UK public sector bodies awarded 7,994 IT contracts in the year to August 2026, worth a combined £91bn, in a market that leans heavily towards five resellers. Softcat, Phoenix Software, Insight Direct, Civica and CDW won 1,117 of those awards between them, accounting for one in every seven.
The £91bn, meanwhile, overstates the flow of work. More than half of it sits in framework ceilings and awards whose supplier names are withheld on security grounds. Barely one award in 14 was flagged as openly advertised.
That is according to data from Contracked, compiled from Find a Tender and Contracts Finder award notices covering the 12 months to 31 August 2026 and analysed by Computer Weekly.
The year’s IT buying ran through a handful of resellers, on a base of small awards, with most of the money concentrated in a few framework ceilings.
The money, and what inflates it
The £91bn total needs reading with care. Contracked flags 153 of the 7,994 awards as frameworks, withheld-supplier deals or multi-supplier panels, and those rows carry £55.5bn between them – more than half the total. The framework ceilings alone are enormous: Technology Services 4 carries £16bn, G-Cloud 15 £14bn, and Digital Outcomes and Specialists 7 £12bn. These are maximum values shared across every supplier on the framework, not money spent in the year. Strip the 153 rows out, and the remaining 7,841 awards are worth £35.5bn, with a median of £164,000.
By category, IT services led the year at £27bn, ahead of hardware at £16.7bn and software packages at £15.8bn. On the buyer side, the two framework-owning bodies dominate: the Crown Commercial Service (CCS) and the Government Commercial Agency (GCA) account for more than £50bn of published value between them, most of it framework ceilings, with the Ministry of Defence next at £15.2bn.
The framework spikes show up clearly month by month, sitting on top of a steadier base of ordinary awards.
G-Cloud 15 is the clearest example of how a ceiling distorts the picture. The GCA estimates about £3bn a year will pass through the framework, but it carries a £14bn headline across four years. The GCA says about 90% of the suppliers awarded places are small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), although a place on the framework does not guarantee any business, and the framework has faced criticism over supplier requirements that smaller firms argue shut them out.
Who wins?
By volume, the work runs through a small group of resellers. Softcat won 473 awards across 238 different buyers, followed by Phoenix Software with 231, Insight Direct with 163, Civica with 136 and CDW with 114.
The five together took 14% of every award made in the year. Softcat, the UK’s largest Microsoft partner, is the pattern in miniature. AwardedTenders, which tracks public procurement, counted it winning work from 217 public buyers in 2025, against just 19 each for Microsoft and Oracle, whose licences Softcat resells. The suppliers sell through the channel, not to the buyer.
By value, the picture flips. IBM took £13.1bn, almost all of it through the £12.4bn Defence Equipment Engineering Asset Management Service (DEEAMS) contract for the Ministry of Defence. Indra took £1.96bn from Transport for London, and Capgemini £1.51bn. A further £36.7bn of awards carry supplier names withheld on security grounds.
The hyperscalers themselves barely appear. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google Cloud won 44 awards between them, worth £531m, the largest being a £394m deal for HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) to exit three Fujitsu-run datacentres. Computer Weekly reported that AWS emerged as the sole bidder after rivals exited. The resellers, by contrast, took 1,693 awards worth £2.09bn, and they sit at the centre of the public sector procurement story.
The competition picture
Competition is harder to read. Contracked flags only 591 awards (7.4%) as openly advertised, and just 417 of those publish a bid count. Where buyers do advertise and report, competition looks healthy, with a median of five bids, 80 awards drawing 10 or more, and single-bidder awards the exception at 42, or 10%.
Small firms feature when competition is real. Across the 394 awards that report a bid count and the share from SMEs, 57.8% of bids came from SMEs.
For the other 92.6% of awards, the notices do not record the procurement route, so no one outside the buyer can see whether competition happened. That opacity matters because so much of the spend is software licensing, with the Competition and Markets Authority to decide whether to give Microsoft strategic market status by February 2027.
The renewal wave
Much of this is about to come back to market. Some 1,812 of the contracts end within the next 12 months, 1,160 of them within six, so the buyers who awarded them will decide again soon. After the period covered here, HMRC awarded Salesforce a £2bn contract for its customer relationship management platform on 30 September 2026.
The renewal wave is where the lopsided market bites. If a handful of resellers keep winning one award in seven and most of the rest is not flagged as openly advertised, the buyers returning to market next year will meet the same channel, and the same few firms, as last year.
