Start by registering on Find a Tender and Contracts Finder, then add the devolved portal for your nation and set up saved searches on each. If your supply chain touches councils or the NHS, add Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales or eTendersNI depending on location, and NHS procurement hubs where relevant. Suppliers bidding for notifiable below-threshold contracts should also register for a PPON ahead of 1 April 2026 to avoid delays.
TL;DR:
- Find a Tender has carried pipeline and lifecycle notices since February 2025, letting suppliers track planned procurements before formal invitations appear.
- Use separate tight and exploratory searches, with specific CPV codes, suitable value ranges, buyer filters, and separate inboxes for urgent bids and early notices.
- If you bid across several UK nations or lack monitoring capacity, trial an aggregator and compare its coverage and relevance against notices you already know.
- Revised Procurement Act thresholds apply from January 1, 2026, through December 31, 2027, while Find a Tender is adding performance and payment compliance notices.
Table of Contents
- Where UK public sector tenders are published
- How to set up alerts on Find a Tender, Contracts Finder and devolved portals
- Third party tender alert services and when they earn their keep
- How to choose and configure alert criteria and triage
- Procurement Act, PPON and the 2026 deadlines that change how alerts work
- How an AI workspace turns alerts into finished bids
- What we would do if starting from scratch this year
- Turn your tender alerts into bid-ready responses
- FAQ
- Sources
Where UK public sector tenders are published
Public sector buyers in the UK are required to publish notices on specific portals depending on contract value, nation and sector, so knowing which platform covers which notice type saves hours of searching.
Find a Tender is the UK's national service for above-threshold procurement, and since February 2025 it has also held pipeline and lifecycle notices for many procurements, giving suppliers visibility of opportunities well before a formal invitation to tender appears. Contracts Finder covers England's lower-value, below-threshold contracts and complements Find a Tender for the opportunities that fall under the national thresholds.
The devolved nations run their own portals. Public Contracts Scotland is the primary channel for Scottish public bodies, Sell2Wales serves Welsh contracting authorities, and eTendersNI handles opportunities from Northern Ireland's public sector. NHS trusts and integrated care boards sometimes publish through regional procurement hubs or shared portals, so it is worth checking the relevant health board's own procurement page alongside the national services.
A quick reference for where to look:
- Find a Tender: above-threshold notices, plus pipeline and lifecycle notices since February 2025
- Contracts Finder: below-threshold contracts and award notices for England
- Public Contracts Scotland: Scottish public sector notices
- Sell2Wales: Welsh public sector notices
- eTendersNI: Northern Ireland public sector notices, including registered email alerts
How to set up alerts on Find a Tender, Contracts Finder and devolved portals
Each portal lets you build a saved search, but the quality of your alerts depends entirely on how carefully you configure the filters at the start.
- Register an account on each relevant portal and locate the saved search or alert function.
- Add CPV codes that match your core services rather than broad category codes, since narrow codes cut irrelevant noise significantly.
- Set the notice type you want to track: pipeline, planned procurement, live tender or award notice, depending on how early you want visibility.
- Define a value range that matches your delivery capacity so you are not alerted to contracts far outside your scale.
- Add buyer organisation filters if you already have relationships with specific councils, trusts or departments.
- Save the search and confirm the alert frequency, usually daily or weekly depending on the portal.
For an IT services firm, a sensible filter combination might pair CPV codes for software development or IT consultancy with a value range matched to typical contract sizes in that sector. A facilities management business would instead combine cleaning, maintenance or grounds CPV codes with a wider geographic radius, while a healthcare supplier would add NHS-specific buyer filters alongside clinical or medical equipment CPV codes.
Where RSS or API feeds are available, route them into a shared inbox, a Slack channel or a project management tool so the whole bid team sees new notices without logging into each portal separately.
Pro Tip: Run your saved searches unchanged for two weeks before widening the criteria, so you get a true read on relevance before you start adding noise.
Third party tender alert services and when they earn their keep
Portal alerts are free and official, but they only show what each individual portal publishes, which means a national supplier chasing opportunities across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland ends up juggling four or five separate accounts.
Third-party aggregators index multiple portals into a single feed and typically add features the government portals do not offer:
- AI relevance scoring that ranks notices against your company's capability profile rather than simple keyword matches
- Winnability metrics that estimate your chances based on buyer history and contract pattern
- Custom pipelines that track a notice from first alert through to submission
- Consolidated daily or weekly digests covering every portal you need in one place
Aggregators tend to help most when you are bidding nationally, operating across more than one devolved nation, or running a small bid team with no spare capacity to monitor five portals manually. If you are only ever bidding into one local authority area, the official portal alone may be enough.
