Two trillion euros per year, and no one can make sense of it. The European Union spends the equivalent of 13.6% of its GDP annually on public procurement, distributed among more than 250,000 purchasing authorities. But a decisive fraction of these contracts—those concluded below European regulatory thresholds—circulates in national formats often unreadable from one country to the next, rendering invisible critical dependencies, supplier concentrations, and barriers facing SMEs. The European Commission launched the Public Procurement Data Space on September 24, 2024, and proposed the Public Procurement Act on September 9, 2026, to make these purchases comparable.

The essentials

  • More than 250,000 public authorities in the EU purchase approximately 2 trillion euros annually, or 13.6% of European GDP (European Commission, Public Procurement Data Space).
  • Contracts below regulatory thresholds remain published in incompatible national formats, severely limiting consolidated visibility of supplier dependencies and SME market shares.
  • The Public Procurement Data Space, launched by the Commission, aims to aggregate this data in a common interoperable format.
  • The Public Procurement Act, proposed on September 9, 2026, seeks to extend this visibility to sub-threshold contracts, where the majority of European public procurement takes place.
  • The stakes: transforming dispersed spending into a lever for economic autonomy without closing markets or concentrating contracts with major suppliers.

Buying in Europe, but without seeing each other

The European Union has for decades set thresholds above which public markets must be open to competition from across the continent. A university hospital ordering medical imaging equipment worth several million euros publishes its call for tenders on a common platform, according to standards that any European supplier can read and respond to. The system works. Where it ceases to work is below these thresholds.

A municipality buying computers for its schools, a regional service renewing its fleet of vehicles, a medium-sized hospital placing orders for consumables: all these contracts are published, but in formats defined by each member state, sometimes by each locality. A Polish public buyer and his Portuguese counterpart use fields, categories, and identifiers that nothing aligns. The result: aggregating this data at the continent-wide level involves a technical and administrative complexity that the European proposal aims to make mandatory and achievable.

The paradox is striking. Europe has created a single market for goods and services, but its public procurement remains fragmented into twenty-seven data islands. A German SME wanting to know whether its products have a reasonable chance in a Slovak call for tenders has no simple way to verify this today. A regulator seeking to identify excessive dependence on a telecommunications equipment supplier across several member states would need to manually compile dozens of disparate formats. The question of the European state’s capacity to act in the face of economic dependencies presents itself here in its most concrete form: the opacity of public procurement forbids analysis before forbidding decision.

The cost of invisibility

The issue goes beyond administrative convenience. When data is unreadable, purchasing decisions are made without aggregated information. Public buyers do not know whether their usual supplier also serves two-thirds of neighboring administrations. They do not know whether the share of SMEs in their contracts is growing or declining. They cannot compare their prices to those of similar authorities in other member states.

This opacity has three concrete effects. It creates a comparative advantage for major suppliers with the legal and commercial resources to navigate twenty-seven different regimes, while an SME stops at its national market’s borders. It limits the effectiveness of a strategic procurement policy at the European scale: without aggregated data, purchasing decisions remain fragmented. It finally renders democratic control illusory: national parliaments and the European Parliament can only control what they can measure.

A few figures illuminate the scale of the problem. Public procurement represents approximately 13.6% of the EU’s GDP. Contracts published on the European platform Tenders Electronic Daily, which aggregates markets above thresholds, represent only a fraction of this volume. The rest circulates in national, regional, or even local databases with disparate standards. No one knows exactly what proportion of the 2 trillion annual budget is currently legible in consolidated form.

This is precisely the problem.

The logic of the Public Procurement Data Space

The European Commission launched the Public Procurement Data Space on September 24, 2024, to attack this problem at its root. The idea is simple: connect, in a federated manner, European public procurement data and available national datasets using a common interoperable format. The proposal makes national data spaces and their connection to the PPDS mandatory, while providing for certain structured information on sub-threshold procedures. Awards must be transmitted for publication at the Union level; national publication remains possible after this publication or within the prescribed timeframe, but according to standards that allow a central system to read, compare, and analyze them.

The project is as technical as it is political. Technical, because interoperability of public data is long-haul work: ontologies must be aligned, entity identifiers standardized, product classifications harmonized. Political, because member states retain control of their national systems and any obligation to reformat directly affects their administrations, including the smallest local authorities that lack the IT resources and expertise of large regional capitals.

The same debate on formats and interoperability runs through other sectors: when a common standard is imposed, winners and losers are created according to their capacity to adapt quickly. In public procurement, the symmetric risk is real: poorly calibrated interoperability could favor large national platforms already well-resourced and marginalize small administrations dependent on legacy software.

