The European Commission will present on 9 September the draft plan of the European Public Procurement Act: a text of roughly 144 articles intended, in the Commission's plans, to fully replace the three directives currently governing the field - Directive 2014/23/EU on concessions, Directive 2014/24/EU on the ordinary sectors, and Directive 2014/25/EU on the special sectors.
The potential scope of the reform deserves attention, because the choice of legal instrument - a regulation instead of a directive - constitutes in itself a discontinuity of systemic significance. A regulation is directly applicable in all Member States, without the need for a national transposition act: this means that, above the EU relevance thresholds, the text drafted in Brussels would become the immediately binding source of law, relegating national codes - including the Italian one, rewritten twice over the past two decades and recently amended by a corrective decree - to the role of complementary legislation, applicable essentially to below-threshold awards and to organisational aspects not subject to harmonisation (the single project manager, design and execution phases, and litigation rules).
The Core Lines of the Draft
Beyond its legal form, the circulated draft anticipates substantive content that, if confirmed, would deeply affect the current architecture of the field.
Procedural simplification
The document proposes reducing the current range of award procedures, identifying as the standard model the so-called open procedure with negotiation: any interested economic operator could submit a tender, while the contracting authority would have the option — to be declared from the outset in the tender documents, specifying which elements are negotiable and which are not — to negotiate certain aspects of the tender, including through successive phases progressively narrowing down the number of competitors, while respecting equal treatment and confidentiality.
Market access for SMEs and new operators
A declared objective of the reform is to facilitate the participation of small and medium-sized enterprises, start-ups, and operators lacking prior specific experience in the public procurement sector. In the open-negotiated procedure, the use of selection criteria would become optional and, where provided for, should be proportionate to the complexity of the contract; save for justified exceptions, prior experience necessarily gained in the public sector could no longer be required, and the minimum turnover requested should ordinarily not exceed 50% of the contract's estimated value.
Strengthening the qualitative component
The draft would seek to make mandatory, in awards based on the most economically advantageous tender criterion, a qualitative component with a minimum weight of 30% (rising to 50% for labour-intensive contracts), reserving the use of price or cost alone for cases in which quality is already adequately guaranteed by technical specifications or stringent performance clauses.
Sustainability and European preference
Among the most politically sensitive elements are energy efficiency requirements for the purchase of goods and supplies, the possible accounting of emissions and other environmental costs throughout a product's entire life cycle, and the introduction of preference mechanisms for European products and secure supply chains — a line of continuity with the Industrial Accelerator Act, proposed in March 2026, which already introduces European criteria for certain strategic industrial sectors (steel, cement, aluminium, low-emission technologies). Contracting authorities would also reportedly be granted the option to exclude from tenders economic operators from third countries lacking reciprocal access to their respective public markets.
Digitalisation and databases
The proposal envisages a European electronic service for verifying exclusion grounds, requirements, and the origin of economic operators, through an interoperable digital company profile linked to national databases, applying the once-only principle (never asking twice for data already available to public administration). Each Member State would also be required to establish its own national procurement data space, connected to a European Public Procurement Data Space, for monitoring competition, SME access, sustainability, supply security, and fraud and corruption risks.
BIM and thresholds
On the front of design digitalisation, the draft would reportedly require the use of Building Information Modelling in the execution of public works contracts valued at or above €25 million — a threshold significantly higher than the €2 million currently set under Italian rules, with the paradoxical risk of a step backward in a digitalisation process already under way in the Italian legal system.
Delegation to the Commission
One aspect that has already raised concerns in preliminary negotiations concerns the breadth of the delegation the draft would grant to the European Commission, empowered through its own acts to revise thresholds, impose environmental requirements for product categories, adjust the BIM mandatory threshold, and make European preference binding — a mechanism that would concentrate choices of significant industrial and commercial impact at the executive level.
Implications for the Italian Legal System
For Italy, the eventual adoption of the regulation would carry far-reaching consequences. The 2023 Public Contracts Code would lose, above threshold, its primary regulatory function: a European regulation is not transposed, nor can it be "improved upon" or supplemented by the national legislature, which would retain competence only over non-harmonised aspects. This is a prospect that, according to early commentary, does not yet enjoy unanimous consensus within the Council, with a group of at least eighteen Member States reportedly having expressed caution regarding the draft's approach — a sign that the negotiations to open with the official presentation of the text, expected in September 2026, will be anything but a foregone conclusion.
In any case, one underlying fact remains: Brussels' choice to intervene with a regulation rather than a directive signals an unprecedented drive toward uniform application in the history of European public procurement law, and requires all stakeholders in the sector — administrations, businesses, and professionals alike — to closely follow a legislative process that, notwithstanding the current margins of uncertainty, appears set to profoundly redraw the regulatory architecture of the field in the years ahead. (*)
(*) For further information, see: https://www.appaltiecontratti.it/new-eu-regulation