EU thresholds (Schwellenwerte)
also: EU threshold · procurement threshold · Schwellenwert
The EU thresholds are the estimated net contract values at or above which a public contract must be tendered EU-wide under the procurement directives and published on TED. The European Commission resets them every two years by delegated regulation, aligning them with the euro equivalent of the special drawing rights agreed under the WTO Government Procurement Agreement (GPA); a revision can lower them as well as raise them. Below the thresholds, national procurement law applies.
66,828 of our 93,400 open procedures sit above the thresholds and 24,935 below them. Counted by procedure rather than by value, the below-threshold market is not a fringe.
What it means for a bidder
For 2026 and 2027, in force since 1 January 2026: EUR 5,404,000 for works contracts and concessions, EUR 140,000 for supply and service contracts of central government authorities, EUR 216,000 for supply and service contracts of all other contracting authorities, and EUR 432,000 in the utilities sector. Social and other specific services have their own value of EUR 750,000, which is not part of the two-year revision. All figures are net of VAT; the preceding values (EUR 5,538,000 and EUR 221,000) applied until 31 December 2025.
What counts is not the price finally awarded but the total value estimated before the procedure starts — including every lot, option, renewal and repetition. A contract may not be split in order to stay below the threshold. For a framework agreement the estimated total of all call-offs across the full term is decisive, not the individual call-off. For a bidder the threshold is mainly a predictor: it tells you how much formality, how much cross-border competition and which route of legal redress to expect.
Related terms
DEFINITION · a description of the law with a citation, not legal advice · FIGURE · from nightly-built aggregates of our own corpus · all terms: friedrich-clement.com/en/glossar