Each year, public buyers within the European Union allocate nearly 15% of EU GDP, amounting to approximately EUR 2.5 trillion, to the acquisition of supplies, services and works. The proposed Public Procurement Act (PPA), presented by the European Commission on 9 September 2026, seeks to transform this financial muscle into a powerful driver of ecological transition, social equity and overall economic efficiency, while radically simplifying the current regulatory landscape, which is currently fragmented across three separate directives.
The economic dimension in favour of long-term value
The proposed PPA brings about a fundamental paradigm shift by making the best quality–price ratio (BPQR) the default award method for public contracts. Contracting authorities must evaluate tenders by comparing their price and quality in light of criteria linked to the subject matter of the contract. This rule is coupled with a comply or explain principle, under which a contracting authority may depart from it only by justifying, in the public summary of the competition, that the quality of the product or service is already ensured by other means, such as strict technical specifications or binding performance clauses.
Going forward, qualitative criteria must account for at least 30% of the overall score, rising to 50% for labour-intensive contracts. Moreover, financial evaluation may rely on life-cycle costing (LCC), thereby making it possible to take into account long-term savings in terms of operation, maintenance and energy efficiency, while also internalising the cost of environmental externalities.
The environmental dimension of sufficiency, circularity and the EU Ecolabel
The draft regulation devotes an entire chapter to environmental requirements in order to accelerate decarbonisation and biodiversity preservation. With regard to the circular economy, specifications may now impose criteria relating to durability, reparability, reusability or the incorporation of recycled materials, and may encourage circular business models such as leasing or Product-as-a-Service.
In terms of energy efficiency, contracting authorities are now required to purchase only goods, services and buildings that demonstrate high energy performance, unless a duly justified technical impossibility applies. For collective catering contracts, sustainable food procurement may also be promoted through short supply chains, fair remuneration for producers, seasonality and animal welfare.
The regulation further reinforces the preferential use of the EU Ecolabel whenever a contracting authority requires an ecological label, provided that such a label exists for the category concerned; a verified third-party label based on a life-cycle assessment is admissible only in the absence of an EU Ecolabel. Notably, the text also broadens the notion of link to the subject matter of the contract, a legal condition that must be satisfied in order to integrate such criteria without risking the annulment of the procedure. This link may now be indirect, covering, for example, production conditions or supply chain traceability, and is no longer confined to characteristics intrinsic to the product itself.
The social dimension of quality employment, accessibility and social justice
Responsible public procurement also becomes an instrument of social progress. Accessibility for persons with disabilities becomes a strict obligation for all purchases intended for natural persons, while contracting authorities are encouraged to promote quality employment, respect for collective agreements, continuous training and the professional inclusion of disadvantaged persons, including through contracts reserved for social integration enterprises. In order to combat social dumping and preserve the transparency of supply chains, the complete subcontracting of a contract at any level is expressly prohibited in the text, accompanied by an obligation to declare the intended subcontractors.
The innovation dimension and a new regime for intellectual property
Less well known, the third component of the environment–social–innovation triptych introduces a new innovation procedure, designed to enable public buyers to bring forth solutions that do not yet exist on the market, by relying on a prior consultation phase followed by a structured dialogue with economic operators. The most significant breakthrough, however, concerns intellectual property. The contracting authority must specify, from the outset in the procurement documents, the intellectual property rights it deems relevant.
Pre-existing intellectual property remains, in principle, the property of the economic operator, subject to exceptions for critical infrastructures. Crucially, unless justified by an overriding public interest, intellectual property rights generated during the innovation procedure remain with the economic operator, and not with the contracting authority. This choice reverses a widespread practice under which the public sector appropriated such rights, thereby impeding the commercial diffusion of innovations funded by public money. It aims to enhance the attractiveness of public procurement for start-ups and European technology companies.
Read in this light, the compromise also reveals the limits of the exercise: in the absence of mandatory quantified targets, the transformation of public procurement into a genuine lever for sustainability will largely depend on the uptake of the new framework by the EU’s approximately 46,600 public buyers, as well as by economic operators themselves. In its current form, the Public Procurement Act would not revolutionise domestic public procurement law ex nihilo, but rather systematises and strengthens instruments already present in national codes, such as the economically most advantageous tender, life-cycle costing, social and environmental criteria, and innovation partnerships, which are already regulated under the French Code de la commande publique. However, whereas French law currently permits these tools on an optional basis, without binding thresholds or generalised obligations, the PPA renders them mandatory, prescribes their precise modalities – such as the 30% to 50% weighting for qualitative criteria – and imposes their systematic application, thereby turning best practices into binding rules.
As this text remains, at this stage, only a Commission proposal, the completion of the European Union’s ordinary legislative procedure must be awaited before its potential adoption can be envisaged. Several steps therefore remain to be completed before it enters into force for European public buyers.
For further reading:
– Public procurement – Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs
– SWD(2025)332 – Register of Commission Documents
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