Where to find government contracts to bid on

There is no single website of government contracts. You find a notice on the board the buyer’s rules require, and you submit the offer on the portal that notice names. Searching only the board you already know misses contracts that were never going to be posted there.

Match the buyer to the board

• EU contracts at or above the 2026 and 2027 thresholds are published on Tenders Electronic Daily. For most supplies and services those thresholds are €140,000 for central government and €216,000 for sub-central authorities, net of VAT, and €5,404,000 for works. Below the applicable threshold the notice often stays on a national portal.
• New UK procurements under the Procurement Act 2023 are published on Find a Tender from 24 February 2025, including notifiable below-threshold contracts, except below-threshold notices in Scotland. Contracts Finder still holds below-threshold notices for procurements that started under the older English rules. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland also use their own portals where the work sits there. The below-threshold guidance and section 87 set out when a below-threshold notice is required.
• SAM.gov publishes contract opportunities from US federal contracting offices. A state, city or school district is not required to post there. Federal grants are a different list. The opportunities page points grant seekers to Grants.gov.
• A project financed by the World Bank is procured by the borrower under the regulations that apply to that project, and notices are published by the borrower and on the Bank’s project pages. That is separate from the Bank buying for its own offices. The African Development Bank separates project notices from corporate solicitations. The Asian Development Bank publishes operational procurement on its own pages.
• A call on the Funding & Tenders Portal may be a grant or another funding procedure. Read the document before you treat it as a procurement contract.

The site where you found the notice may not take the offer

TED, Find a Tender or a development-bank page can be where you learn that the work exists. The upload is often on the buyer’s own portal, named in the notice. An account on the first site does not follow you to the second. Register on the submission portal while the deadline still leaves time to fix a failed login.

A keyword alert is not a shortlist

An alert on one trade word returns notices that use the word. It does not tell you that the turnover is out of reach, or that the certificate is one you do not hold. The list you can act on is shorter. It is the notices in the field you sell, still open, whose mandatory lines you can evidence or can cover on the conditions that notice sets.

Repeat this search, then stop

• Name the buyer and the regime: an EU directive, the UK Act, a US federal office, a state or city, or a bank-financed project.
• Open the official board for that regime, not a rewritten summary of it.
• From the notice, copy the submission portal, the deadline, the time and the timezone.
• Save the notice, any amendment, and the annex that holds the selection criteria.
• Check those criteria against the company before anyone starts a draft.

How Tender Town finds the notice

Tender Town searches public procurement notices and funding programmes, including national portals, TED and development-bank notices, plus news and the sources a workspace follows. It does not file the offer. You still submit on the portal the notice names.

See an example