Where does public money actually go?
Every public contract in the EU is tagged with a CPV code — the Common Procurement Vocabulary. These codes reveal what governments actually buy, from construction work to IT services to medical equipment.
Below, each rectangle represents one CPV division. Area = awarded contract value. The bigger the box, the more money flows into that sector. This treemap is built from 1.52 million real award decisions with a combined value of €384 billion — all from 2025, all in euros, all from the Victoria procurement graph.
What EU Governments Buy
€384 billion in awarded contracts · 2025 · by CPV division
What the treemap reveals
Construction is king. CPV 45 — Construction Work — towers over everything at €109 billion, nearly three times the second-largest division. This single category captures 28% of all awarded contract value. When European governments spend money, they build.
IT is the quiet giant. CPV 72 — IT Services — takes second place at €42 billion across just 7,016 awards. That's an average of €6 million per award — the highest avg. in the top 10. Digital transformation spending is concentrated in large contracts.
Volume ≠ value. Business Services (CPV 79) leads in pure award count with 31,054 contracts, yet ranks third in value at €29B. Recreation & Culture (CPV 92) has 28,296 awards but only €1.5B in value — high-frequency, low-value. Construction is the opposite: 27,505 awards, €109B value.
The top-5 concentration. The five largest CPV divisions — Construction, IT, Business Services, Architecture, and Medical — account for €229 billion, or 60% of the total. The remaining 40 divisions share the other 40%.
Security spending is real. CPV 35 (Security & Defence) ranks 10th at €14.9B from only 3,381 awards — an average of €4.4M per contract, the second-highest average after IT Services. Defence procurement comes in large packages.
Services dominate supplies. Aggregating by CPV category: Services account for roughly 55% of awarded value, Supplies for 31%, and Works (construction alone) for 28%. The EU's procurement economy is increasingly a services economy.
Methodology
Data source. All data comes from the Victoria procurement graph — 61.5 million nodes, 123 million relationships, sourced from TED (Tenders Electronic Daily), 14 German portals, 18 French portals, and 20+ additional EU/EEA sources.
Scope. We count Award nodes with decision_date in calendar year 2025 and currency = 'EUR'. This captures 1,518,249 awards worth €977 billion before filtering.
Framework ceiling exclusion. Individual awards exceeding €1 billion are excluded. These represent framework agreement maximum ceiling values repeated on every lot — not actual contract awards. This removes 140 awards (€593B in inflated value), leaving €384 billion in real contract awards.
CPV multi-classification. A single procedure can carry multiple CPV codes. A construction project classified under both CPV 45 (works) and CPV 71 (architectural services) contributes its award value to both divisions. The CPV-level totals therefore sum to more than the unique €384B.
What's not included. Below-threshold contracts (not published on TED), non-EUR currencies (Poland, Sweden, Czech Republic, Denmark, etc.), and procedures whose awards have not yet been published. The full EU procurement market is estimated at ~€2 trillion annually — our €384B represents the EUR-denominated, above-threshold, award-published segment.
Treemap algorithm. Squarified treemap layout computed at page load. Area is proportional to total awarded value. Color indicates CPV category: amber = Works (division 45), teal = Supplies (divisions 03–44), purple = Services (divisions 48–98).