How to find tender opportunities

Finding public sector opportunities is not hard. Finding the right ones, early enough to bid well, takes a little craft. This guide covers where to search, how to search, and how to read what you find quickly.

Where to search

• Find a Tender (FTS) carries the higher-value UK opportunities and, under the Procurement Act 2023, a growing amount of forward-looking information: pipeline notices, preliminary market engagement notices and planned procurement notices (the successor to what many bidders still call a PIN, a prior information notice).
• Contracts Finder carries below-threshold opportunities in England, typically from about £12,000 (central government) or £30,000 (other bodies) upwards.
• Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales and eTendersNI cover the devolved nations.

Both main sites are free, need no account to search, and offer email alerts once you register.

Search craft

Keyword search is where most people start and where most searches quietly fail. Buyers do not describe things the way suppliers do. A firm selling "digital marketing" will miss notices titled "communications support services"; a training company searching "training" will drown in irrelevant results.

Three habits fix most of this:

• Search the way buyers write. Collect the titles of past notices in your field (award notices are searchable too) and note the recurring vocabulary. Build a list of five to ten search terms, not one.
• Search by buyer as well as by subject. If your realistic customers are the twenty councils within an hour of you, check what each has published recently. Small firms usually win locally first.
• Use award history as a forward radar. Filter for awarded contracts in your field and note the end dates. Most contracts are re-procured, and the tender typically appears three to twelve months before expiry. A spreadsheet of expiry dates is the cheapest pipeline tool there is.

CPV codes, explained simply

Every notice carries one or more CPV codes (Common Procurement Vocabulary). A CPV code is just a standardised label for what is being bought, drawn from a fixed EU-origin list that the UK still uses. The first digits give the broad family and each further digit narrows it down: 45000000 is construction work, 45261910 is roof repair.

Why care? Because codes beat keywords for recall. A notice titled obscurely will still carry a sensible CPV code. Find the handful of codes that cover what you sell (look them up on the codes your competitors' award notices carry), then build alerts on those codes at the broadest level that is still relevant to you. Buyers sometimes miscode notices, so run keyword alerts alongside; the two nets together catch nearly everything.

Alerts: make the opportunities come to you

Register on FTS and Contracts Finder, save your searches (keywords, CPV codes, regions, value bands) and switch on daily email alerts. Do the same on the buyer-side portals you registered with, because some lower-value quotation exercises are only circulated to registered suppliers. Review the alert emails as a daily five-minute habit rather than a weekly backlog; the best opportunities have the shortest fuses.

Frameworks and open tenders: two different doors

An open tender is a one-off competition for a specific contract. Anyone can bid, and the winner signs the contract. Straightforward.

A framework is a pre-approved supplier list. Buyers run one big competition to appoint several suppliers to the framework; then, for the life of the agreement, they buy through call-off contracts, either awarded directly to a listed supplier or through a further mini-competition among them. If you are not on the framework, those call-offs are invisible to you and closed to you.

Watch for framework competitions in your field, because missing one can lock you out for up to four years (open frameworks under the Procurement Act must reopen for new joiners at set points, which softens this). You will also see dynamic markets (the successor to the DPS, or dynamic purchasing system): open lists that suppliers can join at any time, commonly used for things like transport, temporary staff and construction trades. Joining relevant dynamic markets is usually quick and worth doing early. Our frameworks guide goes deeper.

Reading a notice in five minutes

When an alert lands, qualify it fast. Read these fields, in this order:

1. Deadline. Is there enough time to bid properly? A complex ITT (invitation to tender) with ten days left is usually a notice someone else has been preparing for.
2. Value. Is the estimated value worth the effort, and is your turnover plausible against it? Many buyers hesitate when a single contract would represent a very large share of a supplier's revenue.
3. What is actually being bought. Read the description and lot structure, not just the title. Lots matter: a big contract split into lots may contain one small lot that fits you perfectly.
4. Conditions of participation. Required insurance levels, certifications, accreditations, financial standing. Any hard requirement you cannot meet by the deadline ends the analysis.
5. Award criteria. The price-quality split tells you what kind of competition it is. Sixty per cent price means something very different from sixty per cent quality.

If a notice survives all five, download the documents and make a proper bid or no-bid decision, which is the subject of the next guide.