The Commission chose a gradual approach. The Public Procurement Data Space of 2024 aims to connect European data and available national datasets in a federated manner using a common format, on a voluntary basis for member states. The PPDS specifically aims to make purchasing data and flows more analyzable, improve transparency, and facilitate SME access to calls for tenders. If the tool delivers on its promises, an analyst could, for the first time, map supplier dependencies across all member states for a given product category.

The actual effects of the Public Procurement Act on data transparency

The legislative proposal of September 9, 2026, is the next step. It aims to give a binding legal basis to what the Public Procurement Data Space constructs technically. It makes interconnection and national data spaces mandatory; sub-threshold coverage is partially conditional, but includes an explicit obligation for certain data on contracts of at least €10,000.

The proposal remains ambitious and fragile on one specific point. Current European thresholds determine the scope of rules according to value and contract type, not according to the size of purchasing authorities. Markets from authorities whose value reaches the thresholds fall under European rules, regardless of the authority’s size. If the Public Procurement Act only covers markets already visible on Tenders Electronic Daily, it improves the quality of existing data without increasing the proportion of legible purchases. A large share of markets and data from the 250,000 public authorities remains insufficiently consolidated.

The issue of the text is therefore precisely there: its scope of application. An interoperability obligation limited to above-threshold markets is a comfort reform. An obligation extended to all public contracts, with an adaptation timeline for small authorities, is a structural reform. The difference is not technical. It is political: it determines whether Europe gives itself the means to see the entirety of its public spending, or only its visible layer.

The Commission is aware of this tension. The proposal provides for a general two-year timeline before mandatory interoperability application, with no derogations specifically identified for small structures. The question is whether these adjustments preserve system coherence or drain its ambition. A state that spends more without measuring what it buys remains structurally blind: the lesson applies at the European scale as much as at the national scale.

Two trajectories for European public procurement by 2030

By 2030, two trajectories emerge, and they lead to very different places.

In the first, the proposal imposes national data spaces and their connection to the PPDS, with data obligations including certain information on sub-threshold markets. Supplier dependencies become identifiable. A municipality buying all its software from a single publisher appears in aggregated data, as does a member state sourcing 80% of its network equipment from a single third country. SMEs gain visibility into neighboring markets without mobilizing disproportionate legal resources. National parliaments can finally ask precise questions about the structure of their country’s public spending.

In the second, the Public Procurement Act does not extend below thresholds, national formats remain incompatible for the majority of the 250,000 purchasing authorities, and the common data space remains a showcase aggregating what was already visible. Critical dependencies continue to build in the regulatory blind spot. SMEs continue to hit national markets they cannot read. Democratic control remains theoretical for lack of comparable data.

What distinguishes these two trajectories is the scope of obligation, a political decision. If the Public Procurement Act imposes interoperability on all contracts, the signals to watch are simple: the share of contracts published in a common format will progress, and the share of SMEs in the total value of markets awarded in member states adopting the new formats can be measured for the first time in a coherent way. If the text remains above thresholds, these indicators do not move and structural invisibility persists.

A complementary mechanism deserves attention: the possible creation of a European observatory of supplier concentrations, fed by the Public Procurement Data Space. Such an observatory could alert national authorities to critical dependencies in strategic categories before a crisis brings them to light. Equivalent tools already exist in other sectors, particularly with energy and telecommunications regulators, but their application to public markets requires that the underlying data be consolidated and reliable. This condition refers directly to the question of scope.

Legibility as a condition of sovereignty

There is a common assumption about the economic power of democracies: it would suppose a state capable of planning, directing, choosing its champions. European experience suggests another reading. A democracy can exercise considerable economic influence without a centralized industrial ministry, provided it makes its purchases legible, comparable, and controllable. Two trillion euros annually represents a lever of considerable power. But a lever invisible to its own users serves no purpose.

The reform undertaken by the Commission is neither spectacular nor rapid. It is made of data formats, standardized identifiers, publication obligations that even the smallest administrations will struggle to meet on schedule. It supposes coordination between twenty-seven national systems each with their own habits, service providers, and resistances. These obstacles are real. They do not cancel the stakes.

The question that remains open is that of the scope of ambition that member states will accept. They have much to gain from legible public procurement: better allocation of their spending, competitive pressure on their suppliers, capacity to identify dependencies before they become vulnerabilities. They also have much to lose in administrative comfort if the harmonization obligation touches thousands of small, ill-equipped local authorities. Where member states set the cursor will determine whether the Public Procurement Act becomes a fundamental reform or a surface modernization.

Sources

  1. European Commission, Public Procurement Data Space (PPDS)
  2. European Commission, Proposal for Public Procurement Act, September 9, 2026 (proposal undergoing legislative procedure; an adopted text will appear in the EU Official Journal after adoption)
  3. European Commission, data on public procurement in the EU (13.6% of GDP, 250,000 contracting authorities): figures from the PPDS portal and annual reports on European public procurement markets