How do I analyse competitors in public tenders?

Start with published award notices: they name the winning supplier, the contract value, and how many tenders were received. Track the same competitors over time across buyers, sectors, and price ranges. After a couple of dozen contracts, patterns emerge — who you always face, who beats you on price, and who you can out-deliver on quality.

What data can I use for competitor analysis in UK procurement?

Award notices on Find a Tender and Contracts Finder are the core source, giving the winner, value, and number of bidders for above-threshold contracts. The Procurement Act 2023 adds more: payment information over £30,000 and annual KPI performance scores for contracts over £5 million, so you can see how well an incumbent is delivering.

How does competitor analysis inform the bid/no-bid decision?

It tells you whether a contract is genuinely winnable. If award data shows a buyer consistently re-awarding the same incumbent, you need a strong displacement case or your effort is better spent elsewhere. If a CPV code attracts a dozen bidders every time, you can weigh whether your offer truly stands out before committing resource.

Can you find out how many bidders competed for a contract?

Often yes. For above-threshold awards, the contract award notice usually records the number of tenders received alongside the winner and the value. That figure is a direct measure of how contested an opportunity is, and tracking it by buyer or CPV code shows where competition is thin and where it is crowded.

How does the Procurement Act 2023 affect competitor analysis?

It widens the public record. Beyond the award notice, contracting authorities now publish payment information over £30,000 and annual KPI scores for contracts over £5 million, for procurements started on or after 24 February 2025. That means an incumbent's delivery performance — not just the fact that they won — increasingly forms part of the data a challenger can analyse.

Strategy and decision-making

Competitor analysis in procurement

Written by Justin Cesman, CEO of Skim. Last reviewed: 22 June 2026

Definition: Competitor analysis in procurement is the systematic study of the suppliers bidding for the same public contracts — using published award notices, framework positions, and market intelligence to learn who wins, where, at what value, and against how many bidders, so each bid is targeted rather than generic.

Key takeaways

Competitor analysis in procurement maps the suppliers competing for the same public contracts — their wins, losses, pricing patterns, and framework positions.
Public procurement is uniquely data-rich: every above-threshold award notice names the winner, the value, and the number of tenders received, creating a free, searchable record of competitors.
The point of the analysis is sharper decisions — which contracts to chase, which incumbents to challenge, and how to position a bid against a specific rival rather than a generic field.
The Procurement Act 2023 widened the public record further, adding payment data over £30,000 and annual KPI performance scores for contracts over £5 million.
Suppliers who read award data systematically make better bid/no-bid decisions and write more competitive responses, because they understand the market they are bidding into.

How it works

Competitor analysis in public procurement is uniquely data-rich because award notices are public. Every contract awarded above the procurement thresholds is published — naming the winning supplier, the contract value, and, in most cases, the number of tenders received. Higher-value awards appear on Find a Tender; lower-value awards on Contracts Finder. Together these create a searchable record of your competitors' wins, the buyers they serve, and how contested each opportunity was.

Effective analysis goes beyond a list of names. It maps each rival's strengths and weaknesses relative to yours, identifies the sectors and buyers where they win and you do not, infers pricing patterns from published contract values, and flags where a competitor may be overextended across too many live contracts. Tracking the same notices over time turns one-off results into patterns: who you always encounter, who beats you on price, who you out-deliver on quality, and which incumbents are quietly losing ground.

The strategic value lands in two places. First, the bid/no-bid decision: if a buyer consistently re-awards the same incumbent, you need a compelling displacement strategy or your effort is better spent elsewhere. Second, bid positioning: knowing a rival is stretched lets you emphasise capacity and delivery reliability, while knowing where they are weak lets you build win themes that attack that gap directly.

The Procurement Act 2023, in force for procurements started on or after 24 February 2025, widened the public record. Beyond the award notice itself, contracting authorities now publish payment information for individual payments over £30,000, and annual key performance indicator scores for contracts over £5 million — so for larger contracts you can see not only who won, but how well the incumbent is actually performing. That is a direct signal for a challenger building a case at renewal.

Under the Procurement Act 2023

Reviewed 22 June 2026

How much competitor data is public depends on when the procurement started. Under the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 (PCR 2015), which still govern procurements begun before 24 February 2025, the contract award notice was the main public record — winner, value, and number of bidders. The Procurement Act 2023, in force for procurements started on or after 24 February 2025, adds materially more open data that competitor analysis can draw on: contract payment information for individual payments over £30,000 (section 70), payments-compliance reporting on how promptly authorities pay suppliers (section 69), and contract performance notices recording annual KPI scores and breaches for contracts over £5 million (section 71). For analysts, that means an incumbent's delivery performance — not just the fact that they won — is increasingly part of the public record.

