If you sell to the public sector in England, two government websites between them carry most of the contracts you could bid for. Both are free, both publish under the Open Government Licence, and both are easy to overlook in different ways.
Find a Tender
Find a Tender is the central platform for procurement notices under the Procurement Act 2023, which came into force on 24 February 2025. Since then, a contracting authority running a procurement under the Act publishes its notices there, from the early signals (pipeline and preliminary market engagement notices) through the tender itself to the award, the contract details and any later changes or termination.
That makes it the place to see the whole life of a larger contract. It is also where most above-threshold opportunities appear, along with a growing share of lower-value work.
Contracts Finder
Contracts Finder was built for lower-value opportunities and awards in England, and for a long time it was the place small suppliers were told to look. It is still live, and still busy: across the year to August 2026 it carried around 240 new opportunities and 2,700 contract awards a month, a steady flow rather than old procurements running out.
What makes it worth reading alongside Find a Tender is where its contracts sit in the market. Across that year of award notices, about half were worth under £100,000 and nearly one in five under £30,000. Those are the contracts a firm of five to fifty people realistically wins. Its award notices also almost always carry the contract value, the contract period and a named supplier together, which is exactly what you need to spot a renewal coming.
They overlap, but neither is a copy of the other
The two services use different identifiers, so nothing links a notice on one to the same notice on the other. Some buyers publish the same job on both: in our checks, roughly one Contracts Finder opportunity in five was also on Find a Tender. Most were not, so reading one and assuming you have seen the other still leaves real work on the table.
Bidwire compares buyer, title, value and supplier across the two before a notice reaches you. When the same job is on both, you see it once, linked to Find a Tender.
What neither of them covers
- Scotland. Below-threshold Scottish notices are on Public Contracts Scotland.
- Wales and Northern Ireland have their own portals too, Sell2Wales and eTendersNI, for work published only there.
- Unadvertised quotes. Many small purchases never reach any portal: a buyer asks a few suppliers it already knows. Getting onto those lists is a relationship, not a search.
- The tender documents. Both services publish the notice. The specification, the questions and the scoring usually sit on the buyer's own e-tendering portal, behind a registration.
How Bidwire uses both
Bidwire reads both services every day and puts their notices into one list, filtered to your trades and region. Each notice page says which service it came from and links straight back to it, so you can always check the original. Renewal alerts draw on the award notices from both, which is what lets them reach the smaller contracts.