How to look up any company's public contract history

Every regulated contract the UK public sector awards is public record. Under the Procurement Act 2023, buyers publish contract award notices on Find a Tender naming the winning supplier and the award value, and suppliers are identified by their Company Number — the 8-character Companies House ID (e.g. 02093728, or SC123456 for Scottish companies). Put those together and you can reconstruct the public contract history of any company in the country — what it won, from which buyers, and for how much.

Competitors' websites tell you what companies claim; the award record tells you what they win. For anyone selling to councils, NHS trusts or central government, this is the single most useful — and most underused — piece of free market intelligence available.

How to search

In the GovTenderIQ company search you can look up any supplier two ways:

• By company name — the fastest way when you know who you're researching. Registered names in procurement data sometimes differ from trading names, so try both.
• By Company Number — the 8-character ID is unambiguous. If a company appears in an award notice or on Companies House, its number pins down exactly the right entity, even when several companies share a similar name.

What the history shows

• Contract wins — the awards the company has received, with the buying authority and a description of the work.
• Total awarded value — how much public sector revenue the company has captured over time, in pounds.
• Public buyers — which councils, trusts and departments keep coming back to them.
• Sectors — the CPV divisions where they actually win, which may differ from what their website claims.
• Competitors — other companies winning the same kind of work for the same buyers.

Why this changes how you bid

Before investing forty hours in a bid, the award history answers the questions that decide a bid / no-bid call. Is there an incumbent who has held this work for years? What does this buyer typically pay for contracts in your sector — the price-to-win benchmark? Are the winners in this space large national players, or SMEs like yours? A market dominated by one incumbent with a long award record is a very different opportunity from one where new entrants win regularly.

The same lookup works for teaming: if a contract is too large to bid alone, the history shows you which established suppliers win the work — the primes worth approaching as a subcontractor or consortium partner. And if you're evaluating a potential partner's claims, thirty seconds against the public record beats any capability statement.

Spotting re-tenders before they're published

Public contracts have a defined term, and most of the work a buyer needs doesn't end when the contract does — it gets re-tendered. Because the history shows when awards were made and roughly how long they run, you can anticipate which contracts in your sector are approaching expiry and prepare months before the new notice appears. Suppliers who show up only when the tender is published are competing against incumbents who saw it coming.

A note on the data

GovTenderIQ builds on 100% official procurement datafrom Find a Tender. That's a strength — it's the same record the government itself publishes — but it has known edges: awards can appear with a publication lag, and losing bidders are not published, so histories show who wonrather than everyone who competed. That's also why we don't publish "win rates" — nobody honestly can. For decisions on a specific live tender, always confirm details against the official notice.

Try it now, free

Type your own company's name — or a competitor's — into the public contract search and see the history in seconds. Then set up tender alerts so the next opportunity in your CPV sectors lands in your inbox with its deadline already attached.