What these pages cover

Each page brings together published statistics from government, the National Audit Office and industry research with TenderSignal's own figures, drawn from the UK procurement notices we track. The flagship, UK Public Procurement Statistics {flagship_year}, covers spend, buyers, deadlines and suppliers. The Procurement Act page covers thresholds and how often each procedure is used. The competition page covers single bids and bids per contract. The Procurement Pulse is our quarterly report.

How to cite these figures

Please cite the page, the year and the date you accessed it, for example: TenderSignal, UK Public Procurement Statistics {flagship_year}, tendersignal.co.uk/statistics/uk-public-procurement, accessed [date]. For an external figure, cite its original publisher too; every external figure links to it.

Free to reuse under CC BY 4.0

TenderSignal's own figures are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. You can quote, chart and republish them, commercially or not, as long as you credit TenderSignal and link to the page. External figures belong to their publishers and are shown under their own terms.

Methodology

What we count

Our figures count UK procurement notices: tender notices, award notices and the other notices buyers publish. A contract that appears on several portals is counted once wherever we can match it. We count notices and never add up contract values, because published values are too patchy and inconsistent to sum. Notices are dated by publication, in UK time.

Where the notices come from

We collect notices from the national notice services of each UK nation and from more than 600 buyer and e-tendering portals. Our coverage grows over time, which is why we never compare counts between periods and use shares, medians and rates for every comparison.

Periods and updates

Each topic page covers the calendar year to date, from 1 January to the end of the latest full month, and refreshes on the 3rd of each month. The Procurement Act page adds a quarterly series from Q1 2025. Each edition is frozen when its year ends and stays available at its own address. A figure that moves sharply between months is checked before it goes live, and the previous figure stays up until it has been.

Minimum samples

A rate or median built on fewer than 100 records is not published. The page shows "sample too small" instead.

Buyer types

Councils, central government and the NHS are grouped from the buyer on each notice, using the same groups as the Procurement Pulse.

Procedures

The raw data holds more than 1,700 different procedure descriptions, most of them one-off wording from individual buyers. We map every description used on 15 or more notices that has a clear meaning into three groups:

Competitive (42 spellings): open and restricted procedures, the competitive flexible procedure, competitive dialogue, competitive procedures with negotiation, negotiated procedures with a prior call for competition, and below-threshold open competitions, limited competitions and quotations.
Direct (16 spellings): direct awards, awards without prior publication, negotiated procedures without prior publication, below-threshold awards without competition, single tender actions, waivers and exemptions, and most suitable provider awards under the Provider Selection Regime.
Other: call-offs from frameworks and dynamic purchasing systems, blank or "not specified" entries, and wording we cannot classify with confidence. These are left out of every competition rate.

Competition figures

The single-bid rate is the share of awards under competitive procedures, among those that report a bid count, that received exactly one bid. Direct awards are excluded. No UK government body publishes an official single-bidder statistic.

Procurement Act figures

These use UK notices on Find a Tender only, the central digital platform for notices under the Act. Direct award figures count the Act's own direct award procedure, not the wider group of non-competitive routes.

External figures

We show external figures exactly as their publishers released them, with the publication date. We review every external figure and its link each quarter. We do not estimate public spend or SME spend ourselves.

Press and data questions

Email press@tendersignal.co.uk with questions about a figure, its definition or a breakdown you need. We reply by email.

Our figures refresh monthly and are free to reuse under CC BY 4.0. How we calculate them.

Cite this page: TenderSignal, {title}, {url}, accessed [date]. Our figures are free to reuse under CC BY 4.0 with a link to this page.

Statistics

The UK Procurement Pulse: who is buying in the public sector