Find a Tender Service (FTS): The UK Tender Discovery Platform Guide

Finding a tender on day one of a thirty-day window is an opportunity. Finding it on day nineteen is a scramble. How to turn the Find a Tender Service into an early-warning system.

The Find a Tender Service (FTS) is the UK's official home for public sector contract opportunities — and if your team sells to government, it should be the first tab open every morning. Every above-threshold contract notice in the UK must be published there. Yet plenty of work-winning teams still hear about opportunities second-hand, from a buyer's email or a competitor's win announcement.

This guide covers what FTS is, how it changed when the Central Digital Platform arrived in 2025, how it differs from Contracts Finder, and how to build a tender discovery routine that surfaces the right contracts early — while there's still time to write a winning response.

What Is the Find a Tender Service?

The Find a Tender Service is the UK government's central platform for publishing public procurement notices. It launched on 1 January 2021, replacing the EU's OJEU/TED system for UK contracts after Brexit. It is completely free to use, for buyers and suppliers alike — no subscription, no per-notice charges, no premium tier gatekeeping the good opportunities.

That last point matters because the UK tender search market is crowded with paid portals and aggregators, many of which repackage the same public notice data. They can add genuine value — filtering, enrichment, alerts across multiple sources — but FTS is the primary source they all draw from, and it costs nothing to check their coverage against it.

Every above-threshold procurement run by a UK contracting authority must be advertised on FTS. That includes central government departments, the NHS, local councils, universities, housing associations and other public bodies. If you only monitor one tender portal, this is the one.

One geographic caveat: the Procurement Act 2023 covers England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Scottish contracting authorities work under the Public Contracts (Scotland) Regulations 2015 and advertise on Public Contracts Scotland, though their above-threshold notices still surface on Find a Tender. There is no Central Digital Platform supplier record or share code on the Scottish side. If Scotland is a target market, PCS belongs in your routine alongside FTS.

What you'll find on FTS

• Pipeline and planned procurement notices — early signals that a contract is coming, often months before the formal tender.
• Tender notices — live opportunities you can bid for, with links to the invitation to tender (ITT) documents.
• Award notices — who won what, and at what value. Underrated competitive intelligence for your bid/no-bid decisions.
• Contract change notices — modifications to live contracts, which can flag re-procurement timing.

Who should be using it

Any business that wants public sector revenue: construction and engineering contractors, facilities management providers, environmental services firms, IT consultancies and professional services businesses. You don't need to be a current government supplier — the platform exists precisely so new entrants can see the same opportunities as incumbents.

It's not only for prime contractors, either. Subcontractors and specialist suppliers can use FTS to see which main contractors have just won frameworks and major works packages — an award notice is an invitation to introduce yourself while the supply chain is still being assembled. For growing firms, that's often the fastest route into public sector work.

FTS and the Central Digital Platform: What Changed in February 2025

On 24 February 2025 the Procurement Act 2023 went live, and Find a Tender was relaunched as the UK's Central Digital Platform — a single system where authorities publish procurement information and suppliers register and share their business details (GOV.UK Central Digital Platform factsheet).

The practical upgrades for suppliers:

• Register once, reuse everywhere. You store your core business details — company information, financial records, connected persons, any exclusions — on the platform and reuse them across bids, instead of re-keying them into every PQQ-style questionnaire.
• Share codes. You don't submit bids inside Find a Tender. You generate a share code (or file) for your stored information and submit it however the buyer specifies.
• Free search and alerts across notices published throughout the whole procurement lifecycle, not just at tender stage.

One detail worth knowing: registration happens at the point you want to bid, not before. You can search and set alerts without registering — but building your supplier record early means you're not doing admin against a deadline.

The information you'll store is broader than a company profile. The platform asks for your basic details (name, registered address, Companies House or charity number, VAT registration), financial records from recent years, information on connected persons with influence over the business, and details of anything that could trigger exclusion under the Procurement Act 2023. Gathering that once, carefully, beats reconstructing it under deadline pressure — and because buyers receive it via your share code, errors propagate to every bid until you fix them.

