INTRODUCTION

Regulation (EU) 2018/1724 establishing a single digital gateway (SDG) aims at facilitating online access to the information, administrative procedures and assistance services that citizens and businesses need to move within the Union and to trade, establish themselves and expand their businesses in another Member State.

Article 31(1) of the Regulation foresees the adoption of an annual work programme that shall specify actions to facilitate the implementation of the Regulation (1).

The single digital gateway, known and promoted under its brand name ‘Your Europe’ is a major contribution to the digital transition (in line with the objectives of the EU Digital Decade), a critical tool for the Single Market and a priority of the Commission as it contributes to the competitiveness of the EU and its businesses, especially SMEs (2).

The initiative decisively supports three key objectives: (i) reduce administrative burden on citizens and businesses that exercise or want to exercise their internal market rights; (ii) eliminate discrimination and (iii) ensure the effective functioning of the internal market by improving the provision of information, procedures, and problem-solving services.

This fourth work programme sets out the timing of further actions aimed at fully implementing the SDG. Actions will focus on:

—	Continued provision of up-to-date, user friendly and non-duplicative information,

—	Bringing all procedures within its scope online following the expiry of legal deadline of December 2023 and monitoring that progress,

—	Fully rolling out the Once-Only Technical System (OOTS), building on the technical infrastructure launched in December 2023.

On 24 September 2024, this work programme was discussed within the gateway coordination group, in line with Article 31(2) of the Regulation. The implementation of the work programme will be monitored and reviewed annually both via the gateway coordination group online collaboration platform and during its meetings.

National coordinators are invited to produce a national work programme to assess the progress made and outline further actions needed to address the remaining gaps. They are invited to review their national work programme once a year and to share it with the Commission and the coordination group.

For the purposes of this Commission notice, the following definitions apply:

—	‘competent authority’ means any Member State authority or body established at national, regional or local level with specific responsibilities relating to the information, procedures, the Once-Only Technical System and assistance services covered by the Regulation;

—	‘national coordinators’ are the representatives appointed by Member States as foreseen by Article 28 of the Regulation.

1.   INFORMATION AND SERVICE QUALITY

Objective 1.1: Ensuring completeness and quality of information

Reference

Articles 4 and 5 of the Regulation on access to information, Article 9 on quality of information on rights, obligations and rules, Article 10 on quality of information on procedures and Article 12 on translation

Background

The SDG must provide citizens and businesses with information that is comprehensive enough to allow them to fully exercise their rights derived from Union and national law in compliance with applicable rules and obligations.

Annex I of the Regulation provides a list of areas in which the Commission and Member States have to ensure that all information relevant for citizens and businesses is provided online: EU-wide rights and obligations are explained on Your Europe itself; information on national implementation and rules is provided by Member State authorities on national websites and, after notification by the Member States, accessible from Your Europe via (i) links on Your Europe content pages and (ii) the Your Europe search facility.

The Commission also offers translation services to Member States to fulfil their obligations under Article 12 of the Regulation.

How and when?

	When	What	Who
1.1.1.	Continuously	Check completeness, translation and quality and address problems of: — Information covered by Annex I and Annex II, — Information provided at municipal level, — Notification of webpages to the Commission.	Commission National coordinators Competent authorities
1.1.2.	Q2 of every year	Review of Commission guidance on implementation of Annex I.	Commission National coordinators
1.1.3.	Continuously	Improvement of the Your Europe portal to be more user friendly.	Commission National coordinators
1.1.4.	Q1 2025–Q4 2026	Investigate the aggregation and publication of information on product requirements and taxation (including necessary IT developments).	Commission National coordinators
1.1.5.	Continuously	Translation of the information to fulfil the obligations under Article 12 of the Regulation.	Commission National coordinators
1.1.6.	Continuously	Dashboard on usage of Your Europe (users, Member States, accessed information and procedures).	Commission
1.1.7.	Continuously	Build bridges between the SDGR and new legislative initiatives by including the information governed by new proposals in the scope of Annex I (for example, information on citizens’ rights under the European Health Data Space and information on freight transport rules).	Commission
1.1.8.	Q4 2025	Enhance the SDG search user interface results: Assess prioritization of the links when displayed within the SDG search user interface results page based on custom ordering preferences provided by national authority users in the back-office, as well as visitor feedback (thumbs up/down) collected through the interface.	Commission

