What is Find a Tender Service?
Find a Tender Service (FTS) is the UK government's official portal for higher-value public procurement notices. It launched in January 2021, replacing the EU's Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU) for UK contracting authorities following Brexit. When the UK left the EU, contracting authorities could no longer publish in OJEU and needed a domestic equivalent. FTS filled that role, and publication on it is mandatory for all contracting authorities reaching the relevant thresholds.
The thresholds that trigger a mandatory FTS notice are set by government regulation and reviewed periodically. For goods and services contracts, the current thresholds (1 January 2026 to 31 December 2027, including VAT) are £135,018 for central government and £207,720 for sub-central authorities (councils, NHS trusts, universities and similar bodies). Works contracts carry a higher threshold of £5,193,000. Utility sector and defence contracts follow their own thresholds. Any contract meeting or exceeding these figures must be advertised on FTS before a buyer can proceed to award.
FTS is free to search and free to register; bids themselves are usually submitted through the buyer's own e-tendering portal. It is a genuinely important source, and any supplier bidding for public sector work should know how to use it. TenderSignal pulls from FTS every night, normalises those notices alongside the rest of the market, and surfaces the relevant ones in your matched feed.
Where Find a Tender falls short
FTS is indispensable for above-threshold UK-wide contracts, but using it as your only source leaves significant gaps in what you see.
- Many below-threshold opportunities are missing. Most public sector contracts awarded to SMEs sit below the FTS thresholds. Under the Procurement Act 2023, buyers that invite competitive tenders from £12,000 (central government) or £30,000 (other authorities), including VAT, publish a below-threshold tender notice on Find a Tender, but lower-value work, procurements started under the old rules (on Contracts Finder) and Scottish below-threshold notices (on PCS) sit elsewhere.
- Devolved portals are separate. Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales and eTendersNI each hold notices that may not appear on FTS at all. A Scottish council awarding a below-threshold IT contract publishes it on PCS, not FTS.
- Buyer and framework portals are excluded. Many councils, NHS trusts, housing associations and universities run their own procurement systems (In-Tend, Jaggaer, ProContract and others). Lower-value opportunities are often advertised only there, not on FTS.
- There is no intelligent matching. FTS lets you save keyword searches, but there is no scoring against your business profile. Results are raw and frequently noisy.
- No awards intelligence. FTS publishes some contract award notices, but it is not designed to help you understand who is winning work in your sector, what they charged, or when contracts are due for renewal.
- Alerts are basic. Email alerts from FTS are keyword-triggered, unranked and contain no context about why a notice was flagged. High-volume keywords make them unmanageable; narrow keywords cause you to miss relevant notices described in different language.
Find a Tender vs Contracts Finder: what is the difference?
The single question that confuses most new suppliers is the relationship between FTS and Contracts Finder. They are two different portals serving different tiers of the market, and in practice you need both.
Find a Tender is the Central Digital Platform for notices under the Procurement Act 2023: above-threshold UK-wide notices and, since 24 February 2025, below-threshold tender notices from £12,000 (central government) or £30,000 (other authorities), including VAT. A central government department awarding a £200,000 IT services contract must publish it on FTS. Contracts Finder is the England-focused channel for lower-value procurements run under the old Public Contracts Regulations 2015, which required publication above £10,000 (central government) and £25,000 (wider public sector), excluding VAT, and those procurements still appear there. They do not overlap cleanly.
Most SMEs need to watch both, plus the devolved portals for their region. That means logging into three or four separate websites each morning, each with its own search interface, saved-search logic and alert format. TenderSignal reads all of them, and the 600+ additional sources on top, so you never have to remember which site a given contract should be advertised on.
How TenderSignal compares
TenderSignal sits as an aggregation and matching layer above the whole UK and Irish public procurement market. We scan Find a Tender, Contracts Finder, Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales, eTenders Ireland, and 600+ further sources every night. Every notice we ingest is normalised, deduplicated and matched against your business profile. Only what is relevant reaches your inbox.
| Feature | Find a Tender Service | TenderSignal |
|---|---|---|
| Sources covered | Find a Tender only | FTS, Contracts Finder, PCS, Sell2Wales and 600+ more |
| Nations | UK-wide | England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and Ireland |
| Below-threshold notices | Procurement Act 2023 below-threshold tender notices only | Covered via Find a Tender, Contracts Finder, regional portals and buyer systems |
| Matching to your business | Keyword search only | Matched to your business profile, CPV codes and region |
| Alerts | Basic keyword email alerts | Personalised digest of matched, ranked tenders (weekly free, daily on Pro) |
| Awards intelligence | Award notices only | Aggregated awards database with competitor and renewal data |
| Price | Free | Free plan, with Pro and Business tiers |
How to use Find a Tender alongside TenderSignal
The practical answer is that you do not need to change anything about your relationship with FTS. Keep it bookmarked. If you receive a matched alert from TenderSignal and want to read the full official notice, the link takes you straight to it. When you submit a bid for an above-threshold contract, you will do so through the buyer's own e-tendering portal, and that process is unchanged.
What TenderSignal removes is the daily manual checking. Our scrapers pull from FTS every night, alongside Contracts Finder, PCS, Sell2Wales and the rest of the market. Any new FTS notice that matches your profile appears in your next digest (the next morning on Pro), already ranked by relevance, without you having to log in, run a search or interpret raw keyword results. You spend your time on bids, not on procurement websites.
For team workflows, TenderSignal also gives you a single place to review all your matched notices, rather than forwarding FTS alert emails among colleagues and tracking who has reviewed what. The watchlist and saved-search features let you mark opportunities as being worked on and share context with the rest of your team.
Who TenderSignal is for
TenderSignal is built for three groups in particular.
SMEs bidding for public sector work for the first time. If you are new to public procurement, the landscape of FTS, Contracts Finder, regional portals and buyer systems is genuinely confusing. TenderSignal flattens it into a single daily digest, so you can focus on learning to write a good bid rather than learning to navigate a dozen different websites.
Established suppliers who are winning work but worried about missing opportunities. Even experienced bidders miss tenders because a relevant contract appeared on a portal they did not regularly check, or because a keyword search returned too many results to read carefully. Systematic coverage of 600+ sources reduces that risk significantly.
Time-poor business development teams. If BD is one part of your role among many, you cannot spend an hour each morning on procurement portals. TenderSignal monitors the market continuously and surfaces only the notices that meet your criteria, so a five-minute review of your digest is enough to stay on top of new opportunities.
You can start free and browse every tender in the database. Upgrade to Pro when you want matched opportunities delivered to your inbox with AI relevance scoring, or to Business for Pipeline Intelligence, Competitor Intelligence and team features. Create a free account to see how many live tenders match your business right now, or compare plans to find the right fit.