The platform is also designed to capture procurement data for future analytics dashboards, which should gradually make UK contract data easier to interrogate — good news for anyone building a pipeline from published notices.

Contracts Finder vs FTS: Which Should You Check?

This is the question that trips up most newcomers to UK tender search. The short answer: new procurements launched under the Procurement Act 2023 are published through Find a Tender, while Contracts Finder remains the home of notices started under the previous rules — so older frameworks and legacy below-threshold notices still live there.

In practice, that means the date a procurement began determines where you'll find it, not the size of the contract. A framework let in 2024 will keep generating call-off and modification activity under the old regime; a procurement started last month lives on FTS from its first notice to its last.

During the transition, a sensible discovery routine checks both. Public contracts often run for three to five years or more, so procurements advertised under the old rules will keep generating notices — extensions, modifications, re-openings — on Contracts Finder for some time yet. That transition now has an end date: from 1 October 2026, the Procurement (Amendment) Regulations 2026 redirect legacy-regime publication to the central digital platform, so Find a Tender becomes the single front door. Until then, treat FTS as primary and Contracts Finder as your legacy sweep — and after it, expect Contracts Finder to be an archive rather than a live source.

The threshold figures matter here. From 1 January 2026, under The Procurement Act 2023 (Threshold Amounts) (Amendment) Regulations 2025, the main thresholds are:

• Goods and services (central government): £135,018
• Goods and services (other contracting authorities): £207,720
• Works (all authorities): £5,193,000

All figures are inclusive of VAT — a change under the Act that catches out teams used to the old ex-VAT sums. Thresholds are revised roughly every two years, so always check the current figures before advising on a specific opportunity.

Checking FTS manually every day is a job in itself. If your team is losing hours to portal-watching, BidScript's tender discovery tools monitor Find a Tender continuously and surface the opportunities that match your profile — so you spend your time qualifying and writing, not searching.

How to Use Find a Tender to Discover the Right Contracts

Most teams use FTS reactively: someone remembers to look, a colleague forwards a link, a buyer mentions a notice on a call. The teams that get the full value treat tender search as a system with an owner, a cadence and a filter. A repeatable routine looks like this:

1. Search before you register. Run keyword searches for your services and region to gauge deal flow — no account needed.
2. Add CPV codes. Common Procurement Vocabulary codes classify every notice. Searching by the codes buyers actually use catches opportunities your keywords miss.
3. Save searches and set alerts. Get new matching notices pushed to you rather than relying on someone remembering to look.
4. Read the full notice, then the documents. The notice summary rarely tells the whole story — download the ITT pack before forming a view.
5. Qualify hard. Score every opportunity against a bid/no-bid framework before committing writing time.
6. Register when you're ready to bid, and keep your supplier record current so share codes are a two-minute job.

Get CPV codes right

Buyers frequently classify contracts under broader or adjacent CPV codes than you'd expect. Build a code list from award notices for contracts you wish you'd won — that tells you how buyers in your market actually categorise the work.

Set alerts a person actually owns

Saved searches and email alerts are only as good as the routine behind them. Give discovery a named owner, a daily fifteen-minute slot, and a simple triage rule: log it, bin it, or escalate it to a bid/no-bid conversation. That converts a stream of notices into a pipeline decision — and stops the Friday-afternoon notice with a Monday clarification deadline slipping through.

Treat award notices as market intelligence

Award notices show winning suppliers and contract values. Tracking them tells you which competitors are winning where, what buyers are paying, and when contracts will come back around — the raw material of a serious pipeline. A contract awarded today on a four-year term is a diary entry for a re-procurement conversation in year three.

Qualify before you commit

Discovery only pays off if it feeds disciplined selection. Chasing every notice burns your best writers on bids you were never going to win. A simple scoring model — relevance, relationship, capability, capacity — protects the pipeline from wishful thinking.

