The single market is Europe’s home market – a dynamic, integrated space of 450 million people and 26 million businesses that anchors the EU’s economic stability in an uncertain world. With a GDP of EUR 18 trillion, it is the world’s second-largest economy, fostering prosperity, safeguarding social standards, and ensuring a predictable environment for investment and growth.

To unlock its full potential for citizens, workers and businesses, the European Commission’s 2025 strategy proposes a renewed focus on making the single market simple, seamless, and strong. The strategy introduces a new approach centred on key pillars: removing the most harmful single market barriers (the 'Terrible Ten'), addressing challenges in specific service sectors (retail, construction, business services), supporting SMEs and mid-caps in scaling up and doing business across borders, enhancing digitalisation of procedures, promoting smarter, more consistent implementation and enforcement of EU rules, promoting stronger links between EU funding and single market reforms, and shielding businesses from unfair practices in global trade. 

The list of most harmful Single Market barriers (the 'Terrible Ten') includes, among others, overly complex EU rules, complicated business establishment and operations, inconsistency in the recognition of professional qualifications, fragmented rules on packaging, labelling and waste, outdated harmonised product rules, and lack of product compliance and restrictive and diverging national services regulation. 

The list of barriers also includes territorial supply constraints in retail and wholesale which fragment the single market, limit consumer choice, and contribute to significant price differences across the EU, notably for daily consumer goods. The Commission proposes to develop tools to tackle such unjustified practices.

In addition, the strategy puts forward an action on the proportionality of retail regulations. This should improve the sector’s competitiveness held back by numerous restrictions regarding the establishment of shops and their operations.