How big is public procurement in Europe: €2.9 trillion, and the share that reaches TED
EU public buyers spent about €2.9 trillion in 2025, 15.5% of GDP. About a quarter of that value falls under the EU directives and reaches TED.
Tomasz Kowal · Data and public procurement
9 November 2026 · 9 min read
Public bodies in the 27 EU countries spent about €2.9 trillion on goods, services and investment in 2025, on our calculation from Eurostat's government accounts. That is 15.5% of EU GDP and 31.3% of all government spending. The European Commission uses the same three items as a proxy for the upper range of public procurement. Only part of this money passes through procedures covered by the EU procurement directives, and that part is what appears, with some voluntary smaller notices, on TED.
Putting it simply: public purchasing in the EU is worth roughly €2.9 trillion a year on Eurostat's 2025 figures. The Commission's "around €2.6 trillion, or 15% of EU GDP" is the same measure for 2023. Its 2025 evaluation says the EU directives apply to "as much as a quarter" of that spending: on average €616 billion a year of contracts in award notices published on TED in 2018–2023. Procedures above the EU thresholds are about 20% of all contracts by number. How much a country advertises on TED varies widely: on the Commission's 2024 Scoreboard it runs from 1.8% of GDP in Germany to 16.9% in Latvia. Few contracts go directly to foreign companies (about 4% of value), while about 20% goes to local companies owned by foreign groups.
The headline figures, and why they differ
Several publishers measure public procurement. Their numbers differ mainly by year, country group and definition.
| Publisher | Figure | Reference year | Scope |
|---|---|---|---|
| Eurostat, our calculation | €2,927 billion, 15.5% of GDP | 2025 | EU-27, general government |
| European Commission (DG GROW page; evaluation SWD(2025) 332) | "around €2.6 trillion, or 15% of EU GDP" | 2023 | EU, over 250,000 public authorities |
| OECD (Government at a Glance 2025) | 14.8% of GDP (15.0% in 2024) | 2023 | 22 EU countries that are OECD members |
| OECD | 12.7% of GDP | 2023 | all OECD members |
| World Bank (blog, 2020) | about USD 11 trillion, 12% of world GDP | 2018 | 190 countries |
The Commission's page gives no year, but its 2025 evaluation of the directives (SWD(2025) 332) computes the €2.6 trillion for 2023 from the same three Eurostat items we use, and calls it a proxy for the upper range. Eurostat now shows about €2.57 trillion for 2023, €2.75 trillion for 2024 and €2.93 trillion for 2025, so the gap between the two headline figures is mostly two years of nominal growth. The Commission's proposal for a Public Procurement Act (COM(2026) 590, September 2026) also uses "around 15% of the EU's GDP". Earlier wording was lower: in 2023 the European Court of Auditors, citing the Commission's page as it stood in June 2023, wrote "around €2 trillion, or 14%".
The OECD's 14.8% covers a different group of countries (the 22 EU members of the OECD, not all 27) and the year 2023. The OECD also puts procurement at about 30% of total government spending in those countries (30.0% in 2023), in line with the 31.3% Eurostat gives for the EU-27 in 2025.
The World Bank's global estimate (about USD 11 trillion, 12% of world GDP in 2018, published in a 2020 staff blog) covers 190 countries. Its authors collected the data from procurement agencies and statistical offices, completed it with staff estimates, and note that it may not cover military spending and sectors such as healthcare, so we keep it out of the European calculations.
The ten largest public purchasers in the EU
The table below uses Eurostat's general government accounts. "All public purchasing" is the sum of three items: intermediate consumption, gross fixed capital formation and social transfers in kind bought from market producers. The split by function comes from Eurostat's COFOG tables, which run one year behind. The full table for every country is on our facts and figures page.
| Country | All public purchasing, € bn (2025) | % of GDP (2025) | Health, € bn (2024) | Education, € bn (2024) | Defence, € bn (2024) | Advertised on TED, % of GDP (Scoreboard 2024) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Germany | 863.6 | 19.1% | 293.2 | 54.5 | 31.9 | 1.8% |
| France | 485.8 | 16.2% | 179.6 | 30.0 | 29.5 | 6.1% |
| Italy | 274.1 | 12.1% | 96.5 | 15.9 | 11.5 | 3.6% |
| Netherlands | 242.0 | 20.7% | 74.2 | 19.8 | 6.9 | 3.8% |
| Spain | 191.8 | 11.3% | 54.7 | 18.5 | 6.4 | 3.2% |
| Poland | 133.1 | 14.4% | 35.7 | 12.2 | 14.0 | 7.5% |
| Sweden | 105.7 | 17.6% | 21.2 | 16.4 | n/a* | 5.7% |
| Belgium | 99.6 | 15.5% | 42.3 | 6.4 | 3.2 | 7.6% |
| Austria | 79.5 | 15.3% | 27.0 | 6.8 | 1.2 | 7.1% |
| Finland | 54.7 | 19.4% | 12.4 | 6.6 | 2.6 | 5.4% |
| EU-27 | 2,926.6 | 15.5% | 948.5 | 219.8 | 132.8 | not published |
* Eurostat does not publish all three items for Swedish defence, so we leave the cell empty.
Health is by far the largest function. Across the EU-27 in 2024 it accounted for about €949 billion, roughly a third of the €2,734 billion spread across the ten COFOG functions that year. That share partly reflects how each country organises healthcare: where statutory health insurance is classified in government, as in Germany or the Netherlands, care it pays for counts as public purchasing in these accounts. In 2025 these social transfers in kind (D.632) were about €1,027 billion of the EU-27 total, about 35%, and they are seldom tendered as supply contracts.
