One market, one rulebook: inside the leaked EU procurement regulation

Public procurement is about 15% of EU GDP: roughly one euro in seven that the public sector spends. It shapes everything from the roads people drive on to the software that runs a hospital. Yet for all that scale, the market has been getting only less competitive.

The European Court of Auditors put numbers on it in 2023: competition down, SME and cross-border participation limited, single-bid procedures increasingly the norm.

Two in five European tenders now draw a single bid. The Draghi and Letta reports on competitiveness and the single market said much the same, that the way governments buy has become a matter of strategic relevance, and it is not working well enough.

A leaked European Commission draft, marked "sensitive until adoption", proposes the biggest overhaul of the rules since 2014. Here is what is in it, and why it matters for anyone who sells to the public sector.

Three directives become one regulation

Today, public buyers and suppliers navigate three separate 2014 directives, for public contracts, utilities, and concessions, each transposed differently into 27 national laws. The draft replaces all three with a single, directly applicable regulation. That removes a whole layer of divergence: the same core rules would apply the same way across the Union, instead of 27 local variations of the same idea.

Simpler procedures, fewer artificial barriers

The proposal makes the default procedure an open-negotiated one, adds a dynamic simplified route for off-the-shelf purchases, and an innovation-challenge procedure for solutions that do not exist yet. Crucially for smaller and newer suppliers, it limits selection criteria to what is "necessary and proportionate": excessive turnover requirements are curtailed, and unjustified demands for prior public-sector experience are restricted.

Those two requirements, high turnover thresholds and "must have done this for a public buyer before", are exactly the kind of quiet gatekeeping that keeps capable companies out of tenders they could win. Trimming them widens the field.

Quality over lowest price

The draft moves procurement away from price-only awards. As a rule, contracts would be awarded on the best price-quality ratio, with minimum quality weightings and heavier weighting for labour-intensive work. It also builds clearer legal bases for green procurement (circularity, recycled content, energy efficiency, and mandatory green requirements for some product categories), social outcomes, and innovation.

Prove your eligibility once, reuse it everywhere

One of the most practical changes: a common digital ecosystem with an electronic eligibility service built around reusable digital business credentials and company profiles, implementing the "once-only" principle. Instead of re-assembling the same certificates and declarations for every tender in every country, a supplier could prove its eligibility once and reuse it.

On top of that sit National Public Procurement Data Spaces and an EU-level data space, plus a mandate to interconnect Member States' eProcurement systems into a single integrated marketplace. The fragmented, non-interoperable digital landscape the Commission complains about would start to behave like one system.

A strategic-autonomy layer

The draft also hard-codes economic-security tools: security-related exclusions, resilience and security-of-supply provisions for critical contracts, clearer rules on third-country participation, and "European preference" options that let buyers favour Union origin in defined cases. It is a reminder that procurement is increasingly treated as industrial and geopolitical policy, not just paperwork.

Why it matters

Put together, the direction is clear: make bidding across Europe feel like bidding in one market. Fewer rulebooks, fewer artificial barriers, reusable digital credentials, and connected systems all point the same way, toward lower friction for suppliers and more competition for buyers. More competition means better public services and better value for taxpayers.

The goal is simple: make bidding across Europe feel like bidding in one market.

This is, however, a leaked draft, not law. It is explicitly "sensitive until adoption" and will change as it moves through the European Parliament and the Council. The timeline is uncertain, and details will shift.

But the trajectory is the one we have been betting on. Viran helps companies find the right public tenders across 100,000+ weekly opportunities, analyse the requirements, and make it easier to win across markets. A more connected, lower-friction European market is exactly the world we are building for, and it is good news for anyone who wants a fair shot at public contracts.