Methodology
How the numbers on this site are produced
The counters on the front page are read from our database when you load it. They are not typed in, cached overnight, or rounded up. If a number looks wrong, it's a bug, so tell us at hello@contracked.io.
Where the data comes from
- Find a Tender: UK notices above threshold.
- Contracts Finder: UK notices including lower-value opportunities.
- TED: the EU's Tenders Electronic Daily, covering roughly 30 EU and EEA countries.
- Doffin: the Norwegian national register, including below-threshold notices.
All four are official public sources. We pull from them through the day, storing each notice verbatim alongside the fields we extract, so we can correct a parsing mistake without re-fetching.
What counts as an "open tender"
A notice is counted as open when it is actively accepting bids. We exclude:
- Prior information notices and planning notices: an intention to buy, with nothing to bid on yet.
- Market-engagement exercises, where the buyer is asking questions rather than inviting tenders.
- Anything already awarded, cancelled or closed.
- Anything whose deadline has passed.
This matters: those categories are roughly half of everything published, and counting them would double our headline number. Other tender products do count them. Ours doesn't.
"Published today" and "closing within 7 days"
Published today counts notices whose publication date falls since midnight in your local timezone, among the open notices defined above. Closing within 7 days counts open notices with a stated deadline inside the next seven days. Notices with no stated deadline are excluded from that count rather than guessed at. That is a large minority, because not every buyer publishes one.
Why we don't publish a total contract value
Stored amounts span fifteen currencies with no conversion applied, and many are framework ceilings covering several years and multiple suppliers rather than a single contract. Adding them together would produce a large, meaningless number. We'd rather show nothing than that.
How matching works
You describe your business in plain words. We score every open notice against that profile using the words you gave us (matched against the title and description), the sectors you selected, the regions you work in, and your contract-value range. Notices scoring above a threshold become matches, ranked by score.
The score is a heuristic, not a prediction. A high score means the notice looks like your kind of work; it says nothing about how likely you are to win it.
Known limits
- Buyers describe the same thing in different words. Keyword matching will miss some notices, and widening your keywords helps.
- Many notices carry no stated value, no deadline, or no region. We show "not stated" rather than inferring.
- TED titles are machine-translated into English by the source; descriptions are often only in the original language.
- The same contract occasionally appears in two feeds. We remove duplicates between Doffin and TED; UK cross-feed duplicates can still appear twice.
Always open the official notice before acting. It is linked on every match, and it governs.