為甚麼你用合約編號搜尋會搵唔到？香港招標編號的實際運作

One field, three types of identifier

First distinguish the nature of the three, as their lifecycles differ. A tender reference is created by the procuring unit for a specific tender exercise, used for receiving bids and answering queries. A contract number follows the contract itself and continues to be used throughout the construction period after signing, so it appears on the award notice, notices during the works, and even the final account documents. A PWP project number, on the other hand, is the project number within the Public Works Programme, tied to the funding and the project itself; one PWP project can be split into multiple contracts.

This leads to a practical conclusion: when the same project is announced at different stages, that field may contain reference numbers at different levels. It is entirely normal for the number you copied during the tender stage to differ from the number in the award announcement; it does not mean either one is wrong.

This also explains why, when tracking the same project across stages, using the project name or place name is often more reliable than using a number. Numbers change; the keywords in a project name usually do not.

There is another situation that can make a number appear to have "gained an extra one for no reason": a single PWP project is split into multiple contracts for award. For example, a reclamation-plus-infrastructure project may be issued as separate contracts for site formation, roads, drainage, and so on, each with its own contract number but all under the same PWP project number. When you see several similar but not identical numbers in the public record, with highly similar works names, this is usually such a split rather than a duplicate announcement.

Conversely, there are also cases where multiple stages share a single number. A contract number is used throughout the entire works period after signing, so the same contract number may first appear in an award notice and later in other notices during the works period. If you see the same number appear twice with a long gap between dates, check the status column first before judging—do not treat it as duplicate data.

Tender number, contract number, and PWP project number are entered in the same field. They are not the same thing.

Actual format of each department: as observed from public records

The following formats come from public records currently held by OpenTender.hk. They are actual observed formats, not officially published coding rules. Their purpose is to help you identify which department the number in your hand belongs to, so you know which official webpage to check against.

Note that both the Highways Department and the Lands Department place the number first (e.g. 02/HY/2026, 1/DLO-HKEWS/11), whereas the Drainage Services Department and the Civil Engineering and Development Department use a CE prefix with a bracketed suffix (e.g. CE 30/2025 (GE)). The significance of this difference is that the same set of numbers represents different things in different departments, so when searching, it is more accurate to judge together with the department than to look at the numbers alone.

Department abbreviations themselves have an official basis, so there is no need to guess on that part. The abbreviation table in the Civil Engineering and Development Department manual lists ArchSD as Architectural Services Department, CEDD as Civil Engineering and Development Department, DSD as Drainage Services Department, WSD as Water Supplies Department, EPD as Environmental Protection Department, TD as Transport Department, etc. Therefore, when you see segments such as WSD, HY, and BD in a reference number, it is safe to understand them as department labels; as for the suffixes in brackets (for example (GE), (DS), (SP)), no corresponding table has been published in public documents, and I will not guess here what they represent.

A practical observation is that the position of the year is not consistent. Highways Department writes 02/HY/2026, with the year at the end; Water Supplies Department writes 11/WSD/18, where the last two digits are the abbreviated year. This means that when filtering reference numbers by year, you cannot assume that "the first four digits are the year" — you must first identify the department to know which segment contains the year.

Why pure numeric reference numbers are particularly troublesome

The Hospital Authority and the Housing Authority have a large number of pure numeric reference numbers. Such numbers have no department prefix and no year separator, so their source cannot be determined by eye, and they easily clash with numbers in other fields when searching. When you only have a string of digits on hand, first confirm the source organisation, then check the corresponding page on that organisation's tender website — this is more effective than blind searching on aggregator websites.

The situation with MTR and the Airport Authority is the opposite: their reference numbers have a clear alphabetical structure, but because they are not government departments, their formats follow their own systems and do not appear in the Government Gazette. To verify them, you can only go back to their own procurement webpages.

There is an easily overlooked distinction here. The WTO Government Procurement Agreement treats government departments and non-governmental public bodies separately. The Airport Authority, Hospital Authority, and Housing Authority fall under the latter, with a goods and services threshold of 400,000 SDR, higher than the 130,000 SDR for government departments. Different thresholds mean more procurement by these bodies falls outside the Agreement's notice requirements, making notice formats more varied — this is the institutional background for their more varied reference number formats, not merely their own habits.

Practical tip: If your business mainly deals with these organisations, it is worth bookmarking their procurement pages directly and remembering what their reference numbers look like. Relying on a single generic search box to handle five mutually incompatible numbering systems was never going to be reliable.

• Pure numbers + medical supplies or pharmaceutical wording → likely Hospital Authority
• 8-digit pure number starting with 20 → check if it is Housing Authority (first two digits as year)
• C or K prefix with hyphenated year code → MTR
• Contains RFI / DG / E series wording → Airport Authority

Search order when only fragment number is available

In practice, it is usually relayed verbally by a colleague, jotted down over the phone, or half-seen in a PDF. Rather than pasting everything at once, it is better to relax the criteria step by step in the following order, because each step rules out a category of failure cause.

First, remove prefixes such as “Contract No.” or “Tender No.” and extra spaces. Public records may include these prefixes; OpenTender.hk cleans them for display, but your copied reference may still include them.

Step 2: Keep only the alphanumeric core and try the most distinctive segment first. For example, for CE 30/2025 (GE), search CE 30/2025 first, or even just 30/2025; for 02/HY/2026, search HY/2026 first. Slashes and hyphens are often used interchangeably across documents, so searching just the middle numeric segment often yields a higher success rate than searching the full string.

Step 3: Switch to keywords from the works name. A place name (e.g. Tuen Mun, Tung Chung) plus the works type (e.g. drainage, road) is usually more stable than a number, especially when you need to find the same works across stages.

