CPV code finder.

A CPV code is an eight-digit number from the Common Procurement Vocabulary, the classification system every UK and EU public sector buyer uses to describe what a contract is for. When a council publishes a tender for school catering, it tags the notice with a CPV code so suppliers can find it without reading every notice published that week. There are roughly 9,450 codes in the current list, covering everything from bridge construction to translation services.

The first two digits are the division, the broadest category. Each further significant digit narrows the subject by one level, down to a maximum of seven levels. So 45000000 is construction work, 45200000 narrows to complete or part construction, 45210000 to building construction, and 45213320 to buildings relating to railway transport. A ninth digit after a hyphen is a check digit: it catches transcription errors and carries no meaning about the subject, which is why it is left off the codes in this tool.

Start with the keyword search above and type what you actually sell, not the procurement jargon for it. Then open the code and look at its parent and sibling codes: buyers rarely pick the single most precise code, so the useful answer is usually a small cluster of related codes rather than one. The tender counts on each page tell you which of those codes buyers really publish against.

Often not. A buyer may pick a parent code because it is quicker, reuse whatever code was on last year's notice, or classify a mixed contract under the largest component. Cleaning contracts routinely appear under facilities management, and IT contracts get filed under a hardware code when the work is mostly services. That is why every code page here lists the codes buyers commonly use instead, and why searching on CPV codes alone will always miss work you could win.

More than feels natural. Most suppliers start with two or three and quietly miss half their market. A realistic set for a specialist SME is eight to fifteen codes spread across the divisions their work touches, plus the parent codes above them to catch loosely tagged notices. If that sounds unmanageable as a set of keyword alerts, it is: that is the problem Jonty was built to solve.

Yes. The UK kept the Common Procurement Vocabulary after leaving the EU, and it is used across Find a Tender, Contracts Finder, Sell2Wales, Public Contracts Scotland and eTendersNI. The Procurement Act 2023 did not replace it. A supplier bidding in the UK today works with the same CPV 2008 list as one bidding in the EU.

You need them to be found, and to describe your own capability consistently in supplier questionnaires and framework applications. You do not need them to search well. Jonty reads every notice end to end against your business rather than filtering on codes, so a contract you could win still reaches you when the buyer tags it under something odd. The codes are how the system talks about work; they are not a good way to look for it.