What's a contract award?
Every UK public-sector tender ends in an Award Notice — a published record of who won the contract, for how much, and when. Awards are the procurement world's equivalent of "what just happened" — useful for competitor intel, partner shortlisting, account targeting and pricing intelligence.
The Awards page lists every award we've ingested. Filter by keyword, supplier name, CPV category, awarded-date range and SME-flag.
Reading an award row
Each row carries six things:
Supplier
The winning company. Links to Companies House when we have a GB-COH-XXXXXXXX identifier; otherwise filters the awards page to that supplier's other wins.
Competition
How many suppliers bid, shown under the value when the notice states it. Sort by Least contested to put the fewest-bidder contracts first — usually the most realistic wins for a smaller supplier. A blank means the buyer did not publish a figure, not that nobody bid.
An award marked Not yet in force has been published but has not taken effect — typically still in the standstill period, so it can still change.
Buyer
The public body that ran the procurement. Click through to a profile showing their other notices and typical spend.
Title
What was procured. Often vague (deliberately, on the buyer's part); read the original notice via the link icon for detail.
Value
Contract value in original currency. Missing on a meaningful fraction of awards — incomplete data on the publisher side.
Awarded
Publication date of the award notice — not necessarily the date the contract started.
Tracking suppliers
Set up tracked companies at Account → Tracked companies, then let the daily match do the work.
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1
Add the company
Head to Account → Tracked companies and add each supplier you want to follow. Track competitors, framework holders or accounts you sell to.
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2
Choose a match mode
Match by Companies House number (the gold standard) or by company name. See the two modes below.
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3
Get alerted
The match runs after every ingest pass (three times a day). When a tracked company appears on a new award, we email you within 24 hours via whichever channels you've configured. One alert per (user, award) — no spam.
The two match modes
Companies House number
The gold standard. 10234567 matches everywhere that number appears, regardless of how the buyer wrote the name.
Company name
Case-insensitive substring match. Robust to suffix variations ("Limited" vs "Ltd") but matches "Smith & Co" on every Smith Co variant. Prefer Companies House when you have it.
Use cases
Competitor intel
Track the 5-10 firms you bid against. When they win, you know they beat you on a competitive process — useful debrief material.
Partner shortlisting
Track major framework holders in your sector. Winners are often looking for sub-contractors — reach out off the back of an alert.
Account targeting
Track an enterprise you sell to and you'll see every public-sector contract their procurement function awards — visibility into their roadmap.
Re-tender forecasting
Contracts have end dates. We forecast re-tender opportunities based on contract durations and email you a heads-up. Configure at Account → Expiry forecast.
How the figures are calculated
These rules govern the totals on Spend analytics and the free market report.
UK figures
Award value, not annual spend
Totals sum the value of contracts awarded in the window. Most of that money is paid out over several years, so this is not a figure for what the public sector spent in a year, and shouldn't be compared with one.
Framework ceilings are excluded
When a framework is set up, the published value is a ceiling and it is republished against every appointed supplier. Counting it would multiply the same money by the number of suppliers, so those values are left out of every total, average and share. Award counts are never filtered.
One award, counted once
The same contract is often published on more than one portal, and corrections reappear under a new reference. Where the same supplier, value and award date occur more than once, the value is counted a single time.
Ceilings awarded to a single supplier
A framework awarded to just one operator repeats no value, so no automatic check can spot it. Every award of £1bn or more is queued for review against the buyer's own notice, and where one has been read and the published figure turns out to be a framework maximum, a concession's expected income, or a keying error, it is excluded and the reason recorded. Awards still waiting to be read are counted as published. Concessions are excluded because their value is what the operator expects to earn from users over decades, not money a public body has committed.
UK and EU are never mixed
The UK view covers sterling awards from UK sources; EU notices are a separate market with their own currency selector. Notices published without a value are excluded from totals and averages, but they still count as awards.
Awards between public bodies are included
An NHS body contracting another NHS body, or an organisation awarding to itself, is counted in the totals and shown separately in the headline — they are real published awards that no outside supplier could have bid for.
The free market report
Activity is counted, not valued
Its league tables rank by number of contracts, which is immune to the framework-ceiling problem above.
Payments are cash, not commitments
The money figures come from departments' published spending returns — money actually paid — never from contract values. Grants and aid are separated from payments for goods and services, because a return records everything a department spends, not only what it buys. Payment figures are cumulative rather than windowed: returns are published months in arrears, and windowing them would show a decline that isn't real.
A note on comparisons. Published figures for UK public procurement range from £249bn a year (excluding capital spending) to £385bn, depending on what is counted. Those measure cash spent in a year. Contract award values measure something different — the whole value of contracts signed, most of it paid out over several years — so the two should not be read as the same number.
Where the EU figures differ
One currency at a time, never converted
EU notices are published in a range of national currencies. Totals show the single currency selected on the page, and values are never converted into it — so you are seeing one currency's slice of the EU market, not the whole of it. Nothing there is comparable with the UK figures, which are sterling.
Automatic rules only — nothing read by hand
The duplicate and framework-ceiling rules run across this data too, and so does a rule for values filed against a currency that is not the buying authority’s own — all three exclude figures from totals, though the awards themselves still count. What has not happened is any hand review: every notice read against its source so far has been a UK one. Treat large EU values as published, not as verified.
Some panels are absent, not empty
European notices carry no region, so those panels and filters are hidden rather than shown at zero — a zero would read as a finding about the EU market instead of a gap in what is published. Framework routing and the winner’s size band are published there, and on more notices than in the UK: 98% of European notices state whether the contract runs through a framework agreement, against 17% of UK ones. Full coverage table: what the EU feed carries.
What it does carry
Every EU notice has a title, a procurement category and its tender documents — better coverage than the UK feeds manage on titles. Award values are published on 91% of them.
Pricing intelligence on tender details
Open any tender's detail page and you'll see a Pricing benchmark card on the right: median, IQR, min/max, sample size and recent comparables. Built from contract awards in the same CPV branch over the last 24 months, GBP only.
Treat as guidance — not every contract in scope is directly comparable, and the buyer-side noise floor is real — but it's a defensible starting point for sizing your pricing before reading the spec.
Privacy
Contract award data is public — every row comes from a published government notice. Tracking is per-user and never visible to anyone else; the supplier you're tracking has no idea you're tracking them.