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← Make money with AI · Mission 13 of 37

Win small UK public sector contracts with AI-drafted bids

Councils, NHS trusts, universities and schools buy small jobs all year, and a one-person business is allowed to bid. In a two-week sample of award notices for this kind of work, more than half the competitions got 5 bids or fewer. Turn the free government feed into a scored shortlist, draft answers only from work you've really done, and price bids worth winning.

175 minIntermediateTools: Free to search and bid. Your time: 6 to 10 hours a weekStep 1 free
A weekly shortlista Python script that turns Find a Tender's open data into a scored CSV, with no key and no account
Buyer intelwho won similar contracts, what they were worth and how many bids they faced
AI-drafted answers you can stand behindan evidence bank plus prompts that mark gaps instead of inventing experience
  • A renewal radar: contracts ending in the next 12 months, so you're ready before the re-tender
  • A kit: go/no-go checklist, bid-answer template, pricing calculator, bid tracker and message templates
Before you start
  • Python 3.9 or newer, with nothing extra to install. New to the terminal? Start with Terminal survival kit
  • A service you can already deliver well, for example video, copywriting, translation, web, data cleaning, design or training
  • Any AI chat. A local one keeps tender documents on your own PC: Your own private ChatGPT
  • 6 to 10 hours a week. Your first few bids can take a full day each
01/08Why small public contracts are a real opening0 done
STEP 01 of 08~20 min

Why small public contracts are a real opening

Know the rules that changed in 2025, what a small business can bid for, and what it takes.

  1. Your council needs six short videos about the new bin collections. An NHS trust needs a leaflet in Polish and Urdu. A university needs 3,000 survey responses cleaned and charted. These jobs are published in public, and anyone can bid for them. Most freelancers never look, because they assume it's all giant contracts and red tape. A lot of it isn't.

  2. On 24 February 2025 the Procurement Act 2023 replaced the old rules for most UK public bodies, and Find a Tender ↗ became the Central Digital Platform: one website for notices big and small. (Scottish public bodies mostly follow their own rules and use Public Contracts Scotland.) The parts that matter to a small supplier:

    • Small contracts that are advertised must be published. If a central government body (which now includes NHS trusts) advertises a contract worth £12,000 or more, or any other public body (councils, universities, police, fire) advertises one worth £30,000 or more, both including VAT, it must post a notice on the Central Digital Platform first. Schools are exempt from these below-threshold rules. Source: gov.uk guidance on below-threshold contracts ↗.
    • No pre-qualification hurdle on smaller contracts. For contracts under the main thresholds, section 85 ↗ stops buyers shortlisting suppliers on "suitability" (accounts, turnover, years trading) before tenders come in. They can still check you at award stage, but a new business gets to put a bid in. From 1 January 2026 the main thresholds for services are £135,018 for central government and £207,720 for councils and most other bodies (PPN 023 ↗).
    • Some competitions can be reserved for small firms. Below the thresholds, buyers may restrict a contract to SMEs or voluntary and community organisations, and since 2026 the notice must say whether they have (SI 2026/360 ↗).
    • 30-day payment. Public contracts carry an implied term to pay a valid invoice within 30 days (section 68 ↗), and section 88 applies the same to below-threshold contracts. Buyers must publish how well they keep to it (section 69 ↗).
    • It's all open data. Every notice, every award, the winner's name and often the number of bids received come through a free API. That's what the script in step 2 reads.
    • Contracts Finder is fading out. New procurements haven't had to be published there since February 2025, and from 1 October 2026 even the older ones moved their notices to the Central Digital Platform (SI 2026/360, regulation 5 ↗). Some small buyers, like town councils and academy trusts, still post there anyway, so the script can check both.

  3. Do small businesses actually win?Yes, though big firms still take most of the money. In the last official full count (2021/22), central government spent 26.5% of its procurement with SMEs: 12.3% directly and 14.1% through larger suppliers' supply chains (Cabinet Office figures ↗). In March 2026 every department was given its own target for direct SME spending, adding up to over £7.4 billion a year by 2028 (gov.uk ↗). That second route, the supply chain, comes back in step 8.

  4. What suits one person with AI toolsLook for work where quality is judged on the output and you can show past examples:

    Careful
    • What it takes. Bids are real work. A small quality-led tender typically takes 6 to 15 hours the first few times: reading the pack, writing answers, pricing and uploading. Your bid tracker shows your own figure after a few bids, and it drops as your evidence bank grows.
    • Plan on a win rate, not every bid. Step 6 shows how many bidders you're really up against, using live award data.
    • Results take time. Decisions often arrive weeks after the deadline, and the first win commonly comes after a few months of steady bidding.
    • Buyers score evidence. If you've never delivered the service for anyone, land two or three private clients first.
    • Some tenders have entry costs, like insurance or Cyber Essentials (step 5).
    • Who this suits: you're comfortable with forms and word limits, you can give it 6 to 10 hours a week, and you write only about work you've really done. AI structures and polishes real evidence; it never stands in for it.

  5. Keep your day job while you build it. Searching, reading packs and bidding are all free, so there's nothing to spend until a specific tender needs it.

  6. Everything you'll use is in one kitDownload the kit for the overview and the rules on one page, or grab the whole kit as a zip: the shortlist script, a practice data file, the go/no-go checklist, the bid-answer template with prompts, the pricing calculator, the bid tracker and the message templates.

✓
CheckpointYou've written down the one service you'd bid for, plus two real examples of doing it for someone.
If it breaksI'm a sole trader, not a company. Can I bid? + 2 more
I'm a sole trader, not a company. Can I bid?
Yes. Legal form isn't a bar. When you register on the Central Digital Platform (step 6), the platform gives you a unique identifier if you don't have a Companies House number. Some tenders ask for insurance levels or policies that are easier for an established business, which is exactly what the go/no-go check in step 3 catches.
I'm in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland
Find a Tender still shows above-threshold notices from all four nations. For smaller Scottish contracts use Public Contracts Scotland, for Welsh ones also check Sell2Wales, and for Northern Ireland check eTendersNI. You can bid for work anywhere in the UK if you can deliver it, and a lot of this work can be done remotely.
I don't have any past clients yet
Then this is your second course, not your first. Pick a service course from this track, land two or three private clients, and come back with real evidence. The bid-answer template in the kit also shows legitimate ways to build evidence, such as samples and a small job for a local charity.
Still stuck? Ask the community
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