How to read a contract award notice: contract value, award criteria and CPV codes explained

A contract award notice is published once a public buyer has chosen a winning supplier, before the contract is signed. It records who won, the contract's estimated value, and a CPV code describing what was bought. For SME suppliers, award notices are free market intelligence: who is buying what, from whom, and at what price.

What is a contract award notice?

Under the Procurement Act 2023, a contracting authority must publish a contract award notice before it enters into a public contract. Section 50 of the Act puts it plainly: the notice sets out that the authority intends to enter into a contract, plus whatever further detail is specified in regulations. On Find a Tender this is notice type UK6, and it is published after the buyer has made its award decision but before the contract is signed.

Publishing the notice starts the standstill period, a mandatory pause of at least eight working days (weekends and bank holidays do not count) during which the contract cannot be signed. This gives unsuccessful bidders a window to seek an explanation or challenge the decision before it becomes final. In a competitive tendering procedure, the award notice can only go out after every bidder, successful and unsuccessful, has received an assessment summary explaining how their tender was scored against the published award criteria.

That points to something worth being precise about: the award notice itself does not usually restate the full award criteria and weightings. Those are set out earlier, in the tender notice and the invitation to tender, and the buyer must award to the Most Advantageous Tender (MAT) against them. What the award notice confirms is the outcome of that scoring exercise: which supplier's tender was assessed as most advantageous, and when. For a deeper look at how the marks themselves are worked out, see our guide on how bids are scored.

Regulation 27 of the Procurement Regulations 2024 sets out what else the notice must contain: the contracting authority's details, a unique identifier for the procurement and contract, the winning supplier's details (including its SME status and organisation type), the date the award decision was made, the procedure used, the standstill end date, and — for contracts worth more than £5 million — information about unsuccessful tenders and suppliers. Much of this simply updates and confirms what first appeared in the tender notice.

A second notice follows later. Once the contract is actually signed, the buyer must publish a contract details notice (UK7), within 30 days of signature for most contracts (120 days for light touch contracts). For contracts over £5 million, a copy of the contract itself, redacted as necessary, must be attached within 90 days, along with at least three key performance indicators the buyer will report against. Read together, the award notice and the details notice tell you the full story: who was chosen, what it was worth, and what was actually signed.

What does "contract value" actually mean in an award notice?

The value shown against a contract is not a simple sale price. Under section 4 of the Procurement Act 2023, the "estimated value" of a contract is the value estimated by the contracting authority, calculated in line with the methodology set out in Schedule 3 to the Act. Cabinet Office guidance on valuing contracts explains that authorities must estimate the maximum amount payable under the contract over its whole possible term, including any options to extend or renew and any options to supply additional goods, services or works, and that the figure is inclusive of VAT.

Two further rules matter for reading a notice correctly. First, aggregation: if a requirement could reasonably be delivered as one contract or several, the authority must generally value it as a whole rather than splitting it into smaller pieces, unless there is a good operational reason (delegated budgets, genuinely separate business units) to do otherwise. Cabinet Office guidance is explicit that wanting to duck a threshold is never a good reason. Second, there is an anti-avoidance rule: an authority cannot manipulate how it estimates a contract's value with a view to avoiding the Act's requirements.

Practically, this means the value on an award notice is the buyer's best estimate of everything it might spend over the life of the deal, not necessarily what will be invoiced in year one, and it may include extension periods that never get exercised. Treat it as a ceiling estimate, not a guaranteed spend, and cross-check it against the later contract details notice, which confirms the value of the contract actually signed.

Contract values also sit against published thresholds, which is what determines how heavily regulated a procurement is. From 1 January 2026, the main Procurement Act 2023 threshold amounts are:

Contract type	Threshold (inc. VAT)
Goods or services, central government authority	£135,018
Goods or services, sub-central authority (councils, NHS bodies, etc.)	£207,720
Works	£5,193,000
Light touch services	£663,540
Notifiable below-threshold contract, central government	£12,000
Notifiable below-threshold contract, other authorities	£30,000

These figures are reviewed every two years to stay aligned with the UK's World Trade Organisation Agreement on Government Procurement commitments, so expect them to move again.

What are CPV codes, and why do they matter for market intelligence?

Every contract award notice must carry at least one CPV code: a code from the Common Procurement Vocabulary, the classification system adopted by Regulation (EC) No 2195/2002 and retained in UK law. The Procurement Regulations 2024 define a CPV code by direct reference to that vocabulary, and regulation 27 requires it to appear in the award notice alongside the other award information.

CPV codes exist to classify the subject matter of a contract consistently, regardless of how any individual buyer chooses to word a notice title or description. That consistency is exactly what makes them useful for market intelligence. Buyers do not always describe what they are buying the way suppliers describe what they sell, so a title alone can be misleading; the CPV code cuts through that. If you sell into a defined category of goods, services or works, you can build a search or alert around the relevant CPV codes and catch every award in that category regardless of how each notice happens to be titled.

Used this way, award notices become a research tool rather than just a compliance record. Filter awards by CPV code and you can see, across a whole sector, which buyers are active, which suppliers keep winning, and roughly what values are being paid for comparable work, all from data every contracting authority is required to publish.

Where do award notices appear: Find a Tender or Contracts Finder?

This is where suppliers most often trip up, because the answer changed. Before 24 February 2025, above-threshold notices were published centrally and below-threshold notices went to Contracts Finder. Since the Procurement Act 2023 commenced on that date, that split no longer applies to new procurements.

Under the Act, Find a Tender is the central digital platform, and it now carries notices for procurements at every value: above-threshold awards, and, since regulated below-threshold contracts became notifiable at £12,000 (central government) or £30,000 (other authorities), below-threshold awards too. Contracts Finder continues to display notices, but only for procurements that were commenced under the old Public Contracts Regulations 2015, before the Act came into force; Cabinet Office guidance is explicit that no new procurements are run under those regulations after that date.

The practical consequence: a supplier who checks Contracts Finder out of habit for smaller, below-threshold opportunities and awards is increasingly looking at a site that only holds older, legacy notices. Current activity, at every value band, is now on Find a Tender. If you are building award-notice searches for market intelligence, point them at Find a Tender first, and treat Contracts Finder as an archive of procurements that predate the Act rather than a live second channel.

How can suppliers use award notices for market intelligence?

Award notices are published data about real public spending, and a small amount of routine attention turns them into a genuine pipeline tool.

• Track buyers, not just opportunities. Filter award notices by the contracting authorities in your realistic reach and note who they buy from, how often, and at what value. A buyer that repeatedly awards small contracts in your category is a better prospect than one who has never bought anything like it.
• Build alerts on the CPV codes you compete in. Because CPV codes classify the subject matter consistently, they catch relevant awards that a keyword search would miss, and let you monitor a category across many buyers at once.
• Read contract value as a ceiling, and check duration. Compare the estimated value on the award notice with what a contract of that shape usually costs, and note the term and any extension options; that tells you both the likely spend and when it might come back to market.
• Use awards as a forward radar. Because most public contracts get re-procured rather than simply ending, a spreadsheet of who won what, at what value, and until when, is one of the cheapest pipeline tools available. Our guide on how to find tender opportunities covers building alerts and using award history to spot upcoming re-tenders.
• Read the winning supplier's profile. The named supplier, its SME status and its organisation type tell you who you are actually competing with in a given category, and at what scale they operate.

None of this requires anything beyond what every contracting authority already has to publish. Read consistently, contract value, CPV codes and the notice fields around them turn a routine transparency obligation into a working picture of who buys what in the public sector, and from whom.