Before paying for any vendor, run a short trial: check coverage against notices you already know were published, measure the relevance rate of what lands in your inbox, and review a sample daily digest for noise. One G-Cloud listed platform, for example, applies AI scoring to procurement notices so that full-text matching replaces title-only keyword searches, which tends to produce far fewer false positives. Partner services such as Betterpresence extend this further, automating discovery and eligibility matching for grants and tenders across Europe for organisations without an in-house bid team.
How to choose and configure alert criteria and triage
Good filters stop good opportunities getting lost among dozens of irrelevant notices, so it pays to build your criteria deliberately rather than leaving them on default settings.
Judge each filter against five things: CPV match depth, estimated contract value, buyer fit based on past relationships, contract type (framework versus direct award), and geography relative to your delivery footprint.
Three templates work well for most teams:
- Tight: narrow CPV codes, matched value range and known buyers, for high-probability bids worth immediate attention
- Balanced: wider CPV codes and value range, for a steady pipeline of credible opportunities
- Exploratory: broad sector codes and pipeline notices, for early market awareness and preliminary market engagement before formal tenders appear
Route each template to a different inbox or team member, apply a short review service level agreement so nothing sits unread, and tag and export promising notices into your CRM or pipeline tool so you can track them through to submission.
Pro Tip: Give your exploratory search its own inbox, since mixing it with tight, high-priority alerts buries the bids you need to act on fastest.
Procurement Act, PPON and the 2026 deadlines that change how alerts work
Two dates matter for anyone relying on tender alerts in 2026. From 1 January 2026, Procurement Policy Note 023 sets revised threshold amounts that determine which contracts count as above threshold under the Procurement Act. These revised thresholds apply through to 31 December 2027.
From 1 April 2026, contracting authorities will need to obtain and publish suppliers' unique identifiers, known as a PPON, for notifiable below-threshold contracts, according to new legislative requirements under the Procurement Act 2023. Early registration on the Cabinet Office's central digital platform reduces the risk of delay when you are awarded a notifiable below-threshold contract after that date. The same guidance confirms that Find a Tender will carry new data types, including contract performance notices and payments compliance notices, which should give suppliers more signal to work with once those fields are used consistently across notices.
A practical checklist for suppliers:
- Register on the central digital platform and obtain your PPON ahead of 1 April 2026
- Update your supplier records with the new unique identifier
- Watch for new identifier and performance fields appearing in notices on Find a Tender
We cover the detailed buyer-side obligations in our guide to the Procurement Act 2026, and the supplier registration steps in our PPON guide for council tenders.
How an AI workspace turns alerts into finished bids
Receiving an alert is only the first step. We built a workspace to take a matched tender and carry it through requirements analysis, accreditation checks and drafting, using your own evidence library of past responses and social value case studies rather than generic AI text. Notices come in, our requirements analysis flags what the buyer is actually asking for, accreditation checks confirm you can bid, and drafting pulls from evidence you already hold.
If you want the fuller workflow from portal alert to submission, our guide on finding tenders faster walks through the six steps.
What we would do if starting from scratch this year
Register on Find a Tender first, then set two saved searches within the first week: one tight, one exploratory. Register for a PPON well before April, and run a 30-day trial of an AI-assisted workspace alongside your free portal alerts before deciding whether the paid coverage earns its cost.
— Syed
Turn your tender alerts into bid-ready responses
Portal alerts tell you an opportunity exists, but turning that notice into a strong, evidenced response is where most small teams lose time. The workspace sits right after the alert: it pulls in matched tenders, checks the requirements against your accreditations, and drafts from your own evidence library instead of starting cold.
If you want to see how alert-to-draft works in practice, start on our Free plan and measure how many matched tenders and first drafts you get through in your first fortnight.
FAQ
What are the latest updates on UK procurement law?
The Procurement Act 2023 brings revised threshold amounts effective from 1 January 2026, set out in PPN 023. From 1 April 2026, contracting authorities must also obtain and publish a PPON, a unique supplier identifier, for notifiable below-threshold contracts, as set out in the Cabinet Office's guidance.
What are the best websites to find tenders in the UK?
Find a Tender and Contracts Finder cover England and above-threshold UK-wide notices, while Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales and eTendersNI cover their respective nations. Checking the right combination depends on where you deliver and the contract values you target.
Which tender website is best?
There is no single best site, since each portal publishes different notices by nation and value. Suppliers bidding nationally typically need accounts on Find a Tender, Contracts Finder and the relevant devolved portal, and some add a third-party aggregator to consolidate the feeds.
Where are NHS tenders published?
NHS tenders above threshold appear on Find a Tender, with lower-value English NHS contracts also listed on Contracts Finder. Individual NHS trusts and integrated care boards sometimes publish through regional procurement hubs, so checking the relevant board's own procurement page is worthwhile alongside the national portals.