How to Size Your Market in UK Public Procurement Using Award Data

Most small suppliers enter public procurement with a hunch rather than a number. They know their sector buys from the public purse, but they cannot say whether the annual spend in their category is worth £500,000 or £50 million. That gap matters, because without a credible market size you cannot set sensible targets, justify a bidding budget, or decide which buyers deserve your attention. The good news is that the raw material for a proper estimate is already published. Award notices, contract values and buyer histories are all in the public record. This guide shows you how to turn that scattered data into a defensible view of your market.

Start with the right award data sources

Before you can add anything up, you need to know where the numbers live. Public sector spend is not held in one tidy place. It is spread across several portals according to the value and type of contract, and if you only look at one you will badly undercount your market.

Where the notices sit

• Contracts Finder carries awards from central government and its agencies, and is mandatory for contracts above the lower value threshold. It is the most accessible portal for finding small and mid value awards that SMEs actually win.
• Find a Tender is the home for higher value contracts and anything that must be published nationally. Larger frameworks and long term service deals tend to surface here.
• The devolved portals, Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales and the Northern Ireland eSourcing site, hold significant regional spend that never appears elsewhere. If you serve those nations, ignoring them will distort your picture.

Under the Procurement Act 2023, publication is increasingly routed through a single central digital platform, which over time will make this cross referencing simpler. For now, treat each portal as a separate seam to mine. To orient yourself on where opportunities appear in the first place, our guide on how to find government contracts is a useful companion.

When you pull data, filter deliberately. Set the status to awarded contracts so you exclude live tenders and early engagement notices. Use keywords tied to what you actually sell, and pin them to the relevant classification codes for precision. Understanding a CPV code is essential here, because a loose keyword search will sweep in adjacent categories and inflate your figure. Aim to capture a rolling window of the last three to five years, so cyclical spending and one off projects average out rather than skewing a single year.

Turn contract values into an annual market figure

Once you have a clean set of award notices, the arithmetic is straightforward, but the discipline is in normalising the numbers so you compare like with like.

The core calculation

• Sum the contract values. Add the total value stated in every relevant award notice in your dataset. This gives you the gross figure across your whole time window.
• Divide by the number of years analysed. If you gathered four years of awards, dividing the total by four gives a rough annual spend for the category.
• Annualise multi year contracts. This is the step most people skip. A three year framework worth £300,000 is only £100,000 a year. If your dataset mixes one year and multi year deals, convert every contract to its annual value before you compare them, or your average will be nonsense.

Worked example: suppose you find twelve awards over four years in your category, totalling £8 million. That suggests £2 million of annual spend. But three of those awards are five year contracts each worth £1 million, so their true annual contribution is £200,000 each rather than £1 million each. Reworking the maths brings your realistic annual market closer to £1.4 million. The headline number and the annualised number can differ enormously, and only the annualised one is useful for planning.

While you calculate, strip out obvious outliers. A single, unrepeatable award, for instance an emergency response contract, will distort your average and give you a target you can never hit again. Reading the award notice detail carefully helps you spot these one offs and set them aside. The goal is a steady state figure that reflects what the sector reliably spends year after year, not a peak inflated by a project that will not recur.

Adjust for data gaps and apply the SME reality check

Published award data is never a complete record of public spending. If you treat your aggregated figure as gospel, you will overestimate the transparency of the market and underestimate how much sits below the surface. A serious estimate acknowledges the gaps.

Where the blind spots are

• Below threshold spend. Contracts under the publication threshold are not required on Contracts Finder, so a whole layer of small scale purchasing is invisible. In some categories this is a large slice of real spend.
• Redacted and legacy awards. Emergency or sensitive contracts sometimes have price or volume redacted. Awards linked to older frameworks may appear on different systems or be recorded inconsistently, which leads to undercounting.
• Framework activity. A great deal of spend flows through call off contracts under framework agreements, and the individual call offs are not always published as separate awards. The parent framework value may be listed once while the actual usage stays hidden.

Given all this, apply a conservative adjustment rather than pretending your figure is exact. Some suppliers add a modest buffer to account for hidden spend; others deliberately work from the published figure alone as a defensible floor. Either approach is fine provided you state your assumption.

The Procurement Act has improved the raw material. Newer notices carry fields on SME suitability and the number of bids received, which help you judge whether a category is genuinely open to smaller suppliers. Checking the suitability marker across recent awards tells you whether buyers are deliberately shaping lots for firms like yours. For context on what else has shifted, our summary of the changes arriving in 2026 sets out the direction of travel. The single practical rule is honesty: label your estimate as a floor, a midpoint or an upper bound, and never present a figure without saying which it is.

From market size to sensible bidding targets

A total market figure is interesting, but it is not something you can bid for. The final move is to narrow it into a serviceable addressable market, the slice you could realistically win, and then convert that into dated targets.

Narrowing the number

• Filter by geography. If you only serve one region, filter awards by buyer location. National spend of £10 million may shrink to £2 million once you restrict it to where you can actually deliver.
• Study competitor share. Search by supplier name to see who has been winning. If one incumbent holds four fifths of the value, your realistic target is the remaining share, not the whole pot.
• Apply SME suitability. If only a third of lots are marked suitable for smaller suppliers, apply that proportion. A £10 million market with 30 per cent SME suitable lots gives roughly £3 million you can chase.
• Weigh bid density. Where notices show ten or more bidders per tender, your win probability falls, so you may need higher value targets to justify the effort of competing.

The live picture reinforces why targeting matters. There were 1,722 live tenders published in the last 30 days across the UK, and 818 tenders closing in the next 14 days. You cannot chase all of them, so your addressable figure becomes the filter that decides where effort goes. KimonBids tracks this flow so you can spot the awards that fit your category rather than drowning in volume.

Turn the number into a pipeline using contract end dates. If a relevant contract expires in eighteen months, that is a specific, high probability target you can prepare for well in advance. Buyer frequency helps too: an authority that has awarded five contracts in your category in three years is a proven buyer worth cultivating. Disciplined go or no go decisions then protect your budget by steering you away from lots that are technically in your market but practically unwinnable. Market sizing and bid selection are two ends of the same process.