As of 1 January 2026, North Rhine-Westphalia has abolished the state-level value thresholds (Wertgrenzen) for municipal procurement procedures. The Kommunale Vergabegrundsätze – the municipal procurement principles – no longer apply, and below the EU thresholds the UVgO and VOB/A Section 1 have lost their binding force for municipal contracting authorities entirely. What remains are the fundamental principles – economy, thrift, transparency, equal treatment – and whatever a municipality chooses to impose on itself by local ordinance.
This is one of the largest changes to everyday municipal purchasing in years, and it has been discussed considerably more quietly in the trade press than its effect warrants.
What changes in practice
The question used to be: which procedure does the contract value force me into? For municipal awards below the EU thresholds, that question no longer arises in that form. A different and more demanding one takes its place: which procedure is appropriate for this need, this market, and this risk?
For IT purchasing, this is more than a formality. Three things become realistic that previously were not:
- The market can be explored before anything is tendered. If you do not have to set up a formal procedure immediately, you can invite two or three providers, have them present architecture proposals, and only then decide what should actually be procured. With security topics this is often the real bottleneck: the administration knows something is missing, but not precisely enough to write a tender for it.
- Small, specialised providers come back into reach. The effort of a formal procedure has reliably kept small engineering firms and specialist vendors away – on both sides of the table. Yet that is frequently where the competence for network architecture, perimeter security, or emergency preparedness actually sits.
- Purchasing can follow risk instead of the calendar. A segmentation project after a security incident can be commissioned in weeks rather than quarters.
What explicitly remains
The removal of the thresholds is not an exemption, and reading it that way would be an expensive misunderstanding. Still to be observed, among others:
- The EU thresholds. They apply unchanged and were even slightly lowered on 1 January 2026: for supply and service contracts awarded by municipalities and Länder the threshold is €216,000 (previously €221,000), for upper and highest federal authorities €140,000, and for sector contracting authorities – energy, water, transport – €432,000. These values apply for 2026 and 2027. Above them, EU procurement law applies in full.
- The internal-market relevance assessment. It remains mandatory, including below the thresholds.
- Collective-agreement compliance. The requirements of the TVgG-NRW apply from a contract value of €25,000.
- Querying the competition register from €30,000, and the dual-approval principle from €500.
- Budget law and anti-corruption law – unaffected.
One formal subtlety matters as well: if a municipality wants to give itself stricter rules, that is only possible by local ordinance (Satzung), not through internal administrative practice. Anyone who simply carries the old thresholds forward in a service instruction has not legally reinstated them – but has given away the entire benefit of the reform in practice.
For contracting authorities subject to the state budget code, a separate rule applies: from 1 February 2026 the thresholds for direct awards rise to €50,000 for supplies and services and €75,000 for construction work. Municipalities are not affected by this – the state thresholds no longer apply to them in any case.
The quiet mistake: letting the reform pass you by
The obvious reaction of a well-run procurement office is caution: better to leave everything as it was, then nobody can object. That is understandable, and in many cases wrong.
The reason is that the old thresholds never said anything about quality. They coupled procedural effort to contract value – and thereby systematically produced the greatest effort exactly where it helps least: with technically demanding but financially inconspicuous services. A firewall migration, a separation between the administrative network and the specialist applications, a second independent backup path – these are projects whose success depends almost entirely on the provider’s suitability and almost not at all on price. It is precisely for this class of project that room has now opened up.
The recommendation, therefore, is to deliberately rewrite your own procurement rules rather than let the old ones quietly run on: which purchases are low-risk and may move fast? Where does suitability matter more than price, and how is it assessed? From which value onwards is which form of competition established – and why exactly there? Answering those questions cleanly once is worth more than any threshold.
Why we are writing this
We are an owner-led systems house from Solingen and have worked for years in environments where being able to produce evidence is part of daily business – among them the KRITIS operations of a municipal energy utility, where we run security systems and build security concepts to BSI and ISO 27001 requirements.
For municipalities the new situation means something concrete: a conversation about network segmentation, perimeter security, or a backup path independent of your service provider no longer has to fail on procedure before it has begun. If you want to know where your environment actually stands, the first step is a sober assessment – not a tender.