United Kingdom
How to find UK public sector tenders (and get alerted for free)
The UK publishes public procurement notices on two official portals. Find a Tender Service (FTS) carries the larger, regulated contracts. Contracts Finder (CF) carries lower-value opportunities from central government, local councils, the NHS and other public bodies. Both are free to search, and both publish their data under the Open Government Licence. That licence is what lets services like ours (and several others) republish and reorganise the same notices legally.
Where UK tender notices come from
Find a Tender Service (find-tender.service.gov.uk) took over from the EU's OJEU/TED publication requirement for UK contracting authorities after Brexit. It covers the higher-value, more heavily regulated procurements. Contracts Finder (contractsfinder.service.gov.uk) covers a much larger volume of lower-value opportunities and, in many cases, contract award notices too. Neither portal asks you to create an account to search or read a notice. You only need one to bid.
What counts as open
A notice is open while it still accepts bids. Check the closing date on the source portal before you put time into a submission: buyers amend notices after first publication, extending deadlines, correcting values, or cancelling procedures outright. We re-check notices on every read and mark the ones we can no longer see as closed, but the portal is always the definitive record.
The free alternatives
Both FTS and CF have free email alerts built in. You can filter by keyword on both, and by CPV code and location on CF. If you only sell in the UK and don't mind running separate alerts on each portal, that costs nothing. What neither portal does is combine FTS, CF and three other countries' feeds into one ranked daily inbox, or tell you how well each notice fits your business. That is the specific job BidHeron does.
How BidHeron's alerts work
We read new and updated notices from FTS and CF every two hours, put them in one schema alongside the EU, US federal and Canadian feeds, and match them against the search you save as an alert (markets, keywords, category, minimum value). The free plan lists every match on your dashboard and emails up to 20 new ones each week. The paid plan, currently $19 a month, sends a daily email, supports up to five saved alerts, and adds a one-line reason and a fit score from 0 to 100 for each match so you can triage faster.
About the data
Source: Find a Tender Service and Contracts Finder, UK government. Licence: Open Government Licence v3.0 ('Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0'). Update cadence: read every two hours; category pages regenerate hourly; the status page shows the last successful read per source. BidHeron does not alter notice facts (title, buyer, deadline, value). Only the summary and fit score are our own generated content.
Questions people ask
- Do I need to register on Find a Tender or Contracts Finder to bid?
- You don't need an account to search or read a notice. To submit a bid you will usually need to register on the relevant portal, and sometimes on a separate e-tendering system named in the notice.
- Is BidHeron's UK data official?
- We republish the same notices FTS and CF publish under the Open Government Licence v3.0, reorganised into our own schema. Always follow the 'View on Find a Tender' or 'View on Contracts Finder' link on a notice page to read the authoritative, most current version before bidding.
- What if I only need UK coverage?
- Pick only 'UK' when you save an alert and you will only ever hear about UK notices. The price is the same however many markets you select.
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.