Objective 1.2: Avoiding duplication

Reference

Recitals 17 and 55, Articles 19.6 and 30 of the Regulation

Background

The Regulation calls on Member States and the Commission to provide single sources for each information item required for the SDG, and to avoid partial or full duplication whenever possible. This is to avoid confusion among users confronted with different portals containing similar – but not completely identical – information on the same topic. Aiming for single information sources also makes updates easier and reduces the risk of presenting contradictory information.

Only information exclusively targeting citizens and businesses and explaining their applicable rights and obligations is eligible for the SDG. It should not be mixed with other content, such as information on policy in the making, which is aimed at audiences such as experts, journalists and civil servants.

The Commission is applying this principle to its own web presence and is working to integrate and host all EU-level information informing citizens and businesses about their Single Market rights and obligations on Your Europe. This is a continuous long-term, complex exercise. Exceptions will be cases where separate EU law mandates the creation of a particular website. But even in those cases, where possible, the preferred option is integration in the SDG/Your Europe. Content describing policies and processes, on the other hand, is to be hosted on the Commission’s corporate website and the individual websites of the responsible Directorates-General.

How and when?

	When	What	Who
1.2.1.	Continuously	Improve information at EU-level: — Integrate more of the practical EU-level information for citizens and SMEs in Your Europe, — Implement an integrated approach between Your Europe and other EU portals to ensure smooth navigation and to avoid duplication through cooperation between Commission services, — Make a clear separation between information on applicable rules, presented on Your Europe, and information on policy, covered on the Commission’s corporate website and DG websites.	Commission
1.2.2.	Continuously	Work to reduce and avoid duplication: — Update measures to reduce and avoid duplication, including identifying synergies with interoperability assessments made in line with the Interoperable Europe Act, — Monitor the integrated approach at national level to avoid duplication of information between various national portals, — Monitor duplications across Commission and Member State websites and investigate possible solutions for a better distribution of content, — Exchange good practices.	Commission National coordinators Competent authorities

2.   IT DEVELOPMENT, DIGITALISATION OF PROCEDURES, DATA COLLECTION

Objective 2.1: Procedures to be offered fully online and connect to the Once-Only Technical System

Reference

Article 6 and 13 of the Regulation on procedures to be offered fully online and accessibility for cross-border users.

Background

The SDG must offer users easy access to national administrative procedures. For this purpose, the Regulation requires all Member States to ensure that users can access and complete any of the procedures listed in Annex II fully online (Art. 6). This means that the user should be able to take all steps electronically regardless of whether users experience any sort of difficulty or disability, and through an online service. The Regulation also provides a non-exhaustive list of specific criteria that need to be met.

The Commission explores systematically opportunities to expand the scope of Annex II to additional procedures resulting from new adopted EU legislation. The Commission updates annually an explanatory note issued in 2020 focusing on the scope of Annex II procedures and aiming to address issues which occur during the work on the digitalisation of the relevant procedures.

The Commission has created a common repository on the Internal Market Information (IMI) system for Member States to notify to the Commission and the other Member States, the grounds on which, and the circumstances in which, procedures that require physical presence.

A related obligation is that procedures that are already online must also be fully accessible for cross-border users (Art. 13). That means that if a procedure is available for a national of a specific Member State, it must also be accessible, in all its steps, to users from other Member States and to users from the same Member State living in another Member State. The scope for this is broader and covers all procedures related to topics in Annex I.

Member States may use alternative technical solutions for cross-border users where necessary, but in those situations, extra care should be taken to ensure that the procedure leads to the same outcome and is not more burdensome than the procedure offered to users present in their Member States of origin.

Special attention should be paid to obstacles for cross-border users, such as form fields that require national phone numbers, national prefixes for phone numbers or national postal codes, payment of fees that can only be done through systems that are not (widely) available for cross-border users, the lack of detailed explanations in a language understood by cross-border users, the lack of options for submitting electronic evidence from authorities located in another Member State and the lack of acceptance of electronic means of identification issued in other Member States.

