Transparency
How ranking works: how jobs are ordered on TNDR
TNDR is our app for tradespeople. This page sets out the main parameters that determine ranking and the reasons for their relative importance, as required by Regulation (EU) 2019/1150, and it forms part of our Terms of Use. No hedging: what is written here is exactly what the shipping code does.
Your deck
Jobs are ordered by three things, in this order of importance. Fit, weighted 40 per cent: whether the job needs the trades on your profile, in the counties you cover. A job counts fully when its planning description names your trade. It also counts, at a lower strength, when the type of project involves it (every house needs a plasterer), scaled by the size of the project and by what the file says about it, such as a mechanical and electrical package or demolition. Those implied matches only reach your deck when we can also say roughly when the job starts: it has commenced, or it is granted and we can estimate the start from the grant date. We label the two cases differently, show the strength on the card, and never present an implied match as something the file actually said. Timing, weighted 35 per cent: whether the job is at the moment your trade actually gets bought. That is strongest when a procurement window for your trade is open now, then when a council decision is due within eight weeks, then when work has recently started on site, then when a permission is close to expiring with nothing built yet, then when a granted job is about to break ground, then when an on-site job is approaching its declared handover. A job that started recently ranks above one that started months ago, because that is when the trades are bought. Project quality, weighted 25 per cent: the stage the project has reached and our lead score, which reflects how fresh, big and ready it is. A granted job that has sat unstarted for more than 18 months slides down that term gradually, to a floor at three years, because most permissions that will start have started by then. Facts about the parties on a card (the builder on other sites, a repeat organisation applicant, an applicant that builds its own projects) are shown as facts and change nothing in the order. On top of those three, where an applicant has told us they still need one of your trades, that job gets a further 10 per cent added to its score. That is the only bonus, it is the applicant's own statement about their own job, and a score never goes above 100 per cent. Before ranking, we gather candidates from each stage of the planning lifecycle, taking both the strongest and the most recent from each, so a smaller or newer job is not shut out by bigger ones. Nothing else sets the order. There is no paid placement in your deck, and no AI model decides it: the ordering is a fixed formula we publish here. Some job pages also carry a labelled message from a supplier who sponsors that kind of work in the county; it sits outside the deck and changes nothing in the order (see /advertise/how-sponsors-are-chosen).
On a job
This applies wherever an applicant can view the firms interested in their project. Filings are grouped by the trade they are for, and firms in different trades are never ranked against each other: a groundworks firm and a landscaper on the same job are that applicant's build team, not a queue. Within one trade, tenders show above calling cards, and a live calling card shows above one that has gone quiet. Within each of those groups, verified firms show above self-declared firms, and then the firm that filed first shows first. Sending a tender is a paid action and improves your position for that trade on that job. A calling card goes quiet after 90 days and can be stood back up at any time, at no cost; a tender does not expire. Firms are never removed from a job automatically: a filing leaves a job only when you withdraw it, or under our Terms with a stated reason.
What we never use
Applicant personal data is not an input to any ranking. We do not sell deck positions, and there is no way to pay for a higher place in another firm's deck.
Changes
Changes to how ranking works are announced with at least 15 days' notice, and this page is updated in the same release that changes the formula.
Related: how we handle your data is in the privacy notice, and what we use AI for (and never for) is at /how-we-use-ai. Ranking itself uses no AI: it is a fixed, published formula. Sponsored supplier messages sit outside the deck, and how a sponsor is picked for a page is set out at how sponsors are chosen.