The £649.6bn of public contracts coming up for grabs in 2026 and how to win them

That figure excludes framework parents. Of it, £283.7 billion expires in the next 12 months alone. Buried inside both numbers is a subset of 45,069 individual contract records where the buyer has already published a renewal date, the incumbent's name is public, and the rules that govern the rebid are now the most SME-friendly in a generation.

The UK public sector is heading into one of its largest contract renewal waves on record. Two years of contracted spend is coming off its books at once — a hangover from COVID-era extensions, the Brexit transition, and three-year deals signed at the peak of post-pandemic recovery spending in 2022–23. For SMEs that know where to look, the timing is exceptional.

The Procurement Act 2023 went live on 24 February 2025 — the biggest shake-up to UK public procurement law since 2006. It actively reduces the structural advantages that large incumbents have historically enjoyed. Every renewal in the next 24 months is subject to its new rules.

The £1 target. The government's stated aim is for at least £1 in every £3 of public spending to reach SMEs. The current rate falls short — every expiry below is a chance to close the gap.

45,069 contracts with recorded end dates fall in the next 24 months. This is not a forecast — these are actual published contract end dates.

27,596 of those expire in the next 12 months, with a combined recorded value of £283.7 billion — up 37% in value on the full 2025 calendar year.

Software & IT services is the single largest SME hunting ground by contract count: 3,481 contracts in the SME value band (£25k–£20m) expiring in the next 24 months, worth a combined £4.95 billion.

Business services & professional consulting (CPV 79) is the highest-volume sector by count in the SME band: 3,533 contracts worth £3.67 billion — dominated by local councils and NHS trusts, not central government.

65.8% of all UK contracts expiring in the next 24 months (by count) are buyer-attested as SME-suitable: 29,655 contracts with a combined published value of £541.8 billion.

Average competition across the SME sweet spot (£25k–£20m) runs to just 4–7 bidders in building maintenance, waste management, transport, and education.

Waste & environmental services (CPV 90), repair & maintenance (CPV 50), and transport (CPV 60) all show fewer than five recorded bidders on average per contract — the clearest signal of low competitive pressure in the dataset.

What this is. A live analysis of UK public-sector contract award data held by Skim, drawn from UK Contracts Finder and Find a Tender (UK FTS). Both sources are refreshed daily; the snapshot used for this report is 4 June 2026. The dataset covers awards from roughly 2006 to the present, with the richest coverage from 2015 onward.

What "expiry" means here. Where a contract has a published end date, that date is used directly and labelled a fact. Where no end date is published but an award date and duration are available, the expiry is calculated (award date plus stated duration) and labelled an inference — flagged as such in individual contract tables. Roughly 40–50% of contracts in the raw dataset lack a published end date and are excluded from expiry counts, so the figures here undercount the total opportunity.

What this is not. A general-purpose AI model's guess about public spending. This analysis runs directly against Skim's proprietary procurement database. No public search engine, no language-model training data, and no third-party aggregator holds this combination of live award records, incumbent names, buyer histories, and contract end dates in one queryable system.

Coverage limitations. Contracts below the Contracts Finder publication threshold (broadly below £10,000 for central government and below £25,000 for other bodies) are not captured. NHS and local-authority frameworks are often published as single parent notices without individual call-off awards; these are excluded from expiry counts. Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales each have separate procurement portals with partial cross-publication, so coverage is skewed toward England. For any individual contract, always verify current status on Find a Tender before bidding.

Contract value expiring by year:

The next-12-months count (27,596) is lower than the full-calendar-year comparators because it runs June to June, not January to December. The value uplift is striking nonetheless, and reflects a clustering of large, long-duration contracts reaching end of term at the same time.

What is driving the wave? Three dynamics converge. Many contracts signed in 2020–2022 during the pandemic (typically three-year terms) hit their first natural expiry now. Major infrastructure, health and defence deals awarded in 2022–2023 — often three- to five-year terms — are reaching their scheduled end. And post-Brexit procurement restructuring produced a cohort of new contracts in 2022–2024 that are already cycling. For SMEs, the second and third matter most: they tend to involve buyers actively seeking to diversify their supplier base.

Top sectors by expiring value (next 24 months, all sizes):

Construction (45) and fuel supply (09) values are dominated by a small number of mega-contracts well above SME range. The sectors most relevant to SMEs by practical opportunity are covered in the deep-dives in the full report.