How BidSkim counts public sector contracts

The unit on every page is a contract awarded: one procurement that reached an award. A procurement often has several notices, such as a tender notice, an award notice and later changes. We count it once.

The same procurement can appear on more than one of the four sources. We merge the copies and count it once. A framework or dynamic purchasing system is a route to buy, not a contract, so the framework itself is not counted. Contracts awarded through it, the call-offs, are.

A contract is dated by its award date. When a notice gives no award date we use the award notice's date, and failing that the date it was published. Future dates never count.

Buyer and supplier pages cover the 24 months to the date the figures were refreshed, with the latest 12 months used for some lists. Service pages cover the 12 months to the latest date by which every contract awarded has been assigned to its services, so a service page is never based on a partly assigned period.

A supplier is credited with every contract its name appears on as a winner. Several suppliers can share one contract, so supplier totals added together are larger than the number of contracts. Suppliers are named as they appear on the official notices.

A recorded value is the value published on the notice. It often covers the whole term of a contract, extensions included, and it is often an estimate. It is not money paid, so we never call it spend.

Values below £1,000 or above £10 billion are treated as errors. A call-off that carries its framework's whole ceiling, and a contract of £1 billion or more placed through a framework, count as having no published value. So does a supplier's share of a contract when the notice does not say what that supplier won.

Beside every total we say how many contracts have a published value, and we lead with the median contract. A handful of very large contracts can dominate a total, while the median shows what a typical contract is worth.

A service total adds up only the contracts where that service is the main thing bought, so the same money is never counted under two services.

BidSkim reads the text of each awarded contract's notices and assigns it to services from our catalogue of about 2,000 services, grouped by industry. Each contract gets one main service. It gets further services only when it buys materially separate things, such as cleaning and security in one contract.

The assignment is made by an AI model working from the notice text alone, never from keywords or the CPV code on its own. Each release is checked on a sample of 30 assignments by a stronger model, with a person checking a share of them, and must be right at least 90% of the time before pages built on it are published.

A service page counts every contract that bought the service. Its values, median and example contracts use only the contracts where it was the main service. Buyer and supplier pages show services once their period is fully assigned, and until then group contracts by CPV division, the classification buyers choose themselves.

A buyer gets a page after 25 contracts awarded in 24 months. A supplier needs 25 contracts won and an official identifier, such as a Companies House number, a charity number or a public body code. A service needs 25 contracts in 12 months. We never publish a page about a named individual.

A page that falls below 15 contracts at two monthly checks stays online, so links and citations keep working, but it is no longer recommended on other pages. When an organisation is renamed, merged or succeeded, its old address redirects to the current page.

Different sites can report different numbers for the same buyer or market. The usual reasons are these.

• Notices or contracts. A site that counts notices counts one procurement several times, once for each tender, award and change notice. We count contracts.
• One source or four. A site that reads only one notice service misses contracts published elsewhere. A site that adds sources without merging them counts some contracts twice.
• Name variants. Buyers and suppliers appear under many spellings. Where the variants are not merged, one organisation's contracts are split across several records.
• Framework ceilings counted as spend. A framework's advertised ceiling can run to billions of pounds and is shared by many suppliers over years. Counting it as a contract value inflates totals. We leave ceilings out.
• Values and payments. Published values describe contracts, not money paid. Spending data from a buyer's own accounts measures something else.

When a published figure was wrong, we correct it and record the correction here. To report an error, write to [email protected].

• 23 September 2026. Supplier figures for contracts placed through NHS Supply Chain now credit the company that delivers the service, where the notice or a reviewed record names it, rather than NHS Supply Chain itself. NHS Supply Chain's figures as a buyer did not change.

These pages are compiled by BidSkim Limited. The method is owned by Seamus White, BidSkim's founder. For press and data requests, see data for journalists.

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.