How to find council IT tenders (and get on the tender lists)

Three places matter, and one habit. All of them are free to search and free to register on.

Contracts Finder — the place most below-threshold English work appears

This is the government’s own notice service. GOV.UK says of it: “You can create an account to get email updates and save your searches. You can still search and apply for contracts without an account.” Publishing there is not optional for buyers: the government’s guidance for smaller suppliers includes “requiring the public sector to publish its contracts on Contracts Finder”. Most of the council, college and police IT notices in our snapshot came from it.

Find a Tender — the national service, and where the bigger work goes

Find a Tender states plainly that it “is where public sector buyers publish notices about procurements opportunities and contracts”. Its own wording on scope is worth copying down, because it decides which portal you need to watch:

• From 24 February 2025, both above and below threshold notices about new UK procurements are published on Find a Tender — “except below threshold in Scotland”.
• For procurements that started before that date, only above-threshold notices are there, “usually over £139,688 including VAT”.
• Below-threshold information sits elsewhere, and Find a Tender names the places: Contracts Finder “for England and other non-devolved territories”, Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales, and eSourcing NI / eTendersNI for Northern Ireland.

The devolved portals, and the buyer’s own portal

• Public Contracts Scotland offers “free registration as a supplier or buyer” and a Suppliers Area with notice search. Scottish above-threshold notices also appear on Find a Tender; Scottish below-threshold ones do not.
• Sell2Wales is the Welsh route, with a free account and an alerts profile you set up yourself (steps below).
• eTendersNI is where Northern Ireland notices and tender documents live. The health notice in our snapshot is published on Find a Tender and then sends you to eTendersNI to download the documents and submit a tender.
• Then the buyer’s own e-tendering portal. This is the one that catches people out. The notice is a signpost, not the procurement. The college website notice in our snapshot tells you to register on suppliers.multiquote.com and quote the reference CA18461; the documents for the Northern Ireland health notice are, in the notice’s own words, “available for unrestricted and full direct access, free of charge” on eTendersNI, and tenders must be submitted there. If you do not already have an account on that portal, your afternoon just got shorter.

Two of these take about ten minutes. Do them before you read another word about bid writing — an alert that arrives while a notice is still open is worth more than any amount of theory.

Contracts Finder

1. Register an account. You choose your organisation type; the service notes that if you already have a Supplier Registration account you sign in with the same details.
2. Search notices. The keyword syntax is on the search page itself: a space means OR (“radio television” finds either word), a plus with no spaces means AND (“administration+defence”), and quotes mean an exact phrase.
3. Run one search per thing you sell (“network+infrastructure”, “service desk”, “backup”, the product names you actually install), set the region and value filters, then save the search and switch on email updates. GOV.UK states an account gives you email updates and saved searches.
4. Do not make one clever search. Make three blunt ones. Alerts match the words you typed, and nothing else.

Find a Tender

1. Sign in or register — the service uses a GOV.UK One Login. There is no charge and nothing to apply for.
2. Register a supplier organisation (the site lists this alongside saving searches as what an account is for).
3. Search, then use Save search on the results page. It says: “Sign in to save this search … It will be in your list of saved searches, so you can easily run it again.”
4. Turn on email notifications. Find a Tender lists “save search criteria” and “sign up for notifications via email” as the things an account lets you do.
5. On individual notices there is also a Watch this notice action, which adds it to a watched notices list — useful for the two or three you are deciding on.

Public Contracts Scotland

1. Register — described on the site as free registration for suppliers or buyers — then use the Suppliers Area and notice search.
2. The Scottish process itself is documented for suppliers at supplierjourney.scot and procurementjourney.scot, both linked from Public Contracts Scotland.

Sell2Wales (Wales)

1. Register on the Central Digital Platform first to get your Unique Identifier — the Sell2Wales guidance says this is required before you can register on Sell2Wales, and existing suppliers have to update their profile with it.
2. Register on Sell2Wales (free) and complete both your Public Profile and your Alerts Profile.
3. The Alerts Profile is the useful one: it says it “will allow you to receive email alerts for contract opportunities that are relevant to your business”, and that you pick product categories — the CPV codes — to narrow what you are sent.

eTendersNI (Northern Ireland)

1. Register on eTendersNI. Northern Ireland notices and documents live there; Find a Tender names eSourcing NI and eTendersNI as the below-threshold routes for the region.
2. When a Find a Tender notice points at eTendersNI for the documents, that is your cue to already have an account.

A notice is a form, not a sales pitch. The fields below are the ones that decide whether you keep reading; everything else can wait until you have decided it is worth opening. The examples are from real notices in the shortlist further down this page.

• Status, first line. Contracts Finder prints an explicit flag: “Open opportunity - This means that the contract is currently active, and the buying department is looking for potential suppliers to fulfil the contract.” If it is an award notice, a prior information notice, or there is no closing date, stop reading.
• Closing date and time. Contracts Finder shows “Closing: 29 September 2026, 12pm”; Find a Tender shows a date and “Local time 3:00pm”. Two weeks from publication means the buyer already knows what they want and you will be writing from their documents immediately. Four to six weeks means there is room to think.
• The value, and how it is stated. Contracts Finder shows “Value of contract” (the college notice says £25,000); Find a Tender shows “Estimated total value… Value excluding VAT” (the health notice says £243,478). Those are not the same measure, so do not compare one portal’s figure with the other’s. Where the notice says nothing, the buyer published no value: that is an unknown, not a small contract.
• “Suitable for SMEs”. Contracts Finder carries the buyer’s own flags for SMEs and VCSEs (the college notice answers Yes, and No to VCSEs). It is a permission, not a prediction — it tells you nobody is barring you, not that a small firm will win.
• Procedure type. Contracts Finder explains its own field: “Open procedure — Any interested supplier may submit a tender in response to an opportunity notice.” Open is the best case. A restricted procedure or a framework call-off means there is a stage, or a list, before you can tender — and you may already be off it.
• Lots. Look for “This contract is divided into lots”. Where it is, one lot can be the size you actually want and the headline value on the notice is irrelevant. Where it is not, the scope is the whole scope.
• Duration, extensions and renewal. Find a Tender gives you “Duration in months” (29 on the health notice), an options line (“Optional extension period(s) of up to 2 years”) and a renewal line (“This contract is subject to renewal: No”). A support contract with extensions is worth more over its life than the headline figure suggests. “Subject to renewal: no” tells you it is a one-off sale, not a recurring one.
• Where the documents are, and how you submit. Usually not on the notice site. The college notice sends you to a registration on suppliers.multiquote.com; the Northern Ireland notice sends you to eTendersNI for the documents and the submission. Read that line before anything else — it decides whether you can even bid.
• CPV codes. Every notice carries categories, e.g. “72212224 Web page editing software development services”, or “72268000 Software supply services” with “80000000 Education and training” listed as an additional code. These are what category-based alerts match on. If your alerts only use the words in your own marketing copy, you will miss the notices whose titles do not contain them.
• What the notice cannot tell you. Not who holds the contract today (a title like “Replacement of…” tells you a system exists, not who supplies it), not your score, and not how many others will bid. Find a Tender is explicit that the award criteria “are stated only in the procurement documents”. The notice tells you whether the opportunity is real; only the documents tell you whether you can win.

A weekly email. It reads the same free, public notices you have just read about — Contracts Finder, Find a Tender and the devolved portals — and sends only a focused list of the ones that plausibly suit a small supplier like you. These pages are written for IT firms, MSPs and cyber consultancies because that is where we started; the brief itself covers every category a public body buys, and each notice carries its category. For each one you get the buyer, the closing date, the published value where the buyer published one, a one-line reason it fits, and a link to the official notice. UK notices are live today, and so are the US ones: federal opportunities from SAM.gov, plus local bids — city and metro from New York City’s City Record and Los Angeles’ RAMP marketplace, and statewide from Illinois’ BidBuy portal — all in the same brief and each labelled with the market it came from.

The notices themselves are free and public, and they always will be. Nobody needs TenderPulse to read them, and nothing here is behind a paywall. What is being sold is the filtering — the ten minutes a week and the judgement about which notices are worth opening — and nothing else.