A good discipline: for every notice that passes your first filter, write one sentence answering "why us, why now?" If the sentence doesn't come easily, the bid probably shouldn't happen. The teams with the best win rates are usually the ones that say no most often.

Avoid the common FTS mistakes

• Searching by keyword only. Buyers describe the same work in wildly different language; CPV codes catch what synonyms miss.
• Ignoring pipeline and planned procurement notices. By the time the tender notice lands, incumbents and well-prepared rivals have been positioning for months.
• Registering at the deadline. Assembling financial records and connected-persons information under time pressure is how errors get into your supplier record.
• Treating discovery as one person's job. If your alerts live in a single inbox, holidays and departures silently switch off your pipeline.

From Discovery to Submission: Making FTS Work Harder

Finding the notice is step one. Winning the contract depends on what happens next: qualifying quickly, assembling evidence, and writing a response that scores. If you're new to the platform, our walkthrough of how to use Find a Tender covers the basics, and our guide to the Procurement Act 2023 explains the rules your buyers now work under.

For teams bidding regularly, the gap between discovery and submission is where deadlines die. A notice found on day one of a thirty-day window is a genuine opportunity; the same notice found on day nineteen is a scramble. The value of a discovery routine isn't just finding more tenders — it's buying your writers the time to answer the question the buyer actually asked.

Purpose-built bid management support for public sector teams closes that gap, connecting what you find on FTS to how you qualify, plan and write the response. Teams using BidScript have reported win-rate improvements of up to 50%, though results vary by team and sector.

FAQs About the Find a Tender Service

Is the Find a Tender Service free to use?

Yes. Find a Tender is free for both suppliers and buyers. Searching notices, setting up alerts, registering your business details and generating share codes all cost nothing. Paid third-party portals resell much of the same underlying data, so check what FTS gives you before paying for aggregation.

What replaced OJEU in the UK?

The Find a Tender Service replaced OJEU/TED for UK public contracts on 1 January 2021, following Brexit. Above-threshold UK opportunities that once appeared in the Official Journal of the European Union are now published on FTS, which became the UK's Central Digital Platform in February 2025.

Do I need to register on Find a Tender before I can bid?

You can search and set alerts without registering. Registration is needed at the point you want to bid: you store your core business details once, then generate a share code or file for each bid and submit it the way the buyer specifies. Registering early saves deadline-week admin.

What is the difference between Contracts Finder and Find a Tender?

New procurements launched under the Procurement Act 2023 publish through Find a Tender. Contracts Finder holds notices from procurements started under the previous rules, including many below-threshold and legacy framework notices. During the transition it's worth monitoring both, with FTS as your primary source. From 1 October 2026, legacy-regime notices move to Find a Tender too, leaving Contracts Finder as a historical record.

What are the UK procurement thresholds for 2026?

From 1 January 2026: £135,018 for central government goods and services, £207,720 for other contracting authorities, and £5,193,000 for works — all inclusive of VAT. Contracts at or above these values must be advertised on the Find a Tender Service. Figures are revised roughly every two years.

Final Thoughts: Make FTS Your Early-Warning System

The Find a Tender Service is the closest thing UK public procurement has to a single source of truth: free, comprehensive, and now — as the Central Digital Platform — the front door for supplier registration too. The teams that win consistently aren't the ones who check it occasionally; they're the ones who've turned it into an early-warning system feeding a disciplined qualify-and-write process.

Start simple: build your CPV code list, save your searches, set the alerts, and register your supplier record before you need it. Then judge yourself on one metric — how many days of writing time your team gets between finding a notice and the submission deadline. Everything else in bid performance flows from that number.

If portal-watching is eating time your team should spend writing, see how BidScript helps public sector work-winning teams find, manage and win more of the right contracts — or book a demo and watch it work on your live pipeline.