships and position your solution before the tender drops.
This is the foundation of proactive public sector sales. Instead of reacting to tenders at the last minute, you engage buyers early, when you can still influence requirements and build credibility.
Tracking which suppliers win contracts in your space reveals the competitive landscape. You can see who the incumbents are, which buyers they work with, and how long their contracts run.
This intelligence helps you prioritise. A buyer with an incumbent on a five-year contract is a different prospect than one whose supplier relationship ends next year. Focus your energy where you have a realistic shot.
A buyer's award history shows you what they actually purchase, not just what they might need. If an authority has awarded multiple contracts in your category, they're a proven buyer. Focus your efforts on organisations with a track record of spending on solutions like yours.
Here's how award data fits into the public sector sales workflow:
Get started for free and see how Stotles turns award data into actionable pipeline.
UK government contract awards are publicly available, but finding and tracking them takes effort. The data is spread across multiple portals, each with its own interface and limitations.
You can search Contracts Finder and other portals manually. Or you can use a platform that brings everything together, filters for relevance, and connects awards to expiry dates, buyer intelligence, and contact data.
Stotles offers free access to search and track UK government contract awards across all major portals. You can see your market, identify opportunities, and build qualified pipeline in one place.
Contracts are typically awarded to the "most economically advantageous tender" or the lowest price, depending on the evaluation criteria set out in the tender documents. After evaluation, there's a mandatory standstill period, usually 10 days, before the contract is finalised. The award notice is then published on the relevant portal.
Central government bodies publish contracts worth over £12,000 including VAT. Local authorities and other public bodies may publish lower-value contracts, though this varies. Sub-threshold contracts often appear only on individual organisation websites, if at all.
No, only the winning supplier is published. Details of unsuccessful bidders are not made public. You can sometimes infer competition levels from the number of responses mentioned in award notices, but individual bidder names remain confidential.
Regulations require prompt publication, typically within 30 days of contract signature. In practice, timing varies. Some awards appear quickly, while others experience delays. Monitoring multiple sources helps ensure you don't miss important awards.
