UK Public Contracts (Contracts Finder)
Where UK government spends, when, and on what - completing the global procurement suite next to the EU (TED) and US (USAspending) award products. The Cabinet Office publishes every public contract award via the Contracts Finder OCDS API; we aggregate the awarded releases into one tidy monthly panel: for each (buyer region × month × CPV sector) the total award value in GBP, the number of distinct contracts and the average size. Supplier/buyer names aggregated away. Open Government Licence v3.0.
- Source
- UK Cabinet Office
- Licence
- Redistributable open data
- Quality
- QC clean · 0 failures
- Format
- Apache Parquet + dictionary
Safe to train on
Built only from a named, redistributable official source under a documented open licence - not scraped web data. No copyright grey zone, no personal data. Ships machine-readable Croissant metadata (ML Commons - loads in Hugging Face / Kaggle / Google), an AI training-licence manifest documenting source, licence and provenance for your model's data governance, and a machine-readable data dictionary (drop it into an agent / RAG prompt so the model knows every column) - all inspectable before you buy.
What's included
- Monthly UK public-procurement award value by buyer region × CPV sector (2021→present)
- Total GBP awarded, number of distinct contracts and average size per cell
- ~45 CPV sectors mapped to labels; mirrors the EU TED + US contract-awards products
- The UK leg of a global government-demand signal
- Open Government Licence v3.0 - commercial reuse with attribution
- Source: UK Cabinet Office - Contracts Finder (OCDS)
Schema
| Column | Type | Description | Filled | Distinct |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| buyer_region | str | Buyer region / country (from OCDS parties address) | 100.0% | 52 |
| month | str | Award month (YYYY-MM) | 100.0% | 97 |
| cpv_division | str | CPV 2-digit division code | 100.0% | 45 |
| cpv_sector | str | CPV sector label | 100.0% | 45 |
| n_contracts | int | Number of distinct contract awards in the cell | 100.0% | 128 |
| total_gbp | float | Total award value, GBP | 100.0% | 7,462 |
| avg_gbp | float | Average award value per contract, GBP | 100.0% | 7,448 |
Sample & preview
Every purchase ships as Apache Parquet with a data dictionary and the full QC report. A free sample (first rows + schema) is downloadable here - confirm fit before you buy. Source: UK Cabinet Office (redistributable open data; attribution passes through - see our Licence).
Don't trust screenshots - drop the sample into your notebook right now.
import pandas as pd df = pd.read_parquet("uk-public-contracts_sample.parquet") df.info() # typed columns, gap-aware, ready to join⬇ Download free Parquet sample or CSV for Excel
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