Proposal for an EU Regulation on public contracts and concessionsCOM(2026) 590

What the consultation gathered

From 3 November 2025 to 26 January 2026 the European Commission gathered input on the revision of the public procurement directives. It fed into the impact assessment; it was not a consultation on a finished text. Proposal COM(2026) 590 came out more than seven months later, on 9 September 2026.

The exercise had two strands that are easy to confuse. The open public consultation used a questionnaire and 1,037 respondents took part; most of this page is based on their answers. The call for evidence accepted free text and received 746 published contributions, which are fully public, attachments included.

Who took part

The two strands reached different people. Companies and associations lead in the questionnaire, with strong participation from trade unions. Written contributions come mostly from industry associations based in Brussels.

The table scrolls sideways; the first column stays in place.

The biggest difference is for trade unions. 10 of them wrote to the call for evidence, but 115 answered the questionnaire. Filling in a questionnaire is far easier for mobilising a membership than drafting a position paper.

Where the written contributions came from

Belgium leads because European umbrella associations are based in Brussels. Of the 171 contributions from there, 127 come from industry associations, NGOs and trade unions, not from Belgian public buyers or companies. In the questionnaire, which tends to be filled in by individual organisations in the Member States, Germany comes first with 223 answers. Czechia sent 15 written contributions and Slovakia 5. Countries outside the EU sent 54 contributions, most of them from: Norway (12), Switzerland (11), United States (9), Türkiye (6).

When the contributions arrived

Number of written contributions per week; the label is the Monday of that week. The last two weeks account for 639 contributions, or 86% of the total. The last day alone, 26 January, brought 406, which is 54% of the whole exercise. The first ten weeks brought 101 contributions; between 15:00 and 19:00 on the last day, 163 arrived.

Written contributions came in 19 languages, 69% in English. 4 contributions were in Czech and 2 in Slovak. The form allowed at most 4,000 characters, so much of the substance is in attachments: 504 contributions attached a document, 3,707 pages in total, and for 163 of them the form contains only a short cover note along the lines of “please find our position attached”.

What the revision should focus on

Respondents were given three lists of objectives and ranked them by importance. A longer bar means a higher average rank.

One thing stands out in the table. Public authorities are the only group that answered differently from everyone else in all three lists. The others want to move beyond the lowest price and put quality first; public buyers put more flexible rules and less administration first. And they are the ones who will have to apply the new rules.

European preference

The most contested topic of the whole consultation. The question was whether European products and services should be given preference in public procurement, and if so, how.

Support is broad, but not naive. The same people who want the preference also expect purchases to become more expensive (63%) and third countries to retaliate by excluding European companies from their procurement (62%). Just under half also expect fewer bids.

Price versus quality

The second big topic. Should the EU require public buyers to award on the best price-quality ratio and set a minimum weight for quality?

In general, 72% of respondents want the practice to change, but once it comes to a specific obligation, support drops to about half. The gap between groups is the largest in the whole consultation: a mandatory minimum weight for quality is wanted by 97% of trade unions and 13% of public authorities.

Green, social and innovation procurement

All three were asked about in the same way: are today's rules enough, should the EU encourage these purchases, or make them mandatory? Answers were given on an agreement scale; the bar shows the share of respondents who agreed.

All three areas follow the same pattern: yes to encouragement, far less to obligations. It is sharpest for innovation, where 73% want encouragement but only 33% an obligation. Social procurement is the most contested: a third of respondents say today's rules are enough.

Simplification

For twenty-one specific measures, respondents rated how much they could simplify procurement. The bar shows the share of “high” or “some” answers.

A single digital procurement marketplace

Should there be a single entry point giving suppliers access to procurement across the whole EU?

Concessions and sectoral legislation

Two more technical questions where a fairly clear majority emerged.

What the written contributions were about

The questionnaire had fixed questions; written contributions did not. For the 746 free texts and their attachments, topics are therefore detected with keywords in all languages, separately in the text of the form and in the attachments. The dark part of each bar shows how many contributions mentioned the topic in the summary on the form itself, the whole bar how many addressed it anywhere. The difference is telling in its own right: what a writer put in the summary mattered most to them.

mentioned in the summary on the formmentioned anywhere, including only in an attachment

A contribution usually falls under several topics, 6.2 on average. 45 contributions matched no topic at all: short texts without attachments, narrow comments on a single provision, and 2 attachments from which no text could be extracted because they are scans. The percentages therefore do not add up to one hundred. The gap between the dark and light parts is widest for transparency: it appears in almost every detailed position paper (56%), but only 21% of writers put it in their summary, so it is more of a general principle mentioned in passing than the writer's main concern. For European preference the ratio is more balanced (24% out of 46%).

Which topics matter to whom

Share of each group's contributions that touched on the topic. Read across the rows and compare the columns.

The table scrolls sideways; the first column stays in place.

The sharpest difference is on European preference. 65% of business associations mention it, but only 28% of contributions from public authorities. Public buyers have a different order: digitalisation (54%) and simplification (58%) come up most often. Civil society leads on social considerations (52%) and on moving away from the lowest price (70%). Citizens have low figures for everything because they write briefly and without attachments, not because the topics do not interest them.

Running the same method on the 348 position papers attached to the questionnaire, all of which could be read, gives an almost identical ranking of topics. Rank correlation is 0.95 (Spearman's coefficient, where 1 would be a perfect match), and no topic moved by more than 4 places.

Where to find it in the proposal

Each topic below links to the articles of the proposal that deal with it. This is not a claim of cause and effect: the proposal drew on the impact assessment, studies and the political mandate, and the consultation was only one of the inputs. It is a signpost, not proof that the Commission followed the consultation.

One thing the proposal does not address is worth noting. Review and remedies came up in 42 contributions, but the proposal does not repeal Directives 89/665/EEC and 92/13/EEC. They stay in force alongside the Regulation and are referred to, for example, in Article 35. Anyone who expected a single rulebook for the whole of procurement, including remedies against a buyer's decisions, will not find it in the proposal.

Sources and method

Prepared on 2026-09-13. Found an error in the figures? Write to [email protected].