Find a Tender vs Contracts Finder — what is actually on each

If you sell to the UK public sector, someone has told you to check Contracts Finder. Someone else has told you Find a Tender is the real one. Both are official, both are free, and the honest answer is that the split between them changed in February 2025 and most advice has not caught up.

This is what each service holds today, what the change actually did, and — the part nobody writes down — which opportunities appear on neither.

The short version

What changed on 24 February 2025

The Procurement Act 2023 went live, and with it a single central digital platform. From that date, both above-threshold and below-threshold notices for new UK procurements publish on Find a Tender — with one carve-out that matters if you sell in Scotland, which we come back to below.

Before that date, the division was cleaner and the advice you have probably been given was right: Find a Tender for the big stuff, Contracts Finder for everything under threshold in England. After it, Find a Tender is the primary service and Contracts Finder is increasingly the archive.

Why the archive still matters

Contracts Finder reaches back to 2015. Find a Tender's OCDS archive starts at its February 2025 launch. That single fact decides which service answers which question.

• "What can I bid on this month?" — Find a Tender, and it is close to complete.
• "Who holds this contract now, and what did they win it for?" — the answer is usually in an award notice published years ago, which means Contracts Finder.
• "Is this buyer a repeat customer for my kind of work?" — you need several years of award notices, so both.

This is why incumbency research is harder than opportunity search. The notice telling you a contract is being re-let is easy to find; the notice telling you who won it last time, for how much, and for how long is in a different service under a different notice type.

What appears on neither

Both services carry notices that buyers are required to publish. A great deal of public spending is not, or is published somewhere else first.

Below-threshold work in Scotland and Wales

Scottish below-threshold notices are the carve-out from the February 2025 change: they continue on Public Contracts Scotland rather than moving to Find a Tender. Welsh below-threshold work has its own long-running home on Sell2Wales. Neither shows up if you only watch the two UK-wide services.

Framework call-offs

When a buyer calls off from a framework they already sit on, there is frequently no new advertisement at all — the competition happened when the framework was awarded, sometimes years earlier. The visible signal is the framework award notice, not the work itself. If you are not on the framework, the first you hear of it is a contract details notice after the fact.

Portal-first opportunities

Many councils, NHS trusts and universities run their procurement through a portal — ProContract, In-tend, EU Supply, Atamis and others. Formal notices reach the national services, but the portal often carries the opportunity first, along with quick quotes and low-value work that never triggers a notice at all.

How to cover the whole picture

1. Treat Find a Tender as your primary current-opportunity feed, not Contracts Finder.
2. Add Public Contracts Scotland and Sell2Wales if you sell in either nation — they are not optional extras, they are where a whole tier of work lives.
3. Use Contracts Finder's archive for incumbency: who won, what for, and when it ends.
4. Watch framework award notices in your sector. A framework you are not on is a two-to-four-year exclusion from that buyer, and the notice is your warning.
5. Register on the portals your target buyers actually use. The national services tell you a portal exists; they do not replace it.

TenderGraph does all five in one place, and publishes exactly which sources it holds and how fresh each one is — including the categories nobody can cover, because a coverage claim you cannot audit is not worth much.