If your agency bids for public sector work, there are two UK procurement portals you need to know: Contracts Finder, and Find a Tender Service. Most design and digital agencies are familiar with the first. Far fewer use the second — and that gap costs them contracts.
This guide explains what Find a Tender Service is, how it differs from Contracts Finder, how to use it effectively, and why relying on manual monitoring of either portal will cause you to miss opportunities.
What is Find a Tender Service?
Find a Tender Service (FTS) is the UK's official portal for publishing procurement notices above certain financial thresholds. It launched in January 2021 to replace the EU's Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU/TED) system after Brexit.
Before 2021, UK contracting authorities were required to publish high-value contracts in the OJEU so that suppliers across the EU could bid. After the UK left the EU, a domestic equivalent was needed. FTS is that replacement — operated by Crown Commercial Service on behalf of the Cabinet Office.
The key rule: Any UK public sector contract above the relevant threshold must be published on FTS. Below those thresholds, buyers use Contracts Finder (or nothing at all, for the smallest opportunities).
FTS Threshold Values (2024)
The thresholds that trigger an FTS notice depend on the type of authority and the nature of the contract. Current thresholds under the Procurement Act 2023 are:
| Buyer type | Services threshold |
|---|---|
| Central government | £139,688 |
| Other contracting authorities (NHS, councils, universities) | £214,904 |
| Utilities | £429,809 |
For most design and digital agencies, the relevant thresholds are the first two. A £150,000 UX research contract from a government department must appear on FTS. A £200,000 NHS digital transformation engagement must appear on FTS.
These are exactly the types of contracts that represent meaningful revenue for 10–50 person agencies. FTS is where they live.
FTS vs Contracts Finder: What's the Difference?
This is one of the most common points of confusion for agencies entering public sector work.
| Feature | Contracts Finder | Find a Tender Service |
|---|---|---|
| Mandatory threshold | £10,000+ (central govt), £25,000+ (others) | £139,688 – £214,904+ |
| Typical contracts | Low–mid value | Mid–high value |
| Who publishes | All UK public bodies | All UK public bodies (for above-threshold) |
| Coverage | Below and above threshold | Above threshold only |
| Notice types | Prior Information, Tender, Award | Prior Information, Tender, Award, Contract Change, Transparency |
| Search quality | Basic keyword and CPV code | Basic keyword, CPV code, and notice type |
The important implication: A buyer may publish the same contract on both portals. For above-threshold contracts, FTS notice is mandatory. A Contracts Finder notice is also typically published but is technically secondary. If you only monitor Contracts Finder, you may get the information — but if Contracts Finder has a data delay or the buyer publishes FTS only, you'll miss it.
More importantly: Contracts Finder does not cover all above-threshold contracts fully. Some NHS trusts, utilities, and public bodies with specific exemptions publish to FTS and nowhere else. If you're not monitoring FTS, you have a blind spot.
What Notices Appear on FTS?
FTS publishes several types of procurement notice. For design and digital agencies, the ones that matter are:
Prior Information Notice (PIN): Signals that a buyer is planning a procurement. Published weeks or months before the formal tender. PINs are intelligence — they tell you a contract is coming before it goes live, giving you time to build a relationship with the buyer, research the project, and plan your bid.
Contract Notice: The live tender. This is the notice that opens the formal competition. It includes scope, value, timescales, qualification criteria, and how to express interest or submit a response.
Contract Award Notice (CAN): Published after the contract is awarded. Tells you who won and at what value. Useful for competitor intelligence and market sizing — if you see a contract awarded to a competitor you didn't know about, that's a signal to investigate.
For most agencies, Contract Notices and PINs are the priority. Setting up monitoring for both is essential.
How to Search FTS
The FTS portal is at find-tender.service.gov.uk. The interface is functional but not designed for non-procurement specialists.
Basic search approach:
- Go to the search page and enter relevant keywords: "digital," "UX," "user research," "service design," "content design," "accessibility."
- Filter by CPV (Common Procurement Vocabulary) codes. The codes most relevant to design and digital agencies are:
- 72000000 — IT services
- 72200000 — Software programming and consultancy
- 79400000 — Business and management consultancy
- 79930000 — Specialist design services
- Filter by notice type (Contract Notice for live tenders, PIN for early intelligence).
- Filter by value range if you want to focus on contracts within your agency's capacity.
Limitations of the FTS search interface:
- Keyword matching is literal — "design" returns architectural design, industrial design, and supply chain design alongside digital service design
- CPV codes are broad and inconsistently applied — buyers choose their own codes, and many don't use the most precise sub-codes
- There is no saved-search alert system that emails you when matching notices appear
- The interface has no scoring or relevance ranking — a highly relevant £200k UX research contract appears in the same list as an irrelevant £150k facilities design contract
In practice, this means a thorough daily FTS search takes 20–45 minutes and still misses opportunities due to keyword variation and CPV inconsistency.
FTS and the Procurement Act 2023
The Procurement Act 2023, which came into force on 24 February 2025, introduced significant changes to how public contracts are published and managed in the UK. FTS remains the primary above-threshold portal, but several changes affect how agencies should monitor it:
New notice types: The Act introduced transparency notices, pipeline notices, and preliminary market engagement notices — all published on FTS. Pipeline notices in particular are valuable: contracting authorities with spend above £100m annually must publish 18-month pipelines, giving suppliers significantly more advance notice of upcoming work.
Faster timescales in some routes: Some competitive procedures now have shorter minimum timescales, meaning there is less time between a Contract Notice appearing and the deadline for submission. For agencies monitoring FTS infrequently, this increases the risk of missing the opportunity entirely.
Broader publication requirements: More contract modifications and extensions now require FTS notices. This creates more signal noise — more notices to filter through to find genuine new opportunities.
The Act makes comprehensive FTS monitoring more important, not less. But it also makes manual monitoring harder. See What the Procurement Act 2023 means for UK design agencies for a full breakdown.
Why Manual FTS Monitoring Fails
Most agencies that monitor FTS do so inconsistently. The pattern is familiar: someone sets a calendar reminder to check the portal twice a week, searches for "digital" or "UX," skims the results, and either finds nothing of note or adds a vaguely relevant notice to a spreadsheet that nobody updates.
The problems with this approach are structural:
Frequency: A contract notice can appear and close within 25–30 days. If you check FTS twice a week and miss a notice on Monday, you may not see it until Thursday — losing three days on a tight deadline.
Coverage: FTS alone doesn't give you the full picture. Contracts Finder covers below-threshold work. Individual procurement portals (Proactis, Delta, Bravo, In-Tend, and others) are used by specific councils, NHS trusts, and government departments for both above and below-threshold work. A manual FTS check misses everything published elsewhere.
Signal-to-noise: The FTS search interface returns too many irrelevant results for broad keywords, and too few results for narrow ones. Without automated filtering, you're either drowning in noise or missing matches.
Institutional memory: When the person who does the procurement check leaves, goes on holiday, or is pulled onto a project, monitoring stops. Procurement portals don't care about your internal capacity constraints.
The Monitoring Gap Is Where Agencies Lose Revenue
Here's the calculation that matters: if your agency bids for public sector contracts at an average value of £150,000, and you miss two to three relevant tenders per year because your monitoring is inconsistent, you're leaving £300,000–£450,000 of potential revenue on the table. Not because you couldn't win the work — but because you didn't know it existed in time to bid.
This is the problem Tandara was built to solve. Tandara monitors both Contracts Finder and Find a Tender Service daily, filters by relevance to design and digital agencies, and delivers a curated digest of matching opportunities to your inbox each morning. No portal logins. No spreadsheets. No missed deadlines.
Getting Started with FTS Today
If you're not monitoring FTS at all, start here:
- Bookmark find-tender.service.gov.uk and run a search for your priority keywords today.
- Note the CPV codes most relevant to your work (see the list above) and filter searches by them.
- Set up a daily check — either manually (20–45 minutes/day) or through a monitoring tool.
- Create a bid log to track notices you've found, including notice number, buyer, deadline, and your go/no-go decision.
If you want to automate the monitoring across both Contracts Finder and FTS — without spending 20–45 minutes a day on portal searches — Tandara's 14-day free trial is a practical place to start.
Try Tandara free for 14 days: Daily tender alerts for UK design and digital agencies, covering both Contracts Finder and Find a Tender Service. No card required. Start your free trial at tandara.co.uk
If your agency bids for public sector work, there are two UK procurement portals you need to know: Contracts Finder, and Find a Tender Service. Most design and digital agencies are familiar with the first. Far fewer use the second — and that gap costs them contracts.
This guide explains what Find a Tender Service is, how it differs from Contracts Finder, how to use it effectively, and why relying on manual monitoring of either portal will cause you to miss opportunities.
What is Find a Tender Service?
Find a Tender Service (FTS) is the UK's official portal for publishing procurement notices above certain financial thresholds. It launched in January 2021 to replace the EU's Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU/TED) system after Brexit.
Before 2021, UK contracting authorities were required to publish high-value contracts in the OJEU so that suppliers across the EU could bid. After the UK left the EU, a domestic equivalent was needed. FTS is that replacement — operated by Crown Commercial Service on behalf of the Cabinet Office.
The key rule: Any UK public sector contract above the relevant threshold must be published on FTS. Below those thresholds, buyers use Contracts Finder (or nothing at all, for the smallest opportunities).
FTS Threshold Values (2024)
The thresholds that trigger an FTS notice depend on the type of authority and the nature of the contract. Current thresholds under the Procurement Act 2023 are:
| Buyer type | Services threshold |
|---|---|
| Central government | £139,688 |
| Other contracting authorities (NHS, councils, universities) | £214,904 |
| Utilities | £429,809 |
For most design and digital agencies, the relevant thresholds are the first two. A £150,000 UX research contract from a government department must appear on FTS. A £200,000 NHS digital transformation engagement must appear on FTS.
These are exactly the types of contracts that represent meaningful revenue for 10–50 person agencies. FTS is where they live.
FTS vs Contracts Finder: What's the Difference?
This is one of the most common points of confusion for agencies entering public sector work.
| Feature | Contracts Finder | Find a Tender Service |
|---|---|---|
| Mandatory threshold | £10,000+ (central govt), £25,000+ (others) | £139,688 – £214,904+ |
| Typical contracts | Low–mid value | Mid–high value |
| Who publishes | All UK public bodies | All UK public bodies (for above-threshold) |
| Coverage | Below and above threshold | Above threshold only |
| Notice types | Prior Information, Tender, Award | Prior Information, Tender, Award, Contract Change, Transparency |
| Search quality | Basic keyword and CPV code | Basic keyword, CPV code, and notice type |
The important implication: A buyer may publish the same contract on both portals. For above-threshold contracts, FTS notice is mandatory. A Contracts Finder notice is also typically published but is technically secondary. If you only monitor Contracts Finder, you may get the information — but if Contracts Finder has a data delay or the buyer publishes FTS only, you'll miss it.
More importantly: Contracts Finder does not cover all above-threshold contracts fully. Some NHS trusts, utilities, and public bodies with specific exemptions publish to FTS and nowhere else. If you're not monitoring FTS, you have a blind spot.
What Notices Appear on FTS?
FTS publishes several types of procurement notice. For design and digital agencies, the ones that matter are:
Prior Information Notice (PIN): Signals that a buyer is planning a procurement. Published weeks or months before the formal tender. PINs are intelligence — they tell you a contract is coming before it goes live, giving you time to build a relationship with the buyer, research the project, and plan your bid.
Contract Notice: The live tender. This is the notice that opens the formal competition. It includes scope, value, timescales, qualification criteria, and how to express interest or submit a response.
Contract Award Notice (CAN): Published after the contract is awarded. Tells you who won and at what value. Useful for competitor intelligence and market sizing — if you see a contract awarded to a competitor you didn't know about, that's a signal to investigate.
For most agencies, Contract Notices and PINs are the priority. Setting up monitoring for both is essential.
How to Search FTS
The FTS portal is at find-tender.service.gov.uk. The interface is functional but not designed for non-procurement specialists.
Basic search approach:
- Go to the search page and enter relevant keywords: "digital," "UX," "user research," "service design," "content design," "accessibility."
- Filter by CPV (Common Procurement Vocabulary) codes. The codes most relevant to design and digital agencies are:
- 72000000 — IT services
- 72200000 — Software programming and consultancy
- 79400000 — Business and management consultancy
- 79930000 — Specialist design services
- Filter by notice type (Contract Notice for live tenders, PIN for early intelligence).
- Filter by value range if you want to focus on contracts within your agency's capacity.
Limitations of the FTS search interface:
- Keyword matching is literal — "design" returns architectural design, industrial design, and supply chain design alongside digital service design
- CPV codes are broad and inconsistently applied — buyers choose their own codes, and many don't use the most precise sub-codes
- There is no saved-search alert system that emails you when matching notices appear
- The interface has no scoring or relevance ranking — a highly relevant £200k UX research contract appears in the same list as an irrelevant £150k facilities design contract
In practice, this means a thorough daily FTS search takes 20–45 minutes and still misses opportunities due to keyword variation and CPV inconsistency.
FTS and the Procurement Act 2023
The Procurement Act 2023, which came into force on 24 February 2025, introduced significant changes to how public contracts are published and managed in the UK. FTS remains the primary above-threshold portal, but several changes affect how agencies should monitor it:
New notice types: The Act introduced transparency notices, pipeline notices, and preliminary market engagement notices — all published on FTS. Pipeline notices in particular are valuable: contracting authorities with spend above £100m annually must publish 18-month pipelines, giving suppliers significantly more advance notice of upcoming work.
Faster timescales in some routes: Some competitive procedures now have shorter minimum timescales, meaning there is less time between a Contract Notice appearing and the deadline for submission. For agencies monitoring FTS infrequently, this increases the risk of missing the opportunity entirely.
Broader publication requirements: More contract modifications and extensions now require FTS notices. This creates more signal noise — more notices to filter through to find genuine new opportunities.
The Act makes comprehensive FTS monitoring more important, not less. But it also makes manual monitoring harder. See What the Procurement Act 2023 means for UK design agencies for a full breakdown.
Why Manual FTS Monitoring Fails
Most agencies that monitor FTS do so inconsistently. The pattern is familiar: someone sets a calendar reminder to check the portal twice a week, searches for "digital" or "UX," skims the results, and either finds nothing of note or adds a vaguely relevant notice to a spreadsheet that nobody updates.
The problems with this approach are structural:
Frequency: A contract notice can appear and close within 25–30 days. If you check FTS twice a week and miss a notice on Monday, you may not see it until Thursday — losing three days on a tight deadline.
Coverage: FTS alone doesn't give you the full picture. Contracts Finder covers below-threshold work. Individual procurement portals (Proactis, Delta, Bravo, In-Tend, and others) are used by specific councils, NHS trusts, and government departments for both above and below-threshold work. A manual FTS check misses everything published elsewhere.
Signal-to-noise: The FTS search interface returns too many irrelevant results for broad keywords, and too few results for narrow ones. Without automated filtering, you're either drowning in noise or missing matches.
Institutional memory: When the person who does the procurement check leaves, goes on holiday, or is pulled onto a project, monitoring stops. Procurement portals don't care about your internal capacity constraints.
The Monitoring Gap Is Where Agencies Lose Revenue
Here's the calculation that matters: if your agency bids for public sector contracts at an average value of £150,000, and you miss two to three relevant tenders per year because your monitoring is inconsistent, you're leaving £300,000–£450,000 of potential revenue on the table. Not because you couldn't win the work — but because you didn't know it existed in time to bid.
This is the problem Tandara was built to solve. Tandara monitors both Contracts Finder and Find a Tender Service daily, filters by relevance to design and digital agencies, and delivers a curated digest of matching opportunities to your inbox each morning. No portal logins. No spreadsheets. No missed deadlines.
Getting Started with FTS Today
If you're not monitoring FTS at all, start here:
- Bookmark find-tender.service.gov.uk and run a search for your priority keywords today.
- Note the CPV codes most relevant to your work (see the list above) and filter searches by them.
- Set up a daily check — either manually (20–45 minutes/day) or through a monitoring tool.
- Create a bid log to track notices you've found, including notice number, buyer, deadline, and your go/no-go decision.
If you want to automate the monitoring across both Contracts Finder and FTS — without spending 20–45 minutes a day on portal searches — Tandara's 14-day free trial is a practical place to start.
Try Tandara free for 14 days: Daily tender alerts for UK design and digital agencies, covering both Contracts Finder and Find a Tender Service. No card required. Start your free trial at tandara.co.uk