ContractLens is a free, searchable database of UK government contract awards. We make public procurement data easy to find, filter and understand, without paywalls or complicated portals.
Every year the UK government spends hundreds of billions of pounds awarding contracts to thousands of suppliers. This data is technically public, but buried across multiple government portals, difficult to search, and impossible to sort or filter in any meaningful way.
ContractLens aggregates this data into a single, clean, sortable interface. You can search by supplier, buyer, sector, value, or date, and drill into individual supplier and buyer profiles to see their full contract history.
Whether you're a supplier researching competitors, an investor doing due diligence, or a journalist investigating public spending, ContractLens gives you instant access to data that previously required expensive subscriptions or hours of manual research.
All data is sourced from official UK government procurement databases and is licensed for commercial use under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Currently we show contract awards from 2024 onwards. We will add historical data going back to more years in a future update.
We are currently in beta and updating the data periodically. Once out of beta, we plan to update the database weekly to reflect new tenders as they are published.
ContractLens is free during our beta period while we build out and test ContractLens Radar features. The core search and browsing functionality will always remain free. ContractLens Radar features such as email alerts and exports will be part of a paid plan when launched.
We are not affiliated with the UK Government in any way. We simply aggregate and present data that is already publicly available under the Open Government Licence.
Contract values are submitted by the awarding organisation and are sometimes omitted or incorrectly entered in the source data. Where values appear unreliable we show a dash rather than display misleading figures. This is a known issue with UK procurement data and not specific to ContractLens.
Supplier names are entered manually by contracting authorities and sometimes vary slightly across contracts, for example "Acme Ltd" and "ACME LIMITED". We normalise names where possible but some duplicates may still exist. This is a source data quality issue.
The official government data has some clearly erroneous data above this threshold. Whilst in beta we have decided to cap it at £49.9m to keep our data clean. In the future higher contract values will be added.
The underlying data is licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0 which permits commercial and non-commercial reuse. You are free to use the source data directly from the government's own portals. Systematic scraping of ContractLens itself is not permitted.
Spotted an error or have comments in general? Please email contractlens@paulmurray.pm.
ContractLens was built by Paul Murray, an independent developer from the UK.