UK public spending · 2025-26 outturn and 2026-27 budgets
This page follows the money from the headline total down to the part bought from outside the public sector. Councils get their own sections, because that is where most SMEs bid.
About a quarter of all public spending gets bought from outside suppliers. The rest pays salaries and benefits or moves between parts of government. Apply the SME target to that £341bn and you land at roughly £114bn, which is under a tenth of the headline figure most people quote. The four numbers come from three sources covering different years and different boundaries, so they will not subtract cleanly from one another. Treat the shape as directional and each figure as exact for what it measures. The Whole of Government Accounts data also under-counts local government.
Central government · 2025-26 outturn
Resource plus capital. Up 3.8% in real terms.
There are fewer buyers here and the contracts run bigger. Most of the work goes through frameworks. Roughly £2 in every £5 of day-to-day departmental spend goes on bought-in goods and services, and the bulk of the remainder is pay.
Local government · England & GB
Local government current expenditure on services, 2025-26 outturn, Great Britain.
Hundreds of separate buyers, and the lots run smaller. Much more of the work sits below threshold. Pay takes over 40% of council service spending, so the share you can bid for is smaller than the headline suggests, though it spreads across many more contracts.
The two columns will not compare directly. Central figures are HM Treasury budgeting aggregates covering the whole UK. The £180.8bn covers Great Britain on an expenditure-on-services basis, while the England figures come from a separate MHCLG collection and are 2026-27 budgets rather than outturn. Central grant funds much of what councils spend, so the two overlap.
03 — Find your slice
Pick what you supply and the page will highlight the departments and council budget lines that buy it.
We built this mapping ourselves as a rough guide. No official classification links budget lines to supplier types.
Total DEL by departmental group, 2025-26 outturn, resource and capital combined. Sums to £639.8bn. Health rose £12.7 billion in real terms. Energy Security and Net Zero rose £6.4 billion, most of it Sizewell C. The devolved administration blocks pass through to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, so Whitehall does not spend them directly.
Since 1 April 2025 every department has had to set and publish a three-year target for direct SME spend. The first set runs to FY 2027-28, so these are commitments made in advance of any published results.
Direct SME spend targets for FY 2027-28, published 24 March 2026. Crown Commercial Service, which sits behind most cross-government frameworks, is targeting 30%. The Ministry of Defence has a separate commitment to raise direct and indirect SME spend by £2.5bn to £7.5bn by May 2028, a rise of 50% on its FY 2023-24 baseline.
Before these targets existed, the only government-wide measure was a one-off management information exercise, last published for 2021-22. Departments reported 12.3% direct SME spend with a further 14.1% flowing through supply chains, giving 26.5% combined. Combined shares ranged from 45.4% at DCMS down to 12.7% at HMRC. Several departments have been renamed or reorganised since, so the old figures will not line up cleanly against the department bars above.
Per-authority figures average flat across all 415 English authorities, including single-purpose police and fire bodies. Real budgets vary enormously, so use this for a sense of scale.
Budgeted net current expenditure for England, 2026-27 budget, in 2026-27 prices. The figures come net of fees and charges income, so a rise can mean higher costs or lower income. Education is ring-fenced and takes 33% of the total, with adult social care on 19% and children's social care on 11%.
Housing services are up 14.3% on the year, driven by a 14.7% rise in homelessness spending. Children's social care rose 7.4%, most of it on children looked after, and public health rose 6.3%. Cultural services was the only line to fall, by 2.3%. Growth in a budget line usually shows up as new notices a few months later.
Everything above covers revenue, meaning day-to-day running costs. English councils also spent £32.1bn on capital projects in 2025-26, covering roads, buildings, land, housing, vehicles and equipment, up 2% on the year. If you sell into construction, civils or M&E, that capital figure holds most of your addressable work and none of it shows in a revenue budget.
Tenderbot watches all 415 English authorities and every central department, and tells you when something matching your business goes live.
Start a free trialEngland, 2026-27 budget. HM Treasury separately records total central government support for local government of £100.7 billion within DEL for 2025-26, plus £51.2 billion in AME and £16.8 billion of capital support. Several grants were folded into the Revenue Support Grant this year, which rose 399% in real terms while specific grants inside AEF fell 8.1%. That movement comes from how the grants are now reported and does not represent extra money. Grant-funded services follow the annual finance settlement, so their procurement tends to cluster in the months after it lands.
Most notices describe work already out to tender or already awarded. A pipeline notice sets out what a buyer expects to tender over the next 18 months, before any of it goes live.
Any buyer over the £100m threshold has to name its coming contracts before it tenders them, with dates, up to 18 months ahead. The duty has applied since 1 April 2025. Pipeline notices carry the code UK1, which most search tools bury, so a quarterly check takes a bid consultant about five minutes and turns up work nobody else is tracking.
