There are two official UK government tender portals. They look similar, they are both free, they both list public contracts, and they overlap enough to be confusing.
Suppliers usually pick one, check it for a while, decide public sector work is thin in their sector, and stop. Which one they picked determines what they concluded — because the two portals carry systematically different work.
The one-line answer
Find a Tender carries the big contracts. Contracts Finder carries the small ones.
If you can deliver a £3m contract, watch Find a Tender. If your sweet spot is £30,000 to £200,000 — which is most SMEs — Contracts Finder is where your work is, and a Find a Tender-only habit will make the market look empty.
That is the practical difference. The reasons behind it are worth knowing, because they explain the gaps.
Find a Tender
Find a Tender replaced the UK's use of the EU's Tenders Electronic Daily after Brexit, and under the Procurement Act 2023 it became the central digital platform — the single official publication point for notices the Act requires.
It carries above-threshold procurement. From 1 January 2026 that means roughly:
- £135,018 for central government goods and services
- £207,720 for the wider public sector — councils, NHS trusts, universities, police
- £5,193,000 for works
- £663,540 for light touch services, the category covering most health, social and community services
All of those are inclusive of VAT, and they are revised every two years, so check the current figures before relying on them.
Find a Tender also carries everything else the Act introduced: pipeline notices, preliminary market engagement notices, planned procurement notices, dynamic market notices, contract performance notices and payment compliance notices. If you want to see what a buyer intends to do rather than what it has already decided, this is the portal.
It covers England, Wales and Northern Ireland, plus reserved UK-wide bodies operating in Scotland.
Contracts Finder
Contracts Finder is the below-threshold portal, and for a small supplier it is usually the more valuable one.
Contracting authorities must publish opportunities there once they pass £12,000 including VAT for central government or £30,000 including VAT for everyone else. Above those floors and below the Find a Tender thresholds sits an enormous volume of ordinary public spending: maintenance, small works, professional services, training, equipment, one-off consultancy.
This is the winnable band. A national contractor does not chase a £48,000 contract. A ten-person company can deliver it, and the reference it produces is what makes the next, larger bid credible.
Contracts Finder also carries awarded-contract records, which is a research tool most suppliers never use. You can see who won similar work, for how much, and when it runs out.
Why you see the same contract twice
Above-threshold notices frequently appear on both portals, plus on the buyer's own eProcurement platform. Treat a listing as a sighting of a contract, not as a separate contract, and deduplicate by reference number rather than by title — the same procurement often has three slightly different titles across three systems.
What neither portal reliably shows you
This is the part that matters most, and it is why "I watch both, so I see everything" is not true.
Scotland is largely elsewhere. The Procurement Act does not apply to devolved Scottish authorities. Scottish councils, NHS boards and universities publish on Public Contracts Scotland under Scottish regulations. Find a Tender will show you reserved bodies operating in Scotland and very little else.
Wales and Northern Ireland have their own front doors. Sell2Wales and eTendersNI carry work that a Find a Tender search can miss, especially at the smaller end.
The competition usually runs somewhere else. The notice is on the national portal; the documents, the clarification log and the submission box live on ProContract, Delta eSourcing, Jaggaer, In-Tend, Atamis, MultiQuote or EU Supply. Suppliers who only watch the notice boards find out late and start behind.
Framework call-offs often are not advertised at all. If a buyer has a framework in place, the competition happened when the framework was set up. Nothing new appears on either portal.
Under-floor work is invisible by design. Below £12,000 or £30,000 there is no obligation to advertise. Buyers go to suppliers they already know — which is an argument for getting a small first contract, and for being on the supplier lists of the bodies near you.
So which should you watch?
Both, plus the devolved portal for wherever you operate, plus the two or three platforms your buyers actually use.
That is four to six portals, each with its own registration, its own search syntax and its own alert system. Which is exactly why so many suppliers end up watching one and concluding there is nothing there.
A search that covers all of them
TendersHub monitors 10,500+ live UK tenders from Find a Tender, Contracts Finder, Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales, eTendersNI and the eProcurement platforms behind them — in one search, refreshed daily, deduplicated.
You set the value band, the region and the kind of work you do once, and see what genuinely fits, rather than deciding the market is empty because you were standing at the wrong door.