How to Find Public Tenders

Each year, the UK Government spends around £250 billion procuring third-party goods and services, but many potential suppliers are still unclear on how to find public tenders.

Opportunities to Win Public Contracts

The Government’s annual spend on procurement makes it the single largest purchaser across many industries in the UK, and much of this business is only available to be won through the public sector tendering process.

However, many suppliers often struggle when it comes to actually finding public sector contracts, which is why we have put together this guide on how to find public tenders. All public sector organisations are legally required to publish their contract notices to ensure fair competition, and these public sector tenders can be found through a number of sources, including:

Procurement Portals
Tender Alert Services
Official Databases
Government Tender Portals

We examine how these resources can help you find public sector contract opportunities relevant to your business below.

Find contracts for public sector procurement the easy way, with Tracker.

Where to Find Public Sector Tenders

If you are new to public sector tenders and the procurement process, the question of where to find tender opportunities can be quite daunting. Between using tender portals and learning how to search for tenders on the various databases, businesses can become quite overwhelmed with trying to stay up to date in the world of public sector procurement and may end up abandoning it and missing out on high value public sector tenders. Tracker is here to simplify the way you find, bid for and win government contracts in England, Europe and beyond. Here are the most practical and useful resources for businesses looking to find and access high-value opportunities from public sector organisations:

Procurement Portals

Procurement portals, like Tracker, are an excellent source of public sector tenders for businesses wanting to find contracts relevant to their industry. Our research team tracks down high-value contract notices and those under the Find a Tender Service (FTS)/OJEU thresholds to create the UK’s most comprehensive database of public sector contracts. Depending on your needs and supply chain goals, you can use a private or public procurement portal to help you find high-value contracts from public sector organisations.

Tender Alerts Services

Tender alert services allow you to set up a personalised tender feed and receive email notifications for work you’re interested in whenever a new relevant opportunity is published. Tracker’s services include a Tender Alerts tool that provides a personalised feed of relevant opportunities sent directly to your inbox on a daily basis. These email alerts save you time and will ensure you never miss a tender opportunity again.

Official Databases

Find a Tender Service (FTS) is an important portal for buyers and suppliers because it contains high-value, public contract opportunities (tenders) published by buyers within the UK. FTS replaced the OJEU in the UK after Brexit, but the OJEU still exists.

UK businesses looking for opportunities in Europe are encouraged to use another database known as TED, which contains the online version of the ‘Supplement to the Official Journal’ of the EU.

National Portals

The UK’s home countries all have their own dedicated public procurement portals, which are an excellent source for those looking for tenders in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. These national portals are:

England is served by Contracts Finder
Scotland is served by Public Contracts Scotland
Wales is served by Sell2Wales
Northern Ireland is served by eTendersNI

With Tracker, you won’t need to know how to find tenders because we find them for you. Our procurement tools help businesses find tendering opportunities that are relevant by offering access to our public tender portal and sending out alerts through our Tender Alerts tool as soon as they are published. We publish tender notices daily. Sign up for a free trial today and start bidding on and winning more UK public sector tenders.

Tracker: A Public Sector Tender Service That Works

Public procurement is a lucrative market for suppliers to be involved in, and it covers an extremely diverse range of services. As a result, thousands upon thousands of new opportunities are published around the world every single day. While this means that there are countless new business opportunities waiting to be won, it also means that finding the right contracts for your business can be like finding a needle in a haystack. Knowing how to find public sector tenders is key to winning more business. Read our case studies to discover how our customers save time and money when completing research tasks to find government tenders.

Find Public Tenders the Easy Way with Tracker

With our tender alerts and comprehensive database of public contracts, businesses can find relevant public tenders at the click of a button. This saves time which would previously have been spent trawling through multiple databases and portals trying to find the right tenders and aggregates all of these opportunities for you into one central database.

This way, rather than spending time and effort finding tenders, you can focus on bidding for new and relevant government contracts — and winning them.

Our expertise in public sector procurement intelligence is unparalleled — Sign up for a free trial with Tracker today to find, bid for, and win public tenders the easy way.