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Contracts Finder email alerts, and what they cannot do.
Setting up a Contracts Finder alert takes about five minutes and costs nothing. Understanding what it will and will not put in your inbox takes slightly longer, and matters more, because since February 2025 the service has quietly stopped being where most new UK opportunities appear.
First, check you are watching the right service
The Procurement Act 2023 took effect for new UK procurements on 24 February 2025. Since then, Find a Tender has been the central digital platform where public buyers publish notices. Find a Tender's own service information states that from that date "both above and below threshold notices about new UK procurements will be published on this service, except below threshold in Scotland".
Contracts Finder has not closed. It still receives notices, but mostly from procurements that began under the older rules. In the week of 24 to 30 August 2026, the official Contracts Finder API returned 680 notices: 562 were award records, 50 were new tender opportunities, and the rest were amendments and early pipeline notices.
So set up Contracts Finder alerts by all means. Just set up the Find a Tender ones first.
How to set up a Contracts Finder alert
- Search first, register second. Go to Contracts Finder and run a search without an account, so you can see what your criteria actually return before you commit to receiving them by email.
- Set your keywords. The keyword box searches contract title, description, buyer and supplier. The service supports three syntaxes: separate words are an OR search, so radio television finds either; joining words with a plus and no spaces is an AND search, so administration+defence requires both; and quote marks find an exact phrase.
- Narrow with the filters. Location by region or by postcode with a radius from 5 to 50 miles. Value by minimum and maximum contract value. Industry by CPV code, using the browse tool. Publication date range.
- Choose a procurement stage. Early engagement means an idea still being developed and interest is being judged. Future opportunity is prior notice of something not yet open to bids. Opportunity means bids are being accepted now. Awarded contract means it is done.
- Consider the suitability filters. You can restrict to notices flagged as suitable for SMEs, defined as organisations with fewer than 250 employees, or for VCSEs. You can also filter for supply chain notices, which are subcontracts published by suppliers rather than by public buyers.
- Save the search. Choose Save search on the results page. You will be prompted to sign in or register. Contracts Finder uses Supplier Registration accounts, and you pick Supplier as your organisation type in order to search and apply for notices.
- Turn on the email. Saving puts the search in your saved searches list so you can re-run it, and in the service's own words, "you can choose to receive emails when new notices are published that meet your search criteria".
The equivalent on Find a Tender
Find a Tender works the same way with a different front door. It offers Notice Search for individual notices and a newer Summarised Search that groups every notice from one procurement into a single view, though that view only covers procurements published from February 2025 onwards.
Accounts use GOV.UK One Login rather than Supplier Registration, so if your firm already has a One Login for another government service you can reuse it. Once signed in you can register your organisation, save search criteria and sign up for notifications by email. If you intend to bid rather than browse, registering on the platform is worth doing early: some frameworks now require suppliers to be registered on the central digital platform before they can bid at all.
Four things an alert cannot do for you
It cannot tell whether you are eligible. Alerts match words, codes, values and places. Conditions of participation, required certifications, insurance levels and demanded reference projects usually sit in the tender pack behind a portal, not in the notice text a keyword search reads.
It cannot resolve the keyword trade-off. Broad terms drown you. A search for "design" collects uniform design, highway design and service design without distinguishing them. Narrow terms lose you the job where the buyer wrote "digital estate transformation" and meant a website. There is no setting that fixes both, because the problem is that matching is not understanding.
It cannot rank. Everything that matched arrives with equal weight. The three-line notice for a £9,000 leaflet job and the framework that could carry your studio for two years look identical in an inbox until someone opens both.
It cannot see what was never advertised. Below-threshold rules only apply when a buyer chooses to advertise. A buyer entitled to ask three known suppliers for quotes may publish nothing until the contract details notice appears after award. No alert catches that in time, because there was nothing to catch.
The honest comparison with what we do
TenderVerdict is not a better alert. It is a different job. We read Find a Tender and Contracts Finder every night through their official APIs, along with TED and BOAMP, and instead of matching your keywords we judge each relevant notice against a capability profile built from your own website: what you do, where you work, your team size, your certifications, your minimum contract value. At 8am you get one email with three verdicts. BID means the published notice fits and here is why. STRETCH means winnable with a named gap, and the gap has to be named. SKIP means not for you, in one line, and the skips are shown rather than hidden so you can audit what was thrown away. Every brief ends with a count of how many notices were read, how many came from your countries and how many were close enough to judge, so an empty morning reads as "nothing worth your time" rather than "something broke". Setup is a domain and an email address. The free tier is a Monday digest; daily briefs are €99 a month. The limit worth stating plainly: we judge the published notice, not the tender pack, so a BID is where your reading starts, not where it ends.
If you only do one thing this week
Register on Find a Tender, save one deliberately narrow search that describes the work you would clear a fortnight for, and turn its email on. Then save one wide search on Contracts Finder filtered to awarded contracts in your sector, and read it as competitor research rather than as a source of leads. The first tells you what is coming. The second tells you who keeps beating you to it, and what they charged.
Common questions
Do I need an account to search Contracts Finder?
No. Searching is open to anyone. You need an account only to save a search and receive email when new notices match it. Contracts Finder uses Supplier Registration accounts, and you register as a Supplier to search and apply for notices.
How many alerts can I set up?
Contracts Finder does not publish a stated cap on saved searches. The practical limit is your patience: each saved search is a separate email stream, and running several broad ones produces more mail than most small teams read.
Should I set alerts on Contracts Finder or Find a Tender?
Find a Tender first. Since 24 February 2025 new UK procurements publish there, above and below threshold, except below-threshold notices in Scotland. Set Contracts Finder alerts as a secondary net for older procurements still finishing and for supply chain subcontract notices.
Can I filter alerts by contract value?
Yes. The search has minimum and maximum contract value fields, alongside CPV code, region or postcode radius, procurement stage, notice status and SME or VCSE suitability. The filters are good. What they cannot do is judge whether you would win.
Why do my alerts return so much that is irrelevant?
Because keyword matching has no idea what you do. A search for design catches uniform design, road design and service design. Narrowing the keywords fixes the noise and creates the opposite problem: the notice that was worth your week gets filtered out because the buyer used a different word.
What is a supply chain notice?
A subcontract published by a supplier rather than a public buyer, to support delivery of a publicly funded contract. Contracts Finder lets you filter for them. For a small agency they can be an easier first route in than bidding as a prime contractor.
Are Contracts Finder alerts free?
Yes. Searching, registering, saving searches and receiving email notifications are all free. So is the equivalent on Find a Tender. Nobody needs to pay to see UK public notices; the cost of tendering is the time spent reading them.
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