Find a Tender vs Contracts Finder: Which to Use in 2026 (and How to Set Alerts)

Use Find a Tender. It is the central digital platform under the Procurement Act 2023 and it carries every UK public procurement that started on or after 24 February 2025. Do not drop Contracts Finder yet though: below-threshold notices, which is most of the work an SME actually wins, do not have to move off it until 1 May 2027.

I run a subcontracting model - win the work, sub the delivery, keep the spread - and public sector repairs and maintenance is some of the most reliable demand there is. Most of the advice you will find on this question was written before February 2025 and quietly describes a regime that no longer exists. This post is the current answer, including the two 2026 changes that have not made it into the listicles yet, plus the part they never get to: what these portals cannot show you.

What changed, and what changed again in 2026#

Three dates matter.

24 February 2025. The Procurement Act 2023 went live and the central digital platform launched, with Find a Tender as its front end. One place to publish notices, one place to register as a supplier, one supplier record reused across bids.

1 April 2026. The Procurement (Amendment) Regulations 2026 made the central digital platform the primary publication service for notices under the Act. Two duties landed with it. Buyers now publish details of every payment over 30,000 pounds made under contracts procured on or after that date, quarterly, with the first reports due by 29 July 2026. And suppliers awarded below-threshold contracts have to be registered on the platform and hand the buyer their unique identifier.

1 July 2026. The Procurement (Amendment) (No. 2) Regulations 2026 came into force and deferred, by seven months, the date authorities must stop publishing below-threshold contract notices on Contracts Finder. That was due to bite on 1 October 2026. It now applies from 1 May 2027.

That last one is the reason a "just use Find a Tender" answer is incomplete right now. For the next several months the sub-threshold band - the 30,000 to 200,000 pound jobs that are the bread and butter of a small contractor - is still being advertised on the old portal by plenty of authorities.

The below-threshold registration duty is worth reading carefully too, because it is narrower than it sounds. Registration is not a condition of bidding; only the winning supplier has to confirm it at award. It is basic registration, not the full supplier information pack. And if you registered for an earlier procurement, you are already done.

Find a Tender vs Contracts Finder: the actual split#

	Find a Tender	Contracts Finder
What it is	The central digital platform under the Procurement Act 2023	The older England portal it is replacing
What is on it	Everything started on or after 24 February 2025	Pre-Act procurements, plus below-threshold notices until 1 May 2027
Status	Primary publication service for notices since 1 April 2026	Live, no announced closure date
Cost	Free	Free
Where you register to bid	Here	Not the registration route

The honest read: Contracts Finder has not switched off and it has not been emptied. Long framework and contract lifecycles mean notices about pre-Act procurements keep appearing there, because further notices about a procurement have to follow the legislation it started under - and the below-threshold deferral keeps live small work flowing onto it into 2027.

So during the transition, do not pick one. Set a saved search on both. Assuming a single portal covers everything is the most common way to miss work that was sitting in plain sight.

Registering: the PPON and the tell-us-once pack#

You register once on the central digital platform and it gives you a PPON - a Public Procurement Organisation Number, your unique supplier identifier. Every bid afterwards reuses the same core record instead of retyping it into another questionnaire.

What the core supplier information asks for:

• Basic details: name, address, Companies House number, VAT number if you have one, and any relevant qualifications or trade assurances.
• Economic and financial standing: recent accounts.
• Connected persons: names, addresses and details of anyone with significant control.
• Exclusions: whether any mandatory or discretionary exclusion grounds apply to you.

Two things worth knowing. If you had an old Find a Tender account, you have to re-register and enter your organisation information again - it did not carry over. And you only need to register at the point you want to bid, so there is no penalty for setting alerts up first and registering when something lands.

This is the same document stack every buyer asks for, public or private. Build it once properly and it answers council portals, housing association lists and Tier 1 supply chain forms with almost no rework - I covered the buyer-by-buyer version in how to get on a council approved contractor list.

How to set alerts that actually reach you#

The portals are free. The discipline is not. Three things separate contractors who win public work from contractors who browse it:

1. Save searches, do not visit. Build a saved search per service you actually deliver, not one giant search. "Roofing", "planned maintenance" and "responsive repairs" surface different notices from the same buyer.
2. Search by CPV code as well as by words. Buyers write titles badly and inconsistently. Codes do not care how the officer phrased it.
3. Set a geography you can actually service. A national alert is noise you will stop reading in three weeks, and an alert you stop reading is worth nothing.

Then read every notice for the deadline before you read it for the work. Public timetables are short and immovable, and the most common way a capable firm loses a live opportunity is finding it four days before close with a questionnaire still to complete.

The thresholds that decide whether you ever see the job#

Not every pound of public spend gets advertised, and knowing where the lines sit tells you which work to chase through a portal and which to chase directly.

From 1 January 2026, contracts at or above these values, including VAT, are above-threshold and follow the full regime:

Contract type	Threshold from 1 Jan 2026
Central government goods and services	135,018 pounds
Sub-central goods and services	207,720 pounds
Works	5,193,000 pounds
Light touch services	663,540 pounds
Utilities goods and services	415,440 pounds

Below those, a contract is "notifiable below-threshold" - and so has to be advertised - if it is worth at least 12,000 pounds for a central government authority, including NHS bodies, or at least 30,000 pounds for any other contracting authority. Those figures include VAT. The government guidance on below-threshold contracts sets out the notice duties in full.

Read that as a map. Under 30,000 pounds with a council, nobody publishes anything and no alert will help you - that work is won by being on the list before the job exists. Between the floors and the thresholds, a saved search on both portals is genuinely most of the strategy.

Where both portals go blind#

Here is the part that matters most to how I run the model, and the reason I do not treat portal alerts as a work-winning plan on their own.

A notice board can only show you buyers who are legally obliged to publish. Of the 557 UK work sources we hold in our directory, 159 are public sector buyers whose notices reach these portals - councils, housing associations, NHS bodies, universities, frameworks and consortia. Another 140 are private buyers who never publish a notice anywhere: Tier 1 contractors' subcontractor supply chains, insurance repair networks and loss adjusters, managing agents and block managers, housebuilders, and commercial and institutional landlords. The remaining 258 are marketplaces, agencies, accreditations and aggregators - routes to work rather than buyers of it.

So the free portals, used well, reach under a third of the doors. The private 140 do not run tenders you can subscribe to. You get in by registering on their supply chain portal, clearing their vetting, and being on the list when a reactive job drops - the same motion as a council approved list, without the public notice that tells you it happened.

That asymmetry is the whole opportunity. Everyone chasing public work is looking at the same free notice board on the same morning. Nobody is competing with you for a door they have never heard of.

A tender alert tells you about work that is already a competition. The gates nobody advertises are where the margin lives.

If you want the mapped version rather than the summary, the full set of work-winning gates - every portal, supply chain form and panel we have verified, with the registration route for each - lives inside PlanaJob, the platform I use to run the jobs once they land.

The next step#

Set both saved searches tonight. It takes twenty minutes and it is free. Then spend the following week on the part that compounds: registering with the private buyers in your patch who will never send you a notice, and getting your document pack good enough that the next questionnaire is a copy and paste. For the wider picture, start with what construction arbitrage actually is, then how to find clients for the full demand map and the master portal registrations for the accounts that cover many buyers at once.

Last checked: 6 September 2026.