Find a Tender Service (FTS)
Find a Tender is the UK's public procurement notice service. It launched on 1 January 2021 to replace Tenders Electronic Daily for UK notices after Brexit, and on 24 February 2025 it was relaunched as the central digital platform required by the Procurement Act 2023. It now carries both above-threshold and below-threshold notices for new UK procurements, and it holds the supplier registration that the Act requires you to complete before bidding.
What Find a Tender is
Find a Tender (FTS) is the UK government service on which contracting authorities publish procurement notices. It went live on 1 January 2021, taking over from Tenders Electronic Daily (TED) for UK notices at the end of the Brexit transition period. Registration and use are free, and there is no restriction on where a supplier is based.
On 24 February 2025 it changed character. The Procurement Act 2023 requires procurement information to be published on a central digital platform, and the Cabinet Office's own factsheet is explicit about what that platform is:
> An enhanced Find a Tender service (FTS) was launched on 24 February 2025, which is the central digital platform for public procurement.
Find a Tender is therefore not one component of the platform; it is the platform.
What it publishes now
The Act defines a sequence of notice types, referenced UK1 to UK17, covering the whole life of a procurement: pipeline notices, preliminary market engagement notices, planned procurement notices, tender notices, transparency notices, contract award notices, contract details notices, contract change notices, contract performance notices and contract termination notices.
Two changes matter most to suppliers.
Below-threshold work is now here too. The old division — Find a Tender above threshold, Contracts Finder below — is gone for new procurements. Find a Tender states that a UK7 contract details notice must be published for all below-threshold contracts that meet the notification thresholds, and that other notice types from UK1 to UK12 may also be published voluntarily. Under section 87(4) of the Act a "notifiable below-threshold contract" is one worth not less than £12,000 for a central government authority that is not a devolved Welsh authority, and not less than £30,000 for other authorities. The exception is Scotland, where below-threshold notices continue to go to Public Contracts Scotland.
Earlier procurements stay where they started. If a notice about a procurement was published before 24 February 2025 under the old regulations — on Find a Tender, Contracts Finder, Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales or eTendersNI — every subsequent notice about that same procurement must continue under the same legislation and on the same service. Notices published on TED before 1 January 2021 keep going to TED.
Registration and supplier information
The platform's second function is a supplier information service. Rather than re-entering the same core business details in every tender, a supplier registers once, receives an identifier, and maintains a single record: organisation details, financial information, accreditations, and information on connected persons where relevant. Buyers are given access to that record for a bid instead of asking for the same documents each time.
For a supplier planning to bid on UK public work, completing this registration is a prerequisite rather than an optional convenience, and it is worth doing before a deadline forces it.
Thresholds from 1 January 2026
Threshold amounts are revised every two years to track currency movements and keep the UK aligned with its WTO Government Procurement Agreement obligations. Procurement Policy Note 023 sets the amounts applying to procurements commencing on or after 1 January 2026. All figures include VAT:
| Contract type | Threshold |
| --- | --- |
| Goods, services or works — central government authority | £135,018 |
| Goods, services or works — sub-central government authority | £207,720 |
| Works | £5,193,000 |
| Light touch (not a concession) | £663,540 |
| Light touch concession | £5,372,609 |
| Concession | £5,193,000 |
| Utilities (not works or light touch) | £415,440 |
| Utilities light touch | £884,720 |
| Defence and security (not works, concession or light touch) | £415,440 |
Both main thresholds fell on 1 January 2026 — the central government figure from £139,688 and the sub-central figure from £214,904. The new amounts do not affect any procurement commenced before that date.
What else changed with the Act
Three features of the 2023 Act shape what you will see on the platform. The competitive flexible procedure replaces the old menu of fixed procedures with a single procedure whose stages, negotiation points and timelines the authority designs for the requirement, so tender notices vary far more in shape than they used to. Assessment summaries must be issued to every participating supplier before the contract award notice is published, explaining how their tender scored against each criterion and giving the successful supplier's scores; publication of the award notice then starts an eight working day standstill. And a central, public debarment list now exists, on which suppliers excluded on mandatory or discretionary grounds may be placed for up to five years.
Using it in practice
Set up saved searches and email alerts by keyword, CPV classification, region and value. Watch UK1 pipeline notices and UK2 preliminary market engagement notices, not just tender notices: under the Act, authorities publish intentions further ahead than they used to, and the useful conversations happen before a tender notice appears.