How much of it reaches TED
TED publishes the procedures above the EU thresholds, plus some smaller ones that buyers publish voluntarily. Two Commission documents describe that share from different angles:
- By value: the 2025 evaluation of the directives (SWD(2025) 333) says EU rules apply to "as much as a quarter" of public procurement spending, with an average annual value of €616 billion: the contracts in award notices published on TED in 2018–2023.
- By number: the 2023 Commission Notice on the procurement data space says procedures above the thresholds account for "approximately 20% of all public procurement contracts".
The two fit together: about a fifth of the contracts carries about a quarter of the value. Set against the evaluation's own 2023 total of about €2,566 billion, €616 billion is about 24%, its quarter; it is a 2018–2023 average against one year, so read it as a rough check.
The Commission's statistical report to the WTO (SWD(2026) 244) splits above-threshold contracts covered by the Government Procurement Agreement by type. In 2024 they were worth €664.3 billion: supplies €239.6 billion (36%), works €238.5 billion (36%) and services €186.2 billion (28%). In 2023 supplies had a 38% share.
Country by country, the gap is large
The last column of the table above comes from the Commission's Single Market Scoreboard for 2024, which charts the value of procurement advertised on TED as a share of national GDP, including notices published voluntarily below the thresholds. We read the values from the Scoreboard chart, so treat them as indicative; the Scoreboard does not show an EU average in a form we could read. They range from 1.8% of GDP in Germany to 16.9% in Latvia.
Put next to Eurostat's total purchasing, the difference is clear. In Germany, 1.8% of GDP advertised on TED against 19.1% of GDP in total purchasing means roughly a tenth of the value is visible on TED. In France it is about 38% (6.1 against 16.2) and in Poland about half (7.5 against 14.4). These ratios combine two sources and two years (Scoreboard 2024, Eurostat 2025), and Eurostat's total includes items that are seldom tendered as contracts at all, such as care bought from private providers. They indicate visibility and should not be read as exact shares. The ratio depends heavily on D.632: in Germany it is about 48% of total purchasing, and without it TED would show about 18% of the rest.
Who wins: local companies, and local subsidiaries of foreign groups
The Commission's 2025 evaluation finds that only about 4% of awarded value, and 2% of awards, goes directly to companies established in another EU country or outside the EU. Indirect cross-border procurement, through local companies controlled from abroad, is about 20%, of which 80% comes from groups in the EU and 20% from outside it.
A 2021 study for the Commission (TED awards 2016–2019 under €200 million, ownership data from company registers) gives the same picture in more detail: 74.2% of value domestic, 4.1% direct cross-border and 21.6% indirect. For medical equipment, pharmaceuticals and personal care products, indirect cross-border procurement reached 61.3% of the value of that market. The study measures ownership only, so an independent local distributor selling a foreign brand counts as domestic.
Our own count points the same way: in the last 12 months of supply award notices (1 November 2025 to 6 November 2026), 98.6% of awards in 30 countries went to companies registered in the buyer's country. This is a share of awards, not value, and it counts a foreign group's local subsidiary as local, so it is a measure of direct wins only.
Competition: fewer bids per tender
The Court of Auditors' special report 28/2023 found that the share of procedures with a single bid rose from 23.5% in 2011 to 41.8% in 2021, and the average number of bidders fell from 5.7 to 3.2. For framework agreements its dataset includes only the second-stage awards. The Commission's 2024 Scoreboard, which excludes framework agreements and direct awards, shows a single-bidder share of contracts of 56% in Poland and 20% in Germany, with Finland at 15%. On our own data, 31.0% of award rows with a known tender count came from a lot with exactly one tender in the last 12 months. The three measures use different units (procedures, contracts, award rows), so they should not be compared as one series. Our guide to the single-bid rate explains what the figure tells a supplier.
How we counted and what the sources measure
- All public purchasing is our calculation from Eurostat datasets gov_10a_main, gov_10a_exp and nama_10_gdp (fetched 9 November 2026): general government intermediate consumption (P.2), gross fixed capital formation (P.51G) and social transfers in kind purchased from market producers (D.632), in current prices. Totals are for 2025; functions (COFOG) for 2024, the latest year available.
- Third-party figures are quoted with their own year and scope. We have not added together figures with different definitions.
- Cresques counts come from TED award notices for supplies, read from the daily and monthly notice packages. Counted on 8 November 2026: 1,604,107 contract awards dated since November 2023, in 30 countries, out of 1,769,178 awards in the 332,914 live award notices we hold, which name 103,430 winning companies. An award is one winner on one lot, not an amount of money. Only live notices count, and an award repeated by a later notice of the same procedure counts once. Details are on our methodology page and in the European market overview, with category pages such as medical equipment and pharmaceutical products.
- TED values are not the whole market. TED shows contracts above the EU thresholds. Where we total contract values on our pages, we use awarded values only and never framework ceilings.
What this means for a manufacturer
Public buyers in Europe spend a sum close to 15% of GDP, and TED shows the larger contracts within it, roughly a quarter of the value on the Commission's estimate. That makes TED a reliable sample of who wins the bigger public supply contracts, though it covers only part of a market. In most countries the winners are local companies: direct wins by foreign firms are a few per cent, and much of the foreign presence runs through local companies, and the Commission's ownership data cannot see independent distributors at all. For a manufacturer without a local company, the practical route is usually a partner that already wins these contracts.
Cresques reads the award notices for 30 countries and shows, per market and product category, which companies win, from which buyers and how often, so you can see the likely partners before you contact anyone.