How to find out who won a public contract — and what they were really paid
The winner is easy. The amount is where award data goes wrong, and a framework ceiling read as revenue can overstate a company by a factor of ten.
Every UK and Irish public contract above threshold produces an award notice naming the supplier. Finding the winner is a search. Finding out what they were actually paid is where it gets difficult, and where most published analysis quietly goes wrong.
Where the answer lives
- Contract award notice — names the winner, starts the standstill period. May carry a value; often does not.
- Contract details notice — published after signature, and usually the better source for value and term.
- Contracts Finder archive — for anything awarded before February 2025, this is where the history is.
- TED — for Irish above-threshold awards and residual GB notices.
A single procurement generates several of these, and the same procurement can appear on more than one service. Counting notices instead of procurements is the first way to be wrong, and it is the easiest to fix: deduplicate on the procurement identifier before you count anything.
The four ways award data misleads
1. A framework ceiling is not revenue
A framework's published value is the maximum that may be called off across its life, by any buyer, from any supplier on it. It is capacity, not money awarded. One Crown Commercial Service facilities framework states £120bn.
2. A multi-supplier award has no per-supplier split
When a notice names four suppliers and one value, the honest reading is that £10m went to those four in proportions the buyer did not publish. Dividing by four invents a number. Giving each of them £10m inflates the market fourfold. Both are common.
3. The value on an award notice is sometimes an estimate
Where a buyer names a winner but publishes no awarded amount, the only figure on the notice is the pre-award estimate. Treating that as an outcome credits the supplier with a number nobody has agreed to pay them.
4. Sterling and euro get added together
Irish awards are denominated in euro. Any UK-and-Ireland total that produces one number has either converted at an unstated rate on an unstated date, or simply added them. Neither is defensible in a board paper.
What a defensible method looks like
| The notice says | Attribute | Why |
|---|---|---|
| An itemised amount for this supplier | That amount | The buyer stated it |
| One value, one named supplier | The whole value | There is nobody else it could belong to |
| One value, several named suppliers | Nothing — count the award, not the money | The split is unknown, and inventing one is worse than admitting it |
| A framework ceiling | Nothing | Capacity is not revenue |
| A pre-award estimate only | Nothing | An estimate is not an outcome |
The consequence of this method is that it understates. A supplier whose buyers publish vaguely will look smaller than they are. That is the correct direction to be wrong in when the output names real companies: a total that is too low is a gap in the published record, while a total that is too high is a claim about a business that is not true.
Reading an incumbent properly
- Find every award naming them, across services, deduplicated by procurement.
- Separate what is attributable from what is merely associated — a shared framework place is not a contract.
- Look at term and end dates. A five-year contract awarded in 2022 is a 2027 opportunity, and that is your date to prepare for.
- Check contract change notices. Extensions move the re-let and tell you the buyer is reluctant to go back to market.
- Look at which buyers they win from repeatedly. Concentration is a weakness you can bid against.
TenderGraph does this on every supplier it holds, free and without an account: search any company to see their award history, what was attributable, which buyers they win from, and how it has moved year on year. The attribution rules above are published rather than implied, because a number you cannot interrogate is not evidence.
Common questions
- Is award information public for every contract?
- For above-threshold contracts, yes — publication is mandatory. Below threshold the picture is patchier, and framework call-offs frequently generate no separate advertisement at all.
- Why does the same company appear under several names?
- Buyers type the supplier name by hand. The same firm appears as 'Acme Ltd', 'ACME LIMITED' and 'Acme Ltd.' across notices. Grouping those is necessary; grouping too aggressively is worse, because merging a parent with a subsidiary publishes one company's contracts under another's name.
- Can I see the actual contract?
- Often, yes. Contract details notices for larger contracts include the contract document, redacted where commercially sensitive. It is the best available read on scope, KPIs and exit terms before you bid against it.
- How far back does award data go?
- Contracts Finder reaches to 2015 for England. Find a Tender's archive begins at its February 2025 launch. Anything older than early 2025 is therefore a Contracts Finder or TED question.
Read next
- Every notice the Procurement Act created, and what it tells a supplierTransparency was the point, and it worked — the trail is now long enough to read a buyer's intentions months ahead, if you know which notices to watch.
- Framework agreements — the competition you are probably missingMost public money now moves through frameworks. If you are watching tender notices you are watching the wrong thing, because the competition that mattered happened years ago.
- Find a Tender vs Contracts Finder — what is actually on eachTwo official services, overlapping since February 2025, still not interchangeable. Here is what each one holds and what neither of them will show you.