Find a Tender vs Contracts Finder: which portal should your business be on?
If you're new to public sector tendering, two names come up almost immediately: Find a Tender and Contracts Finder. Both are government-run portals. Both are free. They serve different purposes, and understanding which one to prioritise makes a real difference to whether your opportunity searches are productive.
Find a Tender
Find a Tender (FTS) is the UK's mandatory advertising platform for high value public contracts. Any contract above the relevant procurement threshold (currently around £213,000 for goods and services for central government) must be advertised here. It replaced the EU's OJEU (Official Journal of the European Union) after Brexit.
Find a Tender covers the full lifecycle of a procurement, from pipeline notices through to contract award and beyond. Since the Procurement Act 2023 came into force, it also hosts Planned Procurement Notices (early signals about upcoming contracts before the formal tender is published) as well as assessment summaries and contract details post-award.
For SMEs, Find a Tender is most useful for tracking larger opportunities and for understanding the broader landscape of what public sector organisations are buying. It's also where you'll find the transparency data that tells you who's winning what, for how much, and for how long.
Contracts Finder
Contracts Finder covers England and sits at a lower threshold: any contract above £12,000 awarded by central government or NHS bodies in England must be published here. In practice it's also used by many local authorities and other public bodies, though it's not mandatory for them.
For most SMEs starting out in public sector tendering, Contracts Finder is the more immediately useful starting point. The opportunities are more numerous, the contract values are more accessible and the competition, while still real, is generally less intense than at high value contract level.
The search functionality on Contracts Finder lets you filter by category, location and contract value, and set up email alerts for searches you want to monitor regularly. Setting this up once and letting it run in the background is one of the most efficient things a new bidder can do.
The devolved nations
If you're based in or targeting Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, there are additional portals to know about. Public Contracts Scotland covers Scottish public sector opportunities at all values. Sell2Wales covers Wales. eSourcing NI and eTendersNI cover Northern Ireland. These operate separately from Find a Tender and Contracts Finder and are worth registering on if you're targeting those markets.
Which one first?
The honest answer is: start with Contracts Finder if you're new to this and looking for your first public sector contract. Set up a search with your relevant CPV codes (the commodity codes public buyers use to categorise what they're purchasing), add your geographic filters and turn on email alerts.
Then set up the same search on Find a Tender to catch the higher-value opportunities in your sector, and use the Planned Procurement Notices to get advance sight of what's coming up before it goes to formal tender.
Neither portal replaces relationship-building with buyers directly, but both tell you what the market is spending money on, and that's essential information for any business serious about winning public sector work.