Procurement intelligence
Forty-seven UK technology contracts end on 31 March 2027
Of 72 UK public IT contracts over £1m ending in the month around it, 47 end on one day. Named buyers, named incumbents, and why the work starts now.
Skim · Built on Skim's live UK procurement database29 September 20266 min read
Skim award records for UK buyers, CPV division 72 (IT services), contracts over £1,000,000 reaching end of term between 29 March and 29 April 2027. Snapshot 29 September 2026. The window was read to exhaustion — 72 records over two pages, with no further results — so the counts here are complete for that window and those filters, not a sample. Contract end dates are publisher-attested or derived from start date plus duration and are missing on many sources, so this is a floor for the sector as a whole. Framework agreements are excluded: they publish a ceiling across every supplier appointed to them, not a contract value.
The one number
47
Skim award records, CPV 72, snapshot 29 September 2026
Read the window either side and the shape is unmistakable. Between 29 March and 29 April 2027 there are 72 UK public technology contracts over £1m with a recorded end date. Forty-seven of them — close to two in three — end on the same day, 31 March. The remaining twenty-five are scattered across the other thirty days.
This is the UK financial year end, and it is the single most crowded date in the public technology recompete calendar. For a bidder it means two things at once: an unusual concentration of opportunity, and an unusual concentration of competition for the attention of the people running those procurements.
The contracts
Every contract below ends on 31 March 2027. Each is a single award with a named buyer, a named incumbent and a published value. Framework agreements are excluded, because a framework publishes a ceiling covering every supplier appointed to it rather than work any one supplier holds.
| Buyer | Contract | Incumbent | Value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Government Digital Service | SMS provision for GOV.UK Notify | MMGRP | £98,166,541 |
| NS&I | Business to business outsourced services | Sopra Steria | £92,312,456 |
| Home Office | DBS application management services | CGI IT UK | £71,300,000 |
| Department for Work and Pensions | Software value added reseller | Computacenter UK | £37,000,000 |
| HM Revenue & Customs | Procurement of 10,000 laptops | XMA | £10,418,489 |
| Ministry of Defence | DCO close support partner 2 | Logiq Consulting | £10,322,640 |
| Government Digital Service | Cyber security services | Accenture UK | £9,500,000 |
| Northern Trains | On-train Wi-Fi maintenance and software support | Icomera UK | £8,500,000 |
| Government Property Agency | Technology delivery partner 1 | Swift Strategies | £8,000,000 |
| Northern Trains | CCTV, passenger counting and media screens | Alan Dick Communications | £7,350,000 |
| Department for Business and Trade | Digital skills for technology | Made Tech | £6,000,000 |
| UK Health Security Agency | Microsoft Azure cloud platform | Trustmarque Solutions | £4,718,000 |
| Derbyshire County Council | Microsoft licensing solution provider | Insight Direct UK | £4,408,000 |
| NHS Blood and Transplant | Data centre co-location | Specialist Computer Centres | £4,200,000 |
Two patterns are worth more than the individual rows. Government Digital Service appears twice, with two unrelated services ending together — a buyer running a portfolio to one calendar rather than one contract at a time. Northern Trains does the same with two on-train technology contracts held by different suppliers, which is the kind of split estate a challenger can credibly offer to consolidate.
Why the date clusters
Public bodies budget to the financial year, which in the UK ends on 31 March. A contract written to expire on that date keeps the spend inside one budget period and lets the buyer hand a clean number to their finance team. Over enough years, that administrative convenience compounds into a cliff.
The consequence for a bidder is a calendar, not a surprise. A buyer wanting continuity past 31 March 2027 has to start the replacement procurement six to twelve months earlier, which places the decisive period between roughly now and next spring. By the time the notice appears on a portal, the specification is written, the evaluation criteria are set, and the buyer usually has a view about who can deliver it.
“The contract that reaches the portal in January was specified in the autumn.”
The crowding cuts both ways. Forty-seven simultaneous recompetes means forty-seven commercial teams running procurements to the same deadline, and a supplier arriving in February is arriving alongside everyone else. The advantage belongs to whoever engaged while the buyer was still deciding what to buy.
What this data cannot tell you
Four limits, stated plainly, because a recompete list that implies completeness is worse than no list.
The 47 and the 72 are complete for one specific query and nothing wider: UK buyers, CPV division 72, over £1m, ending between 29 March and 29 April 2027. Change any filter and both numbers change. This is not a count of every UK contract ending that day, and it is not a value.
End dates are approximate. Some are attested by the buyer, others derived from a start date plus a stated duration, and many awards carry no end date at all. A sector that looks quiet in this data may simply be a sector that publishes badly, so treat every figure here as a floor.
Records duplicate. The same contract can appear under two different identifiers with different values — one pair in this window, a Department for Work and Pensions design partner contract, appears twice with two award dates and two values, and is counted once above. Where the duplication is not obvious, a count like this will overstate slightly.
An end date is not a re-tender date. A buyer may extend, may hold an option period nobody published, or may bring the service in-house. The date tells you when to ask the question, not what the answer will be.
FAQ
Why do so many UK public contracts end on 31 March?
Because 31 March is the end of the UK public sector financial year. Writing a contract to expire on that date keeps the spend within one budget period, so it is the default choice for a great many procurements. The effect accumulates: in the month around 31 March 2027, 47 of the 72 UK technology contracts over £1m with a recorded end date finish on that single day.
When should a bidder start work on a 31 March 2027 recompete?
Now. A buyer seeking continuity typically begins the replacement procurement six to twelve months before the end date, and longer for complex services. That places the decisive engagement window between autumn 2026 and spring 2027. A contract already out to tender is a contract whose specification someone else helped shape.
How do I find out who holds one of these contracts now?
Award notices name the winning supplier and are published on Contracts Finder for below-threshold awards and Find a Tender for above-threshold ones. The work is in linking an award to its end date and to the buyer's other awards, which is what the table above does.
Does a long-standing incumbent mean the recompete is not worth bidding?
Not by itself. The Procurement Act 2023 requires contracting authorities to assess against published criteria, and a buyer re-tendering after several years is usually looking for something the current arrangement has not delivered. The useful question is what has changed for that buyer since the last award.
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