Incumbency is strong, not a lock
Grant Thornton's federal contractor survey watched incumbent recompete win rates fall from 75% to 54% in a single year. Incumbents lose to challengers who show up early, informed and specific.
Predict with renewals
UK public sector contract renewals.
BidSkim reads every UK award notice and works out when each contract comes back to market: the end date, the extension options, the incumbent who holds it and what it is worth. Then we reread each one to check it is the kind of work that genuinely returns to market, not a one-off. Right now that is 22,900+ contracts across 3,300+ public buyers due to expire within 12 months, with buyer contact details attached and ready to engage. The median is £192,000: SME-sized work, not megadeals. You see it months before the tender exists, while the terms are still being written.
Updated daily
Going back to market in the next few days.
The nearest recorded contract end dates in the corpus right now. Each one links to the full notice detail; the incumbent named below holds it today.
DVA 4246833 New Driver and Vehicle Agency Test Centre, Mallusk
Driver and Vehicle Agency · held by HENRY BROTHERS LIMITED · ends 27 Aug
£13.5m
TC1078 - Learning Disability and/or Autism Early Intervention and Prevention Service
Manchester City Council · held by Barnardo's · ends 27 Aug
£4.5m
A417 Missing Link - Structures Jointing
KIER TRANSPORTATION LIMITED · held by Volkerlaser Ltd · ends 27 Aug
£525k
A417 Missing Link - Structures Waterproofing
KIER TRANSPORTATION LIMITED · held by Volkerlaser Ltd · ends 27 Aug
£525k
A417 Missing Link - Structures Surface Coatings
KIER TRANSPORTATION LIMITED · held by Volkerlaser Ltd · ends 27 Aug
£525k
A417 Missing Link - Structures Expansion Joints
KIER TRANSPORTATION LIMITED · held by Volkerlaser Ltd · ends 27 Aug
£525k
Supply, Installation and Maintenance of Air Quality Monitoring System
Merseytravel · held by Siemens PLC · ends 27 Aug
£361k
Pre-Digital Phone Lines Solution
Bournemouth Christchurch and Poole Council · held by British Telecommunication PLC · ends 27 Aug
£300k
Allanson Street School Pipework Redirection
St Helens Council · held by Senate Group · ends 27 Aug
£289k
QUB/2101/21 - Contract for the Supply, Delivery, Installation, Commissioning, Maintenance and Consumables for a Thermogravimetric Analyser
Queen's University Belfast · held by Waters Ltd, T/A TA Instruments · ends 27 Aug
£150k
NHSDG0162023 - Estates & Property - Chiller Plant Maintenance 2023-2026
Dumfries and Galloway Health Board · held by SPIE Limited · ends 27 Aug
£144k
GSS23441 - UKRI - Secretariat for All-Party Parliamentary Group for Social Science and Policy
UK SHARED BUSINESS SERVICES LIMITED · held by Palace Yard Events Limited · ends 27 Aug
£90k
Fire Damper Verification and Maintenance
University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust · held by Urmson Fire Specialists Limited · ends 27 Aug
£84k
CCTV MAINTENANCE AND REPAIR
NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde · held by ADT Fire & Security · ends 27 Aug
£61k
Portable Appliance Testing (PAT Testing) 2024-2026
East Renfrewshire Council · held by Valley Group Limited · ends 27 Aug
£58k
St Marys University_Supply & Dist of Coffee Products and Equipment
St Mary's University Twickenham C/O Pelican Procurement · held by paddy and scotts · ends 27 Aug
£53k
BDC Provision of Software and Support via Framework Agreement HTE3-011006
Bromsgrove District Council · held by Insight Direct (UK) Ltd · ends 27 Aug
£48k
TENDER FOR THE PROVISION OF A RESEARCH PROJECT IRISHTRAVELLERS ACCOMMODATION SURVEY
Northern Ireland Housing Executive · held by Perceptive Insight Market Research Ltd · ends 27 Aug
£43k
CA12805 - MEH - Short Haul Data Services
Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust · held by British Telecommunications PLC · ends 27 Aug
£37k
Moss Lane, Derry Hill
Yorkshire Housing Limited · held by Termrim Construction Limited · ends 28 Aug
£23.2m
Recorded end dates from published award notices, framework agreements excluded, refreshed at least daily. An end date is a timing signal to verify and act on, not a guarantee of re-tender.
The number
What is actually expiring.
Counted from the award notices themselves, not estimated. Every figure below is a query against the corpus BidSkim reads each morning.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Non-framework contracts expiring in the next 12 months | 22,916 |
| Public buyers holding them | 3,342 |
| Combined value, where a value is published | £44.3bn |
| Median contract value | £192,000 |
Counted on 6 August 2026 across 430,000+ UK award notices gathered from Find a Tender, Contracts Finder, Public Contracts Scotland and Sell2Wales, deduplicated across sources. Framework agreements are excluded, so these are contracts a supplier could bid for rather than routes to market.
