Where the notices come from, and how often
| Source | Checked | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Find a Tender | Every hour | The UK's central notice service. Northern Ireland bodies' notices arrive here too. |
| Contracts Finder | Twice a day | Central government and lower-value notices published in England. |
| Public Contracts Scotland | Twice a day | Scottish public bodies. |
| Sell2Wales | Twice a day | Welsh public bodies. |
| ProContract and EU Supply | Twice a day | Portals used by councils, housing providers and NHS bodies. |
| Council portals | At least once a day | Each active council portal (In-Tend, Delta, Atamis, ProContract and others) — status for every council is on the coverage page. |
| TED and Irish eTenders | Daily / twice a day | Selected EU and Irish notices. Browsable on Tendarix, but kept out of search engines: this is a UK service. |
Which councils we monitor, the software each one uses, and when each was last checked are all on the coverage page.
How notices are cleaned up
- Duplicates. The same tender is often published on Find a Tender and on another service. We keep one page per tender — the Find a Tender copy — and redirect the others to it.
- Regions. Sources write locations as free text (“Any region”, lists of nine regions, a village name). We map them to the twelve UK regions and nations, and leave a notice without a region rather than guess.
- Thin notices. A notice whose description is shorter than 180 characters is kept but left out of listings until a fuller version arrives. Nothing is deleted.
- Closing dates. Some sources leave a notice marked “open” after its deadline. We treat a notice as open only while its deadline is in the future.
- Values. Contract values are the buyers’ own estimates. A framework or dynamic purchasing system often states a ceiling of £1bn or more — the most that could ever be spent — so totals on Tendarix leave those ceilings out.
History since 2014
Contracts Finder publishes a daily record of its notices on data.gov.uk going back to December 2014. We load it into a separate archive so you can see who bought what before. An archived notice records what the source said on the day it was published; we work out its status from its dates, so a notice that was “open” in 2017 shows as closed today. A small number of days (about 3%) are missing from the government’s own files.
AI summaries, fit scores and incumbents
- Summaries are written by large language models from the notice text alone. Everyone sees a one-line overview; members see the full breakdown of requirements and key tasks. They are labelled as AI-generated on every tender page.
- Fit scores compare a notice with the business profile you give us.
- Likely incumbents are suppliers that have won similar contracts from the same buyer before. They are an estimate, not a fact about the current contract.
All three are automated and can be wrong. Always read the original notice and tender documents before you decide to bid.
Licensing
Notices from Find a Tender and Contracts Finder contain public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Notices from other services are used on the terms those services publish. The notices remain the work of the buyers who wrote them; summaries, scores and analysis are ours.
Found a mistake?
Tell us at sales@uniqevo.co.uk or through the contact page, with a link to the page. We fix errors in our own processing; errors in a notice itself need correcting by the buyer at the source.