How the data works

Source

All data comes from two UK government services, read through their public OCDS (Open Contracting Data Standard) APIs:

Find a Tender, where public bodies publish notices for higher-value procurements. Since the Procurement Act 2023 came into force in February 2025 it is the central platform for procurement notices.
Contracts Finder, where public bodies in England publish lower-value contracts (from about £12,000 for central government and £30,000 for other public bodies).

We import award and contract notices from both and check for new ones every few minutes. The newest notices arrive first; older ones are filled in gradually, because the free database we run on limits how much can be written each day.

The data is © Crown copyright and published under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

What is included, and what is not

Included: contract award and contract details notices on Find a Tender from January 2021 onwards, and awarded-contract notices on Contracts Finder from January 2024 onwards, including call-offs from frameworks and dynamic purchasing systems where the buyer published a notice.
Duplicates: the same contract is sometimes published on both services. When a Contracts Finder award has the same buyer and value as a Find a Tender award within 60 days, and they share a supplier, we show it once.
Not included: Contracts Finder notices before 2024, and procurements that never produced a public award notice.
Cancelled and unsuccessful awards are excluded.

Values

We show the contract value from the notice, in pounds. Not every notice includes a value. For frameworks and multi-year agreements the published figure is often the maximum the buyer expects to spend over the whole term, not money actually paid, so totals on buyer, supplier and sector pages can overstate real spending. Treat totals as indicative.

Dates

The contract date is the date the contract was signed where the notice gives one, otherwise the award date, otherwise the date the notice was published.

How suppliers and buyers are matched

Notices do not always use a consistent identifier for companies, so we match organisations by name after tidying it up (ignoring capitalisation, punctuation and suffixes such as “Ltd” and “Limited”). Where a notice gives a Companies House number we show it and link to the company's record. This works well because Companies House does not allow two live companies to share a name, but it is not perfect: a company that changes its name, or is spelled differently across notices, may appear more than once.

“Without competition”

An award is marked without competition when the notice says the buyer used a procedure without prior publication, a limited or direct award procedure, or similar. This follows the procedure the buyer reported. It is not a judgement that anything improper happened; see the explainer on that page.

SMEs

The SME label shows when the notice records the supplier as a small or medium-sized enterprise. Many notices do not say, so SME percentages are calculated only over awards where the size is known.

Sectors and regions

Sectors use the first two digits (the “division”) of the main CPV code in the notice. Regions use the ITL1 area of the delivery location, or the buyer's address when no delivery location is given.

“Other suppliers winning this work”

A supplier page lists the suppliers with the most contracts in the sector that supplier wins most of its work in, over the last two years. It is a starting point for seeing who else does this kind of work, not a judgement that those suppliers bid for the same contracts: two companies in the same sector may serve quite different buyers. Individuals are never listed.

One company, several names

A company often appears in notices under more than one name: its registered name, a trading name, or a different spelling. Where notices give the same Companies House number, those entries are treated as one company: its page shows every contract, says which other names it was published under, and the other names redirect to it. Without a company number in the notice, we cannot be sure two similar names are the same company, so they stay separate.

Personal data

We do not import the names, email addresses or phone numbers of officials that appear in notices. When a supplier appears to be an individual person (a sole trader) rather than an organisation, we do not show their name or give them a page. See the privacy notice.