After the win
Every contract you lost comes round again.
A public contract is a fixed term, not a permanent arrangement. The work you missed three years ago is being re-tendered by somebody, and the firm most likely to win it is the one that saw it coming. Almost nobody watches for that moment — which is precisely why it is worth watching.
The incumbent is more beatable than you think
We hold 225,636 award notices across 6,064 buyers. Of the 43,093 that publish a bid count, 16,571 — 38% — drew a single bid. Bid counts come from Find a Tender only, so that is above-threshold work and says nothing about smaller contracts. That is not an incumbent winning a hard-fought contest. That is a contest nobody else entered.
It happens because the competition finds out too late. By the time the notice appears, the specification is written, the buyer can no longer speak freely to any one bidder, and a challenger has a few weeks to understand a service the incumbent has run for years. Turn up early and that asymmetry mostly disappears.
Expiry dates: what is published, and what is not
The obvious product here is a feed of contracts about to expire. Half of it is genuinely available and half of it is not, and the split is worth stating precisely rather than rounding in either direction.
Contracts Finder publishes the contract end date on effectively every award notice it carries; Find a Tender publishes one on 62% of the award notices it carries. We hold 213,935 awards with a published end date, 97,480 of them contracts still running, of which 47,939 expire within the next eighteen months and 18,526 within six. A renewal calendar built from open data is therefore solid for one register and partial for the other — which is worth knowing before you rely on it.
Two further caveats we would rather state than have you discover. A published end date is the original term, and extensions are exercised quietly — a contract can pass its stated end date and continue for another two years with nothing published at all. And our own record of Contracts Finder awards after April 2024 was incomplete until 31 July 2026: the register kept publishing at its usual rate throughout, we stopped collecting. That backfill has since landed and 2024 onwards is now dense, but the corpus still thins sharply before 2023 — so a contract awarded on a long term several years ago is likelier to be missing than a recent one, and that gap is ours, not the register's.
Which is why the dates are a starting point and not the product. What follows is what actually works, and it works whether or not the date was published.
What actually works
- Record what you hold, and what you want to take. Your own contracts with the dates you know, plus the ones you lost and would bid for again. You have this information; nothing public does.
- Watch the buyer, not the contract. Organisations re-procure on their own rhythm and publish everything they do. Watching the buyer catches the re-tender even when your date was wrong - which it often will be.
- Read the pipeline notices. Buyers publish planning notices before the real procurement starts. That is the window where you can still talk to them and where the specification is not yet fixed.
- Know who holds it now, and on what terms. The award notice tells you the incumbent, the value and often the bid count. A contract awarded to a single bidder at a keen price is a very different proposition from one fought over by twelve.
BidSquirrel does all four: your contracts and their renewal dates, a watch on the buyers that matter to you, the planning notices that show what is coming, and the award history behind each one. It is the half of the job the rest of the category stops before.
Common questions
When does a public contract come up for renewal?
Most public contracts run for a fixed term - commonly three to five years, often with an extension option - so the re-tender is broadly predictable from the award date and the stated duration. The end date is published more often than most people expect, and unevenly: Contracts Finder publishes the contract end date on effectively every award notice it carries; Find a Tender publishes one on 62% of the award notices it carries. Where it is missing you work it out from the award notice, the framework term, or by asking the buyer.
Can you tell me when a specific contract expires?
Often, yes - and we will say plainly when we cannot. We hold a published end date on 213,935 award records, 97,480 of which are contracts still running. Two honest limits: that date is the term as published at award, so an extension or an early exit can move it; and coverage is uneven between the registers, so for some contracts there is simply nothing published. Where we have no date, you record the one you believe applies and we watch the buyer, so the re-tender reaches you even if your date was wrong.
Is the incumbent hard to beat on a re-tender?
Less often than people assume. Of the awards we hold that publish a bid count, a large share went to a single bidder - which means the incumbent frequently faces no competition at all rather than winning a hard fight. Bid counts come from Find a Tender only, so that describes above-threshold work and says nothing about smaller contracts. A prepared challenger who knows the renewal is coming, understands the current service and has spoken to the buyer beforehand is in a far stronger position than the bid count suggests.
What is the best time to approach a buyer about a contract you want?
Long before the notice. Once a tender is published, procurement rules limit what a buyer can tell any one bidder, and the specification is already written. The window that matters is the planning stage - which is why buyers publish planning and pipeline notices, and why they are worth watching.
Related
- Public sector buyers — What each buyer purchases, who keeps winning it, and how often they go back to market - the practical form of "watch the buyer, not the contract".
- Pricing a public-sector bid — The other half nobody covers - a costed price and the value-for-money case.
- How BidSquirrel works — Find, qualify, build, price, keep - the whole journey.
- Coverage and methodology — How we check our own scoring.
- Where our data comes from — Every source, how fresh each one is right now, and the portals we deliberately do not collect from.
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