Public Sector Contracts: See who’s winning government business

Chris Oatts — Head of Data and Product Strategy

Government contract data: now available on Company Watch

Public Sector Contracts [BETA] is live on the platform for Gold subscribers. The feature brings together procurement records published by UK government contracting authorities — covering tender opportunities, contract awards, and the agreements that follow — so users can see who is buying what, from which suppliers, at what value, and over what period.

It’s accessible in two places: via the Public Sector Contracts notification on a company’s Health Profile, or directly through Company Info → Public Sector Contracts [BETA].

What is Public Sector Contracts?

Public Sector Contracts pulls data from the UK’s two central procurement platforms — Contracts Finder and the Find a Tender Service (FTS) — both published under the Open Contracting Data Standard and made available via the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Contracts Finder is used by all non-devolved public sector bodies to publish opportunities and awards above set thresholds (£10,000 in central government, £25,000 across the wider public sector and NHS), and publication is a legal requirement under the Public Contracts Regulations 2015. Find a Tender Service handles higher-value notices — historically above roughly £118,000 — and, following the Procurement Act 2023, now also carries below-threshold notices for new procurements. In practice, lower-value contracts tend to surface via Contracts Finder and higher-value ones via FTS, with many procurements represented across both.

Company Watch focuses specifically on the Contract stage of the procurement lifecycle — the agreement entered into following an award — rather than earlier planning or tender-stage records.

Why government contract exposure matters for financial risk

What financial checks should be done before awarding a contract? It’s a question procurement and risk teams ask constantly, and a supplier’s own public sector track record is a useful part of the answer. A company with a strong pipeline of government contracts may carry a different risk and revenue profile to one without — but that exposure cuts both ways:

• Revenue concentration: A company heavily reliant on a small number of public sector contracts may be exposed if one isn’t renewed.

• Delivery capacity: A sudden jump in contract volume can signal growth, or it can signal a business stretched thin.

• Framework vs. commitment: Being named on a framework agreement is not the same as holding a live, funded contract, and the two are easy to conflate without the right categorisation.

• Public sector concentration in a supply chain: For buyers running due diligence on suppliers, visibility into who else a supplier works for adds useful context to a credit or onboarding decision.

Understanding contract status

Every contract in Public Sector Contracts is categorised by status, based on the dates published in the original record:

• Active: The contract is within its delivery period; the start date has passed and the end date has not.

• Expired: The contract’s end date has passed, so its term has concluded, unless it has since been extended or replaced.

• Framework: An agreement setting the terms under which future “call-off” contracts may be awarded. This is not a purchase commitment in itself and may cover numerous suppliers under a single framework.

• No Date: The start and/or end dates are missing from the published record, so status cannot be reliably determined.

How values are calculated

Because procurement data is published by hundreds of individual authorities to differing standards, Company Watch applies a set of rules before presenting contract values:

• Frameworks are excluded from value totals, since a framework figure is a shared ceiling across many suppliers rather than one company’s award.

• Duplicated values are excluded, so the same figure isn’t counted twice where it’s repeated across related lines.

• Unverified values are excluded. For example, awards published without a meaningful figure attached.

• All values are shown in GBP.

Data currency and limitations

Public sector contract data refreshes monthly. Because awards are often published weeks or months after signing, the most recent contracts may not appear immediately. Contracts are matched to companies by registered company number, so where an agreement runs through a reseller or partner, it will appear under that partner rather than the end supplier.

As with any dataset compiled from records submitted by hundreds of separate authorities, some inconsistency is inevitable — missing fields, unrealistic dates, and occasional duplicate or estimated values all exist in the source data. Company Watch presents the information as published and recommends cross-checking original notices where accuracy is critical to a decision.

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