About the data
Where the data comes from, and how it fits together
Sources
Find a Tender
The UK’s central platform for public procurement notices.Contracts Finder
Opportunities and awards from central government and public bodies in England.Public Contracts Scotland
Notices from public bodies in Scotland.Sell2Wales
Notices from public bodies in Wales.eTendersNI
Notices from public bodies in Northern Ireland.TED
Tenders Electronic Daily, for UK notices published in the EU’s journal before 2021.Companies House
The register of UK companies, for matching suppliers to the companies behind them.
Updated every week
Insights is refreshed once a week. Each run collects what every source has published since the last run, adds the new notices to the procurements they belong to, matches new suppliers to Companies House, and recalculates the totals on every buyer and supplier. The public pages are then refreshed, so what you read reflects the latest run.
How notices become procurements
A single purchase is usually described by several notices over several years: a planning notice, a tender notice, an award notice, a contract notice, and sometimes changes or a termination. Publishers that follow the Open Contracting Data Standard give each purchase one identifier, its OCID, and repeat it on every notice about it.
Insights groups notices by that identifier and orders them by publication. The procurement’s stage, values and dates are read from all of its notices together: the planning notice opens the record, tender and award notices move it on, and the contract dates say when it ends, which is when the buyer has to let it again.
How suppliers are matched
The same company appears under many spellings across thousands of notices. Insights normalises supplier names, then matches each supplier to its Companies House record, using the company number where the publisher gives one. A supplier page shows the company it was matched to, and a company page lists every supplier name matched to it.
Whether a supplier is a small or medium-sized enterprise is shown as the publishers record it.
What the figures mean
Values are in pounds sterling. Awarded totals on buyers, suppliers and procurements count pending and active awards only, so a cancelled or unsuccessful award never inflates a figure. Spend is shown as published, including refunds and corrections, which appear as negative payments. Dates are UK dates.
Licence
The UK portals and Companies House publish their data under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Notices from Tenders Electronic Daily are reused under the European Union’s policy for reusing its open data.