For years, a company bidding for public contracts in three different Member States has effectively had to open three separate files on itself: three registrations, three sets of eligibility documents, three national eProcurement logins. The European Commission’s new Public Procurement Act proposal, tabled on 9 September 2026, aims to close that gap by connecting national eProcurement platforms into a single digital marketplace built around the “once-only” principle. Here’s what’s actually in the proposal, what already exists to build on, and what it means in practice.
What “once-only” actually means
The once-only principle is simple to state and hard to deliver: public administrations should not ask a business or citizen for information that another public authority already holds electronically. Instead of re-uploading the same certificate to every portal, the data moves between authorities on the person’s or company’s request.
This isn’t a new idea for the EU. The principle already underpins the Single Digital Gateway Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2018/1724), which created the Once-Only Technical System (OOTS), the EU’s cross-border infrastructure for exchanging official evidence such as diplomas, company registrations or permits between national authorities. OOTS went live in December 2023, after Member States met the regulation’s legal deadline to connect their systems, and it now links over a thousand public authorities exchanging around 60 categories of “key evidence” across 25 defined administrative procedures. The European Single Procurement Document (ESPD) and the eForms standard already digitised parts of the bidding process, but the underlying national eProcurement platforms, the actual portals where tenders are published and bids submitted, have largely remained separate, non-interoperable systems. A supplier still has to learn, register on, and submit through each country’s own platform.
What the new proposal adds
The Public Procurement Act proposal is a draft Regulation, not yet law: it now goes to the European Parliament and the Council of the EU for negotiation, and its content, and timeline, can still change. Its stated aim is to consolidate the EU’s three existing procurement directives, plus procurement rules scattered across sector-specific legislation, into a single directly applicable Regulation, replacing today’s five procurement procedures with three.
The digitalisation piece sits inside that broader simplification effort. Rather than one central EU platform, the Commission is proposing a decentralised network: national eProcurement platforms remain in place, but are linked through a common EU interoperability layer, shared semantic standards and common technical specifications. In practice, a bidder would be able to submit a tender through any connected national platform and take part in procedures run from another Member State’s platform, without re-registering or resubmitting documentation already verified elsewhere.
Three building blocks are meant to carry the once-only principle through this network:
- A digital business credential and digital company profile, a verifiable digital identity and eligibility record for each economic operator, intended to let public buyers confirm exclusion and selection criteria automatically rather than requesting paper or PDF evidence each time.
- A common procurement eligibility service, built on that credential, to standardise how eligibility is checked across borders.
- National Public Procurement Data Spaces, feeding into an EU-level data framework, meant to support transparency, spend analysis and anti-fraud monitoring through systematic data exchange.
The Commission frames this as extending the once-only logic already proven in OOTS and the EU Digital Identity Wallet work into the procurement domain specifically, moving from a document-centric process to a data-centric one, where verified data is reused rather than re-collected.
The numbers behind the pitch
The Commission’s own estimate is that the reform, taken as a whole, could generate around €649 million in annual administrative savings, roughly €80 million for public buyers and €570 million for economic operators. That imbalance is deliberate framing: the burden of navigating fragmented, non-interoperable systems has fallen disproportionately on suppliers, and especially on smaller ones, for whom the cost of learning a new national platform and re-submitting documentation for every cross-border bid can be a genuine barrier to competing at all.
Public procurement is not a marginal slice of the EU economy. The Commission puts the value of the procurement single market at around €2,500 billion, close to 15% of EU GDP, which is part of why interoperability here carries more weight than a typical back-office efficiency measure, it changes how much of that market is genuinely contestable across borders.
For context, the EU has previously estimated that authorities which have already digitised their procurement processes report savings of 5-20%, and separate research on requiring only the winning bidder to submit original eligibility documents (rather than all bidders upfront) found administrative burden reductions of 29-58% in the Member States studied. The once-only digital marketplace is designed to generalise that kind of gain EU-wide.
What it changes for procurement teams, and what it doesn’t
If adopted as proposed, the practical shift for organisations that manage tenders or bid for them would include:
- Fewer duplicate eligibility submissions, as automatic verification replaces repeated document uploads for criteria already confirmed elsewhere.
- Easier cross-border bidding, since a single connected platform login could, in principle, reach opportunities published on other Member States’ systems.
- New data infrastructure to understand, as National Public Procurement Data Spaces and the eligibility service become part of the compliance landscape alongside existing tools like eForms and TED.
Digitalisation, however, is not a substitute for the other conditions that determine whether SMEs can realistically compete: accessible procedures, proportionate financial and technical requirements, and contracts divided into manageable lots. The Commission’s own communications around the proposal acknowledge this, a connected platform reduces friction, but public buyers still need the staffing and skills to use the new system well, and suppliers still need bidding opportunities that are genuinely sized for them.
It’s also worth being precise about status: this is a Commission proposal, not adopted legislation. It will go through the ordinary legislative procedure, with the Parliament and Council both able to amend it substantially, and there is no confirmed date for when a connected digital marketplace of this kind would actually be operational. Given how long OOTS itself took, from the 2018 Single Digital Gateway Regulation to its December 2023 go-live, a multi-year runway between adoption and implementation is a reasonable working assumption for procurement teams planning ahead.
The bigger picture
What makes this proposal notable is less any single feature than the direction of travel: the Commission is explicitly building the procurement platform layer as a sibling to OOTS and the EU Digital Identity Wallet, using the same once-only logic and drawing on the same interoperability infrastructure (eID, eDelivery, common semantic standards) that already underpins cross-border public services elsewhere. For an organisation working across multiple national procurement systems, that convergence, rather than any one platform feature, is the thing worth tracking as the legislative process unfolds.
Background Reading and Additional Sources:
Commission proposal, COM(2026) 590 final (9 Sept 2026): https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/document/download/59557310-3af0-426d-b6b6-0357b650065f_en?filename=Proposal+for+a+Regulation+-+Public+Procurement+Act.pdf
Council of the EU document 12969/26 (10 Sept 2026): https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-12969-2026-INIT/en/pdf
eureporter summary (savings figures, “one single platform” language): https://www.eureporter.co/politics/european-commission/2026/09/10/commission-proposes-simpler-and-more-strategic-public-procurement-rules/
eubusiness.com: https://www.eubusiness.com/sme/new-europe-focused-eu-public-procurement-rules-could-save-eur-650m/
European Times, “EU Unveils Public Procurement Act”: https://www.european.express/2026/09/10/eu-unveils-public-procurement-act-the-european-times/
