Ursula von der Leyen gave the European Parliament one number about the Single Market on Wednesday. "Our 12 omnibus proposals are reducing administrative burden by around €17 billion a year," she said, in a passage about speed: permits, forms, grid connections, financing decisions. The rest of the economic section was about the Savings and Investments Union and a banking system "built for growth, not just stability".
Seventeen billion euros is a real saving. It is also a measurement of a different problem from the one the Single Market was built to solve, and setting it against the figures in EPIC's July 2026 report, The Cost of Single Market Fragmentation: What We Know, What We Don't, and What We Need to Measure, shows how narrow the speech's economic ambition was.
Administrative burden is the cost of complying with rules that apply to everyone: reporting duties, permits, paperwork. Cutting it makes the same market cheaper to operate in. The Commission's own programme targets a 25 per cent reduction for all firms and 35 per cent for SMEs by the end of the mandate, and the €17 billion figure is the running total it claims from the omnibus packages so far.
Fragmentation is different. It is the cost of the market not being one market: 27 sets of national rules on services, incompatible product requirements, procurement that stays local, retail supply chains split by country. EPIC's review of four decades of evidence puts what the existing Single Market already delivers at about €840 per EU citizen per year, or roughly €427 billion across the bloc (Mion & Ponattu, 2019). Without it, EU GDP would be 8 to 9 per cent lower (in 't Veld, 2019).
The upside of finishing the job is larger still, though the estimates disagree with each other. The European Parliament's research service has put broad completion gains at €651 billion to €1.1 trillion a year (2014), at €615 billion (2017), and at €297 billion for services alone (2019). EPIC treats a central range of 4 to 5 per cent of EU GDP as an inference from that scatter, not a measurement. Even the lowest of those figures, services alone, is seventeen times the number von der Leyen offered.
Simplification is deliverable by the Commission on its own. An omnibus is a Commission proposal that trims Commission rules. Completion requires member states to give up national protections, and EPIC's report names the political economy plainly: the benefits of integration are diffuse, cross-border and long-term, while the benefits of national protection are local, immediate and politically organised. A State of the Union is a speech to an audience that includes those organised interests.
The week supplied its own illustration. On the morning of the speech, Italy extended its border controls on arrivals from Spain for another 15 days and Madrid told Brussels its checks on passengers from Italy would run until 8 October, the third renewal since July's Ceuta crisis. Two founding members of Schengen are now inspecting each other's travellers, and the speech expressed solidarity with Spain without addressing the checks.
The procurement evidence cuts the same way. Public contracting has been legally integrated for decades, yet local firms remain more than 900 times more likely to win contracts than foreign bidders (Herz & Varela-Irimia, 2020). EPIC's phrase for this is that legal integration is not market integration. An omnibus cannot fix it, because the barrier is not paperwork.
EPIC's central recommendation is that the EU has never measured what completing the Single Market would gain, only what it delivers and what dismantling it would cost. The 1988 Cecchini Report, which priced the "cost of non-Europe" at about ECU 200 billion, roughly 5 per cent of Community GDP, gave the 1992 programme its political force. The report proposes a research steering group to produce a sequel, with workstreams on services and regulated professions, goods and regulatory heterogeneity, public procurement, territorial supply constraints and administrative burden.
Note the last item. Administrative burden is one of the five workstreams, and the only one where a scoreboard already exists. That is why it is the one number the Commission can put in a speech. The other four have no agreed figure, so they get no line.
Von der Leyen's €17 billion is honest and small. It tells MEPs what the Commission can do without asking the Council for anything painful. The Single Market figures in EPIC's report are an order of magnitude larger and belong to the member states, who were not asked on Wednesday to do anything about them. Until someone produces the completion number, the Cecchini sequel, the State of the Union will keep reporting the cost of forms while the cost of borders goes unmeasured, and Rome and Madrid will keep extending their checks.
