How to Find UK Government Tenders Automatically (and Get Daily Alerts)

By Damian Fairholme, Komos Solutions Ltd

The UK public sector spends billions every year with outside suppliers, and much of it is advertised openly. For a small business, the problem is rarely access. It's time. Checking several portals every day, wading through award notices and expired deadlines, and copying details into a spreadsheet quickly becomes a chore that gets dropped.

This guide covers where UK tenders are published, what to filter for, and how to automate the whole thing so new opportunities arrive in your inbox each morning.

Where UK government tenders are published

  • Contracts Finder – England and non-devolved bodies, for contracts above roughly £12,000 (central government) or £30,000 (wider public sector) including VAT.
  • Find a Tender – the UK's main service. Since 24 February 2025 (Procurement Act 2023) it covers above- and below-threshold notices outside Scotland.
  • Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales and eTendersNI / eSourcing NI for the devolved nations.

Source: Find a Tender, GOV.UK guidance for SMEs.

What to filter for

  1. Status: open, with the deadline still in the future. Most raw feeds are dominated by award notices.
  2. Keywords that describe your service ("cyber security", "cleaning", "software").
  3. CPV codes, the EU/UK procurement classification. For example, 72 is IT services and 79 is business services.
  4. Minimum value, so you don't spend bid effort on tiny contracts.
  5. SME suitability: buyers flag notices they consider suitable for SMEs.

Option 1: Use the free portal alerts

Contracts Finder lets you create an account, save searches and get email updates. That's a good start, but the output is an email, not data you can sort, score or feed into a CRM.

Option 2: Automate it with our Contracts Finder tool

We built the UK Government Tenders & Contracts Scraper on the Apify platform. It reads the official Contracts Finder open-data API and returns clean rows: title, buyer, buyer contact email, value, deadline, CPV code, SME flag and a link to the notice. For awarded contracts it also returns the winning suppliers and their Companies House numbers.

Set up a daily alert in 5 minutes

  1. Open the tool on Apify and set your filters, e.g. keywords: ["cyber", "security"], minValueGbp: 20000, status: open.
  2. Turn on Alert mode (onlyNew), so each run returns only notices you haven't seen before.
  3. Save it as a Task, then create a Schedule, e.g. 07:00 on weekdays.
  4. Add an integration so the results reach you: email, Slack, or Zapier/Make into a Google Sheet or CRM.

Pricing is pay-per-result at about £2.30 per 1,000 notices (billed as $3 by Apify), so a typical daily alert costs a few pence a month.

Bonus: competitor and market intelligence

Switch the status to awarded to see who is winning contracts in your CPV codes, for how much, and from which buyers. Use that to target buyers and to benchmark your pricing.

Tips for SMEs bidding for the first time

  • Start with lower-value notices flagged as SME-suitable.
  • Read the buyer's evaluation criteria and answer each question directly. Evidence beats adjectives.
  • Build relationships with buyers ahead of time. Check pipeline and planning notices.

Need help?

Komos Solutions Ltd has 20+ years of experience in IT and security. If you'd like help setting up tender alerts, or need IT/security expertise for a bid, get in touch.

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