Why timing decides it
Most contracts are decided before the tender is published.
Different markets, different methods, one direction of travel.
| Source | Figure | What it measured |
|---|---|---|
| Shipley Capture Guide | 40 to 80% | of customers have decided a preferred supplier before proposals are submitted |
| Stotles, government tender analysis | 46% | of won contracts were shaped, influenced or pursued before a formal tender was published |
| Open Contracting Partnership, Procurement Act year one | ~1 in 6 | above-threshold competitions received exactly one bid |
| 6sense, 3,500+ B2B buyers | 81% | of the time, the supplier a buyer engages first is the one that wins |
| European Court of Auditors, SR 28/2023 | 23.5% to 41.8% | growth in EU single-bid procedures between 2011 and 2021 |
Economists have measured the same effect inside procurement itself. A peer-reviewed study in Management Science found that where buyers have discretion, the firm they already know keeps winning, and a 2022 Review of Economic Studies paper on federal contracting is titled, simply, “Winning by Default”. By the day the notice goes live, the result is often already decided.
The playbook
How the biggest suppliers set it up.
It is not a secret and it is not reserved for large companies. It is just slow to do by hand.
The UK public sector spent £249bn through procurement last financial year, and £24.7bn of it went directly to the government's own list of Strategic Suppliers. Those firms do not win by refreshing tender portals. They run capture: business development that starts 9 to 18 months before a tender is expected, tracking contract expiries, meeting buyers, answering every market engagement exercise. They also position early on the routes that shut competition out later, and win over half their contracts through frameworks, almost three times the rate SMEs manage.
The pipeline is enormous
Tussell counts £41.7bn of Strategic Supplier contracts alone expiring before the end of this parliament. That is one slice of the market, and it is already larger than most sectors.
The rules
Set the terms before your competitors see the notice.
Talking to buyers early is not a grey area. It is official policy.
Section 16 of the Procurement Act 2023 spells out what preliminary market engagement is for: developing the buyer's requirements, preparing the tender documents and identifying likely contractual terms. In plain words, the suppliers in the room help decide what the tender asks for. Everyone else bids against a document they never saw coming.
The government does not merely permit this. It instructs buyers to do it. Cabinet Office guidance calls early engagement a particularly important tool for the achievement of value for money, and says publishing an engagement notice should be standard practice. Buyers listened: they published more than 600 preliminary market engagement notices a month in the Act's first year, topping 700 in February 2026, and tenders that follow early engagement attract 4.7 bids on average against 3.8 without it.
The only real rule is timing
Buyers want more suppliers in early. Engagement happens months before the tender, so if the first you hear of a contract is the notice, that stage already happened without you. The full story of how the pre-tender window works is on our contract renewals page.
Definition
What a contract expiry tracker is.
And what it is not.
A contract expiry tracker takes public award data and turns it into a forward-looking list: which contracts end when, who holds them now, and what they are worth. It is not a directory of live tenders. It is a view of what is coming, which is the only view early engagement can work from. Keyword alerts cannot do this job. They fire when a tender is published, which is precisely too late.
The filter
Filtered for genuine renewals, not raw end dates.
An award end date is not an opportunity.
Plenty of expiring contracts never come back to market in a form you could bid for. Some roll into a framework call-off. Some are extended without a new notice. Some services simply stop. Trackers that forward every end date fill your pipeline with dead leads and quietly train you to ignore them, and on most platforms, working out which expiries are genuinely winnable is a job left to you.
- Every signal starts with a real award notice, deduplicated across the four official sources.
- We pull the end date, the extension options, the incumbent and the value from the record itself.
- Only where the record supports a genuine renewal window does the contract reach your radar.
- Each one is scored 0 to 100 against your services and regions, with the reasoning attached.
- Where a field is missing, we say so rather than guess.
What you get
Everything you need to start the conversation.
A renewal flagged 6 to 12 months out gives you what big bidders buy with headcount: time. BidSkim makes that time usable.
Who holds it, and what they are paid
The incumbent, the value and the buyer, taken from the award notice rather than inferred.
When it should come back
The end date and the extension options, so you know whether you have six months or two years.
What the buyer requires
The pass/fail requirements that decide their bids, their spend history and their top suppliers.
Who to write to
Buyer contact details on 99.8% of tracked renewals. A first email you can send this morning, months before the specification is drafted.
BidSkim does not write bids. Bid-writing tools help after you decide to bid. BidSkim gets you into the conversation that decides what the bid will be. The full buyer picture is in how to research a public sector buyer.