Finally, for any procedure that requires the exchange of evidence across borders it must be mapped and enabled in the OOTS common services and relevant competent authorities must be connected to the system (see also objective 2.3) (3).

In certain areas (e.g., Services Directive, Professional Qualifications Directive, Public Procurement Directives), non-discriminatory access to procedures for cross-border users is already a legal requirement, in addition to the principle of non-discrimination enshrined in the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.

The deadline for offering procedures fully online expired in December 2023. The focus of this work programme will be to fill the remaining gaps and to refine the monitoring tools measuring the degree of compliance, in particular through an implementation scoreboard. In order to better ensure successful progress on implementation, priority areas should be set in accordance with the new Commission’s political mandate.

EU programmes will help Member States achieve this goal, for instance the Digital Europe Programme, Cohesion policy programmes 2021-2027, and the Technical Support Instrument (4) (TSI) Programme. Competent authorities are invited to contact their national coordinators responsible for the financial programmes in their Member State.

Aiming to provide an insight on the implementation of the Regulation in all EU Member States, the Commission has improved the alignment of the eGovernment Benchmark methodology with the Regulation by adding pertinent measurable indicators.

How and when?

	When	What	Who
2.1.1.	Q4 2025	Fill remaining gaps in offering fully online the procedures in scope of Annex II.	Competent Authorities National coordinators
2.1.2.	Continuously	Address remaining barriers to ensure that, where a procedure in scope of Annex I can be accessed and completed online by non-cross-border users, it can also be accessed and completed online by cross-border users in a non-discriminatory way.	Competent authorities National coordinators
2.1.3.	Q2 of every year	Review of explanatory paper on implementation of Annex II and all its Amendments.	Commission National coordinators
2.1.4.	Continuously	Report progress in offering procedures fully online, in particular by notifying corresponding webpages in the repository for links and encouraging the use of public service catalogues.	National coordinators
2.1.5.	Q1 of every year	Track progress through monitoring tools such as the eGovernment benchmark.	Commission
2.1.6.	Continuously	Activities to increase awareness of existing funding programmes available for SDG implementation.	Commission
2.1.7.	Continuously	Notify all relevant procedures that require physical presence or physical delivery to the Commission (Art. 6(4)) through the common repository implemented in the Internal Market Information system (IMI).	National coordinators Competent authorities
2.1.8.	Continuously	Build bridges between the SDGR and new legislative initiatives by bringing the administrative procedures governed by new proposals within the scope of Annex II.	Commission

Objective 2.2: Contributing to the development of the EU level IT tools and ensuring interoperability between EC and national IT tools

Reference

Article 21 of the Regulation on responsibilities for the ICT applications supporting the gateway

Background

As set out by the Regulation, the functioning of the SDG is made possible by technical tools that include: a search facility and a common ‘assistance finder’ guiding end-users towards information, procedures and assistance services; a user feedback tool on quality of services; a tool for collecting feedback on obstacles in the Single Market and for tracking resulting barriers; a tool to collect statistics of use; and a dashboard as the interface for public authorities and the Commission.

Guidelines and technical documentation on these tools and support is provided by the Commission, among others through the SDG Library web page.

How and when?

	When	What	Who
2.2.1.	Q4 2025	Extend the functionality of existing crawlers to check compliance of SDG webpages with requirements such as presence of Your Europe logo, feedback tool, contact data of competent authorities, indication of last update, etc.	Commission
2.2.2.	Q4 2025	Create an additional monitoring section in the SDG dashboard to visualise and analyse results from the crawler data and take appropriate corrective actions.	Commission National coordinators
2.2.3.	Continuously	Maintain and further develop and improve: — the SDG common IT tools with a focus on task automation and developing the remaining legal requirements including the update and further development of the Single Market Barriers Tracker, — the links repository, including the new module on procedures, in order to allow Member States to notify the necessary data and, whenever possible, to automate the process, — the search facility to facilitate business and citizens access to EU and national information, