How a notice gets here

Every notice links back to the government record it came from. This is what happens in between, including the parts that are a judgement rather than a fact.

one in 9

notices fit no category here

one in 36

open notices published no closing date

half

notices published no region at all

Those three are counted from the 398,458 records held rather than estimated, and they are recounted every time this page is built. Everything below says where each gap comes from.

Where the records come from

Two services, both run by government, both free to read directly:

Find a Tender covers higher-value notices from across the UK.
Contracts Finder casts a wider net, and is the one that publishes contract end dates.

Both publish under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Nothing is scraped from a buyer’s own website, nothing is bought from a reseller, and no notice is held back to sell later.

What changes on the way

Four things happen to a notice

The original record is kept exactly as published and is never edited. What you read is a second copy.

01
The same contract on both services is shown once
Two records are treated as one only when the buyer, the closing date and the title all line up, and only across the two services, never within one. A buyer advertising three lots of the same framework on the same day is three opportunities, not one.
02
Buyers and suppliers are tied to one record each
The same council writes its own name four different ways across four notices. Where an organisation publishes a company number it is linked to Companies House; where it does not, the name is matched and the page says so.
03
Every notice is sorted into categories
Buyers are obliged to use a classification code system almost nobody outside procurement can read. Those codes are mapped onto 61 categories in 13 groups that describe work the way you would describe it.
04
Values are stated excluding VAT
Unless the page says otherwise. Where a buyer publishes both, you see both.

What is worked out rather than published

Some of what you see on a notice is not in the notice. Treat these as a starting point rather than a fact. Each one is labelled on the page.

The category. Taken from the classification code where there is a usable one, and from the wording where there is not.
A heading rather than a category, where that is all the buyer said. Many notices are classified only at the very top of the code system — “construction work”, “health and social work services”. That is true, and it narrows down to nothing, so those appear under the heading and not under any category beneath it. Filing them under a guessed one would invent a detail the buyer never gave.
Nothing at all, for 43,138 of the 398,458 looked at: one in 9. Some classification codes have no counterpart here — laboratory and precision equipment, industrial chemicals, and the code system’s own “other services” catch-all. Those are findable by search and appear on no category page, which is a more useful answer than a category that does not describe them.
Where the work is. Taken from the region the buyer published, and 263,027 of 398,458 notices: half publish no region at all. A national framework may show as nowhere in particular, because that is genuinely what was published.
Whether it suits a small firm. The buyer’s own statement, reproduced. Never a guess.

What is missing, and why

Contract end dates. Counted across every award held: Contracts Finder publishes one on 150,198 of its 150,201; Find a Tender on 8,134 of 204,542. So a contract missing from contracts running out soon almost always means the date was never published, not that the contract does not exist, and the higher-value work is the part most likely to be missing.
Closing dates. 3,226 open notices of 115,073 have none: one in 36. Those are still open: an absent date is not a passed one.
Contracts below the advertising thresholds. If a buyer was not required to advertise it and chose not to, it is on neither service, so it is not here either. Where those lines sit is worth knowing before concluding that a market is small.

How current it is

Both services are checked every half hour, and each notice page shows when its record was last read. Records are re-checked against the source overnight, so an amended deadline or a withdrawn notice catches up on its own.

The earliest record held is from 18 Nov 2016, and there are 398,458 of them. Every figure, counted.

If something looks wrong

Check the notice against the original first. The link is near the bottom of every notice page. If the two disagree, the original is right and the mistake is ours. If they agree and the notice itself is wrong, only the buyer can fix it, and their contact details are on the page.