Honest limits
Where this does not work.
This only works where the underlying data exists. Across the 430,000+ award notices we track, 73.2% publish a contract end date. The rest do not, and where the public record is thin, the tracker is thin too. Nobody publishes an official figure for how many expiring contracts are re-tendered rather than quietly extended; the Public Accounts Committee has criticised exactly that data gap. We would rather show you a shorter, honest list than pad it with guesses.
The same goes for the research above. Those numbers come from different markets and methods, and early engagement moves your odds rather than guaranteeing anything. What every source agrees on is direction: earlier is better, and the earliest reliable signal is the expiry of the contract you want.
In the product
How BidSkim helps.
- Tracks 22,900+ non-framework contracts renewing in the next 12 months across 3,300+ public buyers, £44.3bn where a value is published, median £192,000.
- Scans Find a Tender, Contracts Finder, Public Contracts Scotland and Sell2Wales daily, deduplicated across sources.
- Filters every expiry for a genuine renewal window and scores it 0 to 100 against your service lines, reason attached.
- Buyer profiles carry the requirements that decide bids, spend history, top suppliers and named contacts.
- Free one-off match scan and a free 12-month report before you pay for anything. In the 12-month reports we run for new sign-ups, 7 in 10 had missed at least one contract that matched their business.
Questions
Things people ask about expiry tracking.
Is it really allowed to talk to a buyer before a tender is published?
Yes. The Procurement Act 2023 formalised preliminary market engagement, and official guidance says publishing an engagement notice should be standard practice. The rules require fairness, so being in the room is not a fix. It is the stage of the process where suppliers are invited to speak.
How many contracts actually come up for renewal?
In BidSkim's data, 22,916 non-framework contracts held by 3,342 UK public buyers have end dates inside the next 12 months, worth £44.3bn where a value is published. The median is £192,000, the size of contract an SME can credibly chase.
Is there a free way to try this?
Yes. The free scan and the 12-month report show you the honest picture for your trades before you commit to anything. No card, no sales call.
Does this cover every public contract in the UK?
It covers what is published on Find a Tender, Contracts Finder, Public Contracts Scotland and Sell2Wales. Contracts awarded through some frameworks or call-off arrangements may not generate a separate notice, so they will not appear.
How accurate are the renewal dates?
As accurate as the underlying notice. When a buyer publishes an end date and extension terms, the estimate is solid. When they do not, we flag the gap rather than invent a date.
Do I need to be able to write a winning bid for this to help?
The tracker tells you what is coming, who holds it now and who to talk to. It does not write bids for you.
Sources
Where every number came from.
Sources
- BidSkim database of UK award notices, queried 6 August 2026: 430,000+ award notices; 22,916 non-framework contracts with end dates in the next 12 months across 3,342 buyers; £44.3bn total and £192,000 median where a value is published.
- Shipley Associates, Shipley Capture Guide (Larry Newman): customers decide a preferred supplier before proposals are submitted in 40 to 80% of cases.
- Stotles, “Three strategies to win government tenders”: 46% of won government contracts shaped, influenced or pursued before publication of a formal tender.
- 6sense Research, “The Critical Period for B2B Buying” (2024, 3,500+ buyers): buyers engage the eventual winner first 81% of the time; 85% largely set requirements before speaking to sellers.
- Coviello, Guglielmo and Spagnolo, Management Science (2018): buyer discretion increases the probability the same firm wins repeatedly.
- Kang and Miller, “Winning by Default”, Review of Economic Studies (2022): US federal contracts often attract only one bid.
- European Court of Auditors, Special Report 28/2023: EU single-bid procedures rose from 23.5% (2011) to 41.8% (2021).
- Open Contracting Partnership, “The UK Procurement Act one year on” (March 2026): single-bid share of above-threshold competitions around one in six; 600+ preliminary market engagement notices a month; tenders preceded by early engagement average 4.7 bids against 3.8.
- Tussell, UK Government Strategic Suppliers 2026: £249bn FY24/25 procurement spend; £24.7bn direct to Strategic Suppliers; £41.7bn of their contracts expiring this parliament; frameworks used at almost three times the SME rate.
- Grant Thornton Federal Contractor Survey (via Federal News Network, 2017): incumbent recompete win rate fell from 75% to 54% in one year.
- Public Accounts Committee, “Competition in public procurement” (December 2023): data gaps on extensions and framework direct awards.
- Procurement Act 2023, section 16; Cabinet Office guidance on preliminary market engagement; HM Government Sourcing Playbook (2023).
See which contracts on your patch expire next year.
Run the free 12-month report and judge the list yourself. No card, no sales call.
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