Free Tender Alerts for UK Public Sector Contracts

UK central government, the NHS, local authorities, housing associations, police, fire and rescue services, universities, and devolved administrations award hundreds of billions of pounds of contracts every year. The headline figure is over £400 billion in public sector spend annually, and a large slice of it goes through formal tender notices published on dozens of different procurement portals.

Most existing tender-alert services charge £500-£2,000 a year per user for what is essentially keyword matching against public data. We think that is the wrong model. The notices themselves are public; the work to aggregate them is largely automatable. TenderSignal keeps the core alerts free for everyone. Paid tiers exist for power users who want advanced filtering, Pipeline Intelligence and Competitor Intelligence, but the free tier is genuinely useful on its own.

Set up your keywords once. Every morning at 7am UTC we email you the tenders that matched in the previous 24 hours. You can also browse the full database, save tenders to a watchlist, see who won previous awards, and review live deadlines, all without paying.

After you register, you will be guided through a short onboarding to tell us about your business, sectors you work in, the regions you cover, and the contract sizes you typically bid for. This builds your default profile, but the most important step is creating one or more saved searches.

A saved search is a named bundle of keywords. For example, a facilities management contractor might create a saved search called "FM services" with keywords like "facilities management", "facility maintenance", "hard FM", "soft services", "TFM", "cleaning contract", "M&E maintenance". A signage fabricator might create one called "Signage" with "signage", "wayfinding", "external signs", "interior signs". CPV code categories can be layered on top to narrow further.

Each night our match engine compares every new tender from the previous 24 hours against every saved search across every account. Matches are emailed to you the next morning. The free tier covers up to three saved searches with unlimited keywords per search.

You can click straight from the email into the full tender detail, buyer information, contract value, deadline, evaluation criteria, document downloads, and a direct link to the source portal where you submit your bid.

Most public-sector tenders publish with a submission window of 30 to 45 days. That sounds generous, but it includes time for you to read the specification, decide whether to bid, ask clarification questions (often with a deadline 10 days before submission), draft your response, get internal approvals, and proof-read. In practice, suppliers who see a tender within 48 hours of publication have a meaningful advantage over those who find it with two weeks to go.

Email alerts close that gap. Instead of remembering to log into Find a Tender every few days, or paying a researcher to monitor feeds, your inbox tells you the moment a relevant opportunity drops. For high-volume suppliers (FM contractors, IT resellers, consultancies) this often means seeing two to five matches per day; for niche specialists it might mean one match a week, but that one match is worth a serious bid effort.

The other reason early alerts matter is the pre-market engagement opportunity. Some notices are Prior Information Notices (PINs) or "Preliminary Market Engagement" notices, published months ahead of the formal tender to gauge supplier interest. Spotting these gives you a chance to influence the eventual specification, attend supplier days, and build relationships with the procurement team before competitors are even aware the opportunity exists.