09 — Seeing the contracts
Find a Tender carries notices for any procurement started on or after 24 February 2025. The Procurement Act 2023 puts no duty on buyers to repeat them on Contracts Finder.
The £30,000 trigger puts a lot of council work into public view at values a small supplier can serve. Whitehall publishes from £12,000, though its contracts start much larger, so most of what you can see there sits above what a new bidder will win. Above-threshold values reset every two years, so we link to the current GOV.UK figures rather than print one that goes stale: check current thresholds on GOV.UK.
Every threshold in the regime, low to high. Crossing one of these triggers a publication duty.
| Value | What happens | Applies to |
|---|---|---|
| £500+ | Every council payment above this must be published | Local Government Transparency Code 2015 — councils only. |
| £5,000+ | Every council contract above this must be published | Local Government Transparency Code 2015 — councils only. |
| £12,000+ | Central government below-threshold notice trigger | Procurement Act 2023 s.87 — including VAT. |
| £30,000+ | Every other authority's below-threshold notice trigger | Procurement Act 2023 s.87 — councils, NHS bodies, schools, universities, including VAT. |
| £2,000,000+ | Included in a pipeline notice, if the buyer spends £100m+/year | Procurement Act 2023 s.93 — published up to 18 months ahead. |
| £5,000,000+ | Buyer must set KPIs and report performance against them | Procurement Act 2023 s.52/s.71 — reported at least annually. |
| Code | Notice | What to do when you see one |
|---|---|---|
| UK1 | Pipeline notice | Work a big buyer expects to tender in the next 18 months. The earliest possible warning. |
| UK2 | Preliminary market engagement notice | The buyer is talking to the market before writing the spec — a chance to shape it before it's fixed. |
| UK3 | Planned procurement notice | Optional heads-up ahead of a live tender. If the buyer used one, they can legally shorten the eventual bidding window to as little as 10 days. |
| UK4 | Tender notice | The live opportunity — this is the one to actually bid against. |
| UK6 | Contract award notice | Who won, and for how much. Starts the standstill period before the contract can be signed. |
| UK9 | Contract performance notice | How the winning supplier is actually performing against their KPIs — useful intelligence before the next recompete. |
Tenderbot reads the full text of every UK notice each day and matches it against what your business does. Twenty-one days free.
10 — Frequently asked
Total managed expenditure across the UK public sector came to about £1,360bn in 2025-26, around 44.3% of GDP. Central government departmental spending accounted for £639.8bn of that, with local government current expenditure on services at £180.8bn.
Gross public sector procurement was £434bn in 2024-25, although that figure includes the public sector buying from itself. The more useful number for a supplier is what gets bought from outside the public sector, which was £341bn in 2023-24, around a third of all public spending.
English councils budgeted £148.8bn on services for 2026-27 across 415 authorities. Across Great Britain, local government current expenditure on services was £180.8bn in 2025-26.
Find a Tender. For any procurement started on or after 24 February 2025, the Procurement Act 2023 requires notices to be published there, and buyers have no duty to duplicate them on Contracts Finder.
11 — Sources
| Source | Publisher | Published | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Public spending statistics: July 2026 | HM Treasury | 2026-07-16 | |
| Local authority revenue expenditure and financing: 2026-27 budget, England | MHCLG | 2026-06-11 | |
| Procurement statistics: a short guide (CBP-9317) | House of Commons Library | 2026-07 | Secondary source citing HM Treasury PESA 2025 and Whole of Government Accounts. |
| Central government spend with SMEs | Cabinet Office | 2023-08-15 | Management information published for transparency. Treat with caution; methods have changed over time. |
| Procurement Act 2023, section 87; PPN 019 transparency guidance | UK Parliament / Cabinet Office | 2025-03-06 | |
| Local authority capital expenditure and receipts in England: 2025 to 2026 provisional outturn and 2026 to 2027 forecast | MHCLG | 2026-06 | |
| Departmental Small Business Procurement Targets | Cabinet Office | 2026-03-24 | Forward-looking targets through FY 2027-28, signed off by departmental ministers. Not a report of actual results. |
| PPN 001: SME and VCSE procurement spend targets | Cabinet Office | 2025-02-12 | |
| Guidance: Pipeline Notice (UK1) | Cabinet Office | 2025 | |
| Local Government Transparency Code 2015 | MHCLG | 2015-02 | |
| Guidance: Key Performance Indicators | Cabinet Office | 2026-04-20 | |
| Notice types and sequences | Find a Tender / Cabinet Office | 2025 |
MHCLG updates council budgets each June and HM Treasury updates the spending statistics each July. Leave an email and we will send you the revised page.