Step 4: If you still cannot find it, accept one possibility: the notice is outside the aggregation scope. Contracts below the open tender threshold may appear only on departmental webpages, or even be handled only by quotation, and may never have been published in the Gazette. In that case, go directly to the Financial Services and the Treasury Bureau's tender notice index and check department by department.

• Remove prefixes: delete Contract No. / Tender No. / Ref. and extra spaces
• Shorten: keep only the most distinctive alphanumeric segment, and try both slashes and hyphens
• Pivot: switch to place name + works type keywords
• Go to source: if there are still no results, go to the department's official tender page; it may never have been published in the Gazette

If you cannot find it, first assume the number type is wrong, not that the information does not exist.

An example: reconstructing the official notice from half a number

Suppose a colleague says on the phone: "There's a Highways works job in Tuen Mun, the number seems to be HY 2025 something something." That is all you have.

The first step is not to search, but to identify the organisation. HY corresponds to the Highways Department, which can be confirmed from the department abbreviation, so the verification endpoint is the Highways Department's tender notice page. The second step is to search HY/2025 to obtain the scope of that department's records for that year; if there are too many results, narrow down by adding the place name "Tuen Mun". The third step is to compare the works names in the results; after finding a likely match, open the detail page and note the full reference number. The fourth step — which cannot be skipped — is to open the official source link to confirm the closing date and document requirements, because aggregated data may lag behind the latest addendum.

The key to the whole process is: first narrow down by organisation, then narrow down by place name, and only finally confirm by reference number. Doing it the other way round (pasting the full reference number first) easily hits a wall right at the start when the reference number format is inconsistent.

• Determine the organisation from the abbreviation to decide the verification endpoint
• Use the year segment to obtain the scope, then narrow down by place name
• Compare the works names in the results and note the full reference number
• Open the official source to verify the closing time and addenda — this step cannot be skipped

The reference number in the electronic tendering system is a different matter

Works contracts have progressively adopted the electronic tendering system. The abbreviation table in the Civil Engineering and Development Department handbook lists it as e-TS(WC), i.e. Electronic Tendering System (Works Contract); the Development Bureau issued memoranda in December 2023 and May 2024 respectively on implementing the electronic tendering system for works contracts and on registration of closing dates.

The internal identifier in the system is used for operating the bid and may not be the same as the reference number on the public notice. So if the reference number you have comes from the tendering system interface or a confirmation email, using it to search public notices may itself be searching for the wrong thing. To verify a notice, use the reference number on the notice.

The same principle applies to the classification of tender notice samples. The handbook's appendix handles notice samples "adopting the electronic tendering system" and "not adopting the electronic tendering system" separately, which means that during the transition period the two types of notice will coexist for a time, and their field arrangements may not be consistent. When copying a reference number, note down the source URL of the notice as well, so that verification later does not require searching again.

Build your own reference table of reference numbers

Since no official unified coding rules have been published, the most practical approach is to build your own record over time. Each time you successfully find a notice, note four things on the same line: the reference number as written, the organisation, a keyword from the works name, and the notice URL. After three months, you will have a reference table tailored to your business scope that is more accurate than any general guide, because it only covers the departments you actually encounter.

The value of this table lies in reverse lookup. Next time a colleague gives you a reference number in an unfamiliar format, you can first compare format similarity against your own table and quickly determine which page to visit — rather than pasting the whole string into a search box and staring at zero results.

If multiple team members track tenders, this table is worth sharing. The cost of misidentifying the department from a reference number and making a wasted trip far exceeds the cost of maintaining a table.

• Note four items per line: the reference number as written, the organisation, a keyword from the works name, and the notice URL
• Group by organisation, not by date order
• When encountering an unfamiliar format, first compare format similarity, then decide which official page to visit
• Share across the team to avoid the same misjudgement recurring

Slashes, hyphens and spaces: three different reference numbers in the eyes of a machine

The same reference number may appear in different documents as HY/2026/01, HY-2026-01 or HY 2026 01. To a person these are clearly the same, but to a search system they are three different strings of characters. This is the most technical and most common reason why a notice clearly exists but cannot be found.

When OpenTender.hk builds URLs for reference number pages, it deliberately handles slashes and hyphens separately, keeping HY/2026/01 and HY-2026-01 as two distinct URLs rather than merging them into one page. The reason is that in the source data they may genuinely be different contracts, and forcing a merge would create false associations. The trade-off is that you have to remember to try both formats.

Another trap is full-width versus half-width characters. Reference numbers copied from PDF or Word may contain full-width slashes, brackets and spaces that are almost indistinguishable to the eye, yet pasting them into a search box will always return zero results. When you cannot find a result but are confident the reference number is correct, retyping it manually often solves the problem.

• Try all three formats: slash, hyphen and space
• If you cannot find a result after copying from PDF, retype it manually to rule out full-width characters
• Bracketed suffixes (such as (GE)) can be omitted entirely before searching
• Letter case generally does not matter, but extra leading or trailing spaces do

Treat the reference number as an index, not an identity card

To sum up with a mindset adjustment: in Hong Kong public procurement open data, a reference number is a convenient index but not a stable identity card. It changes with the stage, varies by department, and is written differently across documents.

A more reliable identification combination is to use three things together: organisation + keywords from the works name + approximate timing. These three remain largely unchanged throughout the project cycle, whereas any single reference number may change. When you need to confirm with a colleague whether it is the same job, using this combination will produce fewer errors than comparing reference numbers.

A final reminder: this site only consolidates publicly available notices, for the purpose of discovery and cross-referencing. Tender eligibility, addenda, official closing times and contract terms are governed solely by the official notices and the electronic tendering system. However accurately you have traced a reference number, always open the official source to verify once before submitting a bid.