How to find UK contracts before they go to tender
Published 21 September 2026
Work backwards from the contract end date. UK buyers publish it on the contract details notice when they award, and it is the earliest reliable signal that a piece of work will come back to market.
The end date is the signal nobody uses
When a UK public body awards a contract it publishes a notice, and that notice usually carries the period the contract runs for. A contract awarded in 2024 for four years tells you, in public, that the work returns to market in 2028. That is not a leak or an inference; it is a published fact that almost nobody acts on because procurement tools are built around what is open today.
By the time a tender appears, the buyer has already written the specification. The incumbent has spent years shaping what the buyer thinks it needs. If the first time you see the work is the day it is advertised, you are bidding into a requirement someone else helped design.
Working out when the re-tender actually starts
A buyer does not begin replacing a contract on the day it expires. For anything substantial they start six to twelve months out: market engagement, drafting, internal approvals, then the notice itself. The larger the value and the more regulated the category, the longer the runway.
So the window you care about opens well before the expiry date. ContractWindow computes it from the published end date together with typical lead times for that value and category, and ranks contracts by how soon and how worthwhile the opportunity is. It is an estimate, and buyers extend, re-scope and cancel all the time.
What to do inside the window
Approach the buyer before the specification is fixed. Ask what is working and what is not in the current arrangement. Offer a view on what good looks like. None of this is improper: buyers are encouraged to engage the market before they procure, and preliminary market engagement is a recognised part of the Procurement Act 2023 regime.
Knowing the incumbent matters as much as knowing the date. The award notice names them and states what the contract was worth, which tells you who you are displacing and at roughly what price.
Questions
- Is it legal to approach a buyer before a tender is published?
- Yes. Buyers are expected to understand their market before they procure, and preliminary market engagement is explicitly provided for in the Procurement Act 2023. What matters is that the buyer treats suppliers equally and does not give one an unfair advantage in the competition that follows.
- How far ahead can I see?
- As far as buyers have published. Contracts with end dates several years out are visible now. The practical horizon for acting is about two years, because beyond that the requirement may change substantially.
- Why do some contracts have no end date?
- Because the buyer did not publish one. End dates come from contract details notices, and not every buyer files one or completes it fully. Absence means it was not published, not that the contract runs forever.
See it on real contracts
The expiry radar applies this to every UK public contract with a published end date: what is expiring, who holds it now, and when the window opens.