How has the use of procurement procedures changed in the EU during the last decade?

Every year since 2022 I update my table on the use of different public procurement procedures across the EU, based on data available on TED. Here's the table for procedures initiated up to the end of 2025.

I think there are a couple of interesting points to raise here. The first is that the total number of procedures keeps increasing and more than doubled in 10 years. This is remarkable especially if we take into account that the UK left the Union in 2020. Once more I am at a loss to explain this increase and have found no good explanation for this fact. If this increase is mostly due to the Recovery and Resiliency Facility then we should expect the numbers to start coming down this year or the next.

The second point to mention here is that virtually all growth in adoption has come from the open procedure, which increased its share slightly from 92% to 93%. We have a monoculture of procedural usage in the EU based around the open procedure.

The third point is a small decrease in the total number of competitive procedure with negotiation, which had been increasing by leaps and bounds until 2024. It would seem we have reached a high watermark of 19-20k a year. Nonetheless, this is still 22x the usage of competitive dialogue and a reason why I think we should simply get rid of competitive dialogue in the upcoming revision.

Finally, the restricted procedure has also seen a small (5%) increase but it is still just around 1/3 of the usage of the competitive procedure with negotiation. In fact, if we compare with 2015 the total usage has gone down during this decade both in absolute and relative terms. It is simply not a particularly interesting option anymore.