Find a tender faster — across every UK portal.

What is the UK Find a Tender Service?

The Find a Tender Service (FTS) is the UK government's official portal for higher-value public sector contracts, launched January 2021 after Brexit. It replaced the EU Official Journal (OJEU) and hosts every contract above the UK statutory thresholds — roughly £138,760 for supplies and services, higher for works contracts.

FTS covers central government departments, NHS trusts, local authorities, police and fire services, defence, housing associations, and education institutions. Publication is mandatory for contracts above threshold under the Procurement Act 2023.

Why suppliers look for alternatives

FTS does its job — it hosts every above-threshold contract notice. The limitations are:

• Slow search. The FTS UI is functional but dated. Complex filtering takes time.
• Above-threshold only. Most UK public spending happens BELOW FTS thresholds — those contracts are on Contracts Finder, not FTS. If you only check FTS you miss around 70% of the market by volume.
• No devolved coverage. Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish contracts have their own portals. FTS doesn't aggregate them.
• No keyword alerts. You have to check manually or rely on RSS.
• No buyer intelligence. You can see a notice but not the buyer's history, typical contract values, or win-rate patterns.
• No export tools. Getting a weekly digest of matching tenders requires custom scripting.

How WinAContract compares

WinAContract is a commercial aggregator that includes every FTS notice plus Contracts Finder, Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales, and eTendersNI. Search once, see everything. Daily keyword alerts, value band filtering, buyer profile pages with typical contract sizes, and API access on paid plans.

Basic search is free — no signup required. Use it alongside FTS or as a replacement.

FTS vs Contracts Finder — what's the difference?

Find a Tender Service is for higher-value regulated contracts (above statutory thresholds, ~£139k services / £5.4M works). Contracts Finder is the Cabinet Office portal for lower-value contracts (£12k+ central government, £30k+ other public bodies). A contract above FTS threshold must be listed on BOTH — FTS is the legally required channel for threshold compliance, Contracts Finder is the practical UK-focused channel for buyers and suppliers.

For a comprehensive search you need both. WinAContract indexes both, plus the three devolved portals, and dedupes so you don't see the same contract twice.

Finding tenders for your specific sector

Public-sector tenders cluster into eight practical sectors. WinAContract has dedicated search URLs for each:

• NHS and healthcare — medical equipment, clinical services, facilities
• Local government — councils, waste, social care, highways
• Education — universities, schools, catering, IT
• IT and digital — cloud, software, cyber, digital transformation
• Defence — MoD, security, training
• Housing — housing associations, social housing, regeneration
• Transport — highways, rail, buses
• Facilities management — cleaning, catering, maintenance

Setting up a tender alert

The highest-ROI thing any supplier can do: set a daily keyword alert so new matching tenders arrive in their inbox the morning they're published. Most suppliers lose contracts simply because they spot the tender too late to mount a proper response.

WinAContract's keyword alerts are free, daily, and cover every source portal. Set up an alert in 90 seconds.