What is Contracts Finder?
Contracts Finder is the UK government's free portal for public sector contract opportunities, run by the Cabinet Office. It carries notices for procurements run under the Public Contracts Regulations 2015, which required publication of contracts over £10,000 (central government and its agencies) and over £25,000 (the wider public sector in England), excluding VAT. Procurements started under the Procurement Act 2023 since 24 February 2025 publish their notices, including below-threshold ones from £12,000 or £30,000 including VAT, on the Central Digital Platform (Find a Tender) instead. It is a genuinely useful, free service, and every supplier bidding for government work should have an account. TenderSignal is not a replacement for it in the sense of hiding it from you: we pull from Contracts Finder ourselves, alongside dozens of other sources.
The question most suppliers really have is not "what is the alternative to Contracts Finder", but "how do I stop missing relevant tenders when the opportunities are spread across so many different websites". That is the gap TenderSignal fills.
Where Contracts Finder falls short
Contracts Finder does one job well: it lists England-focused public sector notices above the thresholds. But relying on it alone leaves real gaps.
- It is England-focused. Scotland publishes on Public Contracts Scotland, Wales on Sell2Wales, and Northern Ireland on eTendersNI. High-value UK-wide notices sit on Find a Tender. If you only watch Contracts Finder, you miss all of these.
- It misses buyer and framework portals. Many councils, NHS trusts, universities and housing associations run their own procurement systems, and lower-value opportunities are often advertised there rather than centrally.
- There is no intelligent matching. You save a keyword and get everything that mentions it, relevant or not. There is no scoring against a description of your business, so alerts are noisy and easy to ignore.
- No awards or competitor intelligence. Contracts Finder shows some award notices, but it is not built to help you see who is winning what in your sector, or which contracts are coming up for renewal.
- You still have to check other sites. In practice you end up logging into Find a Tender, your regional portal and several buyer systems, every day.
Contracts Finder vs Find a Tender: what is the difference?
This is the point that trips up most new suppliers. The UK actually has two central government portals, and you need both. Contracts Finder carries lower-value England notices for procurements run under the old Public Contracts Regulations 2015. Find a Tender, now the Central Digital Platform, carries higher-value, UK-wide notices above the procurement thresholds (from £135,018 including VAT for central government goods and services, with higher figures for other buyers and for works) and, for procurements under the Procurement Act 2023, below-threshold tender notices from £12,000 (central government) or £30,000 (other authorities) including VAT. Watching only one of the two means missing a whole tier of opportunities. TenderSignal reads both, plus the devolved portals, so you never have to remember which site a given contract should be on.
How TenderSignal compares
TenderSignal is an aggregation and matching layer that sits on top of the whole market. We scan Contracts Finder, Find a Tender, Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales, eTenders Ireland and 600+ further sources every night, normalise the notices, and match them against your business profile. You describe what you do once, and we do the daily checking for you.
| Feature | Contracts Finder | TenderSignal |
|---|---|---|
| Sources covered | Contracts Finder only | Contracts Finder, Find a Tender, PCS, Sell2Wales and 600+ more |
| Nations | England-focused | England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and Ireland |
| Matching to your business | Keyword search only | Matched to your business profile, CPV codes and region |
| Alerts | Basic saved-search emails | Personalised digest of matched tenders (weekly free, daily on Pro) |
| Frameworks and DPS | Partial | Framework and DPS notices surfaced and tagged |
| Awards and competitor data | Limited | Awards database and pipeline intelligence |
| Price | Free | Free plan, with Pro and Business tiers |
How to get the most out of Contracts Finder
If you are set on using the free contract finder on its own, a few habits help. Search by CPV code as well as by keyword, so you catch notices that describe the work in unexpected language. Save several narrow searches rather than one broad one, to keep the email alerts readable. Check Find a Tender separately for anything above the thresholds and for Procurement Act below-threshold notices, and add your two or three most important buyers' own portals to your morning routine. It works, but it is a lot of manual checking, which is exactly the routine TenderSignal is designed to remove.
Do you still need Contracts Finder?
You can keep your Contracts Finder account, and to submit a bid you will often go through the buyer's own portal anyway. But you no longer need to check Contracts Finder, Find a Tender and your regional portal by hand every morning. TenderSignal reads all of them for you and only surfaces the opportunities that fit your business, so relevant work is far less likely to slip past while you are busy delivering it. If alerts are all you want, our free tender alerts cover the same ground without the daily logins.
Who TenderSignal is for
TenderSignal is built for SMEs that bid for public sector work and do not have time to monitor a dozen procurement websites. Whether you are a cleaning contractor in Manchester, an IT consultancy chasing G-Cloud call-offs, or a care provider watching for local authority DPS openings, you set your profile once and let the matching do the work. You can start free and browse every tender, and upgrade when you want matched opportunities delivered to your inbox with AI relevance scoring.
Create a free account to see how many live tenders match your business right now, compare plans, set up free tender alerts, or see how it works.