Sources: Procurement Act 2023 (legislation.gov.uk) · GOV.UK — New legislative requirements under the Procurement Act 2023 · GOV.UK e-learning — Module 2: Transparency

Why it matters for bidders

You cannot write a differentiated bid without understanding what you are differentiating from. Competitor analysis turns a generic statement of capability into a targeted argument for why you — not a named rival — are the right choice for this contract. The richest input is free and public: from award notices you can model who wins in your sectors, what buyers actually pay, and how many suppliers each opportunity attracts, while the Procurement Act 2023 now exposes incumbent performance and payment data on larger contracts too. Most bidders glance at an award notice to see who won and move on, wasting the best open intelligence in the market. The discipline of mining that data — drawn from teams who have won £3bn+ in UK and EU public contracts — is what separates a bid that names its rival's weakness from one that competes on hope.

How Skim helps

Skim's Competitor Analysis agent builds and maintains your competitive landscape from award notice data, framework positions, and market intelligence across UK and EU procurement — showing exactly who you are competing against, where they are winning, against how many bidders, and at what value. That picture feeds the Bid Analysis agent, so each bid/no-bid decision and every win theme is grounded in the contracts the market has actually awarded rather than guesswork.

Competitor Analysis agent · Bid Analysis agent

Frequently asked questions

How do I analyse competitors in public tenders?: Start with published award notices: they name the winning supplier, the contract value, and how many tenders were received. Track the same competitors over time across buyers, sectors, and price ranges. After a couple of dozen contracts, patterns emerge — who you always face, who beats you on price, and who you can out-deliver on quality.
What data can I use for competitor analysis in UK procurement?: Award notices on Find a Tender and Contracts Finder are the core source, giving the winner, value, and number of bidders for above-threshold contracts. The Procurement Act 2023 adds more: payment information over £30,000 and annual KPI performance scores for contracts over £5 million, so you can see how well an incumbent is delivering.
How does competitor analysis inform the bid/no-bid decision?: It tells you whether a contract is genuinely winnable. If award data shows a buyer consistently re-awarding the same incumbent, you need a strong displacement case or your effort is better spent elsewhere. If a CPV code attracts a dozen bidders every time, you can weigh whether your offer truly stands out before committing resource.
Can you find out how many bidders competed for a contract?: Often yes. For above-threshold awards, the contract award notice usually records the number of tenders received alongside the winner and the value. That figure is a direct measure of how contested an opportunity is, and tracking it by buyer or CPV code shows where competition is thin and where it is crowded.
How does the Procurement Act 2023 affect competitor analysis?: It widens the public record. Beyond the award notice, contracting authorities now publish payment information over £30,000 and annual KPI scores for contracts over £5 million, for procurements started on or after 24 February 2025. That means an incumbent's delivery performance — not just the fact that they won — increasingly forms part of the data a challenger can analyse.

Sources

Related terms

Bid/no-bid decision

A bid/no-bid decision is the structured assessment a supplier makes before pursuing a tender, weighing strategic fit, win probability, resource cost, commercial value, and risk to decide whether the opportunity is worth bidding for — concentrating limited bid effort on winnable, profitable work rather than chasing every notice.

Award notice

An award notice is a public notice confirming the outcome of a procurement — naming the winning supplier, the contract value, and the number of tenders received. Under the Procurement Act 2023 the term splits into two notices: a contract award notice published before the contract is signed, and a contract details notice published after.

Win themes

Win themes are the three to five recurring messages woven through a tender response that tie a genuine differentiator to a buyer's stated priority and frame it as a benefit. Win themes answer the evaluator's underlying question — why choose this supplier for this contract — rather than listing capabilities.

Contracts Finder

Contracts Finder is the UK government's free, Cabinet Office-run portal where public buyers publish lower-value contract opportunities and award notices. It covers contracts above £12,000 including VAT for central government and £30,000 including VAT for sub-central bodies such as councils, NHS trusts, and universities.

Find a Tender(FTS)

Find a Tender (FTS) is the UK government's central digital platform for publishing public procurement notices above the threshold, replacing the EU's Official Journal (OJEU/TED) after Brexit. Under the Procurement Act 2023, FTS carries all regulated above-threshold notices for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

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