NHS IT tenders: how to find them, and which ones a small supplier can actually win

Find a Tender — the national service

Find a Tender says of itself: “Find a Tender is where public sector buyers publish notices about procurements opportunities and contracts.” Its own scope wording is the bit to remember: from 24 February 2025 both above and below threshold notices about new UK procurements are published there, “except below threshold in Scotland” — while for procurements that started before that date only above-threshold notices are held, “usually over £139,688 including VAT”.

Contracts Finder — the English below-threshold route

For below-threshold work in England and the non-devolved territories, Find a Tender itself directs you to Contracts Finder. GOV.UK states that you can create an account there to get email updates and save your searches, and that you can still search and apply without an account.

Northern Ireland — eTendersNI

Northern Ireland health work is published on eTendersNI, which Find a Tender names (with eSourcing NI) as the region’s below-threshold route. When a Northern Ireland notice reaches you through Find a Tender, the pattern to look for is that Find a Tender carries the advertisement and names the contracting authority, then points you at eTendersNI for the documents and for submission. So the tender is submitted in the Northern Ireland system rather than the one you found it in — check that line before you plan any work on it. The documents themselves are normally open to anyone to read.

Frameworks and dynamic purchasing systems — where a lot of health IT actually goes

This is the honest caveat that matters most on this page. Find a Tender’s own home page lists “Framework agreements, dynamic markets and dynamic purchasing systems” as one of the things it holds. A framework call-off is work placed with suppliers who are already on that framework: if you are not on it, the call-off notice is not something you can bid for, however well it fits you. The Digital Marketplace is the clearest example — its current front page offers buyers cloud services and digital specialists under the G-Cloud and Digital Outcomes and Specialists frameworks, and its supplier route in is an application to the framework when it is refreshed, not a notice you respond to.

We are not going to give you a value threshold, because a threshold would be invented: every buyer sets its own financial and technical requirements, and they live in the tender documents rather than on the notice. What actually separates winnable health IT work from unwinnable work is the shape of the contract.

Usually winnable

• A defined, single-system requirement where the buyer already knows what it wants. Read the scope in the notice. Where the buyer names the system, what it must do, what it replaces, the contract length and whether extensions are available, they have already decided what they want — and a small software, cloud or digital firm can answer that on competence rather than on scale. The notices in our snapshot are not all this shape; the point is the shape, not our list.
• A migration off a named legacy system. Where a notice names the technology being replaced and the target platform, the scope is knowable before you contact anyone: you can value the work from the notice itself, then decide whether to spend a day on it. Legacy migrations off a named system are the clearest version of this — and they are common in health, where older clinical and corporate systems are still in service.
• A support or managed-service contract attached to a system. Look at the duration and extension lines rather than the headline value. A support-and-maintenance commitment over several years is recurring revenue, and it is the sort of contract a small firm is genuinely competitive for.

Usually out of reach — and better recognised early

• Anything that is a call-off from a framework you are not on. No amount of good bidding helps; the eligibility is the barrier.
• Multi-site platforms and national programmes where the notice says the contract is not divided into lots and the scope spans many sites or many services. You would be bidding to be a subcontractor at best, and the notice will not say so.
• Work that needs a scale of accreditation, insurance or turnover you cannot evidence. The notice usually will not show those thresholds — Find a Tender is explicit that criteria are “stated only in the procurement documents”, so check the documents before you spend a day on a bid.
• Anything with a deadline you cannot physically meet. A notice published two weeks before closing means the buyer already knows what they want; if you cannot write from their documents immediately, it is out of reach this time round.

The full two-minute read is on the council IT tenders page — status, closing date and time, value and how it is stated, procedure, lots, duration, and where you submit. Four things are specific to health work:

1. Notice type first. Find a Tender headline notices “F02: Contract notice” — that is an opportunity. If what you are looking at is an award notice or a prior information notice, it is history or a warning, not an invitation.
2. Check it is a health buyer, and which kind. The contracting-authority section names the body. Both health notices in our current snapshot are from health bodies — an NHS foundation trust and a health board — which is how you tell a trust or a board from a council at a glance. It also tells you who to ask questions of.
3. Check the procedure before the value. Open procedure means any interested supplier may tender. Both health notices in our current snapshot are advertised under the open procedure — checked against the notices themselves, not assumed — which is what makes them a real opportunity for a firm of any size. A framework call-off is a different animal entirely.
4. Note the deadlines as times, not dates. The health notice gives a date and a local time for receipt of tenders, and a separate time for opening them. Health procurement deadlines are not extended on request, so treat the hour as the deadline.

Health work in the snapshot

Naming it as published: the buyer is NHS Borders, the closing date is Mon, 16 Nov 2026, and the notice classifies the work itself as CPV 48422000 — Software package suites. It is health work and it is presented as nothing else.

The other five in the same snapshot — none of them health work

Included so the list is not curated to flatter the page: the buyers are Aberdeenshire Council; Anthro JV; Lincolnshire County Council; Newcastle City Council; BMet College. None of them is a health body, and we do not file a college, a university or a council under “health” because it would make this page look better.

A dated snapshot from the day we pulled it, not a claim that these contracts are still open. Check the official notice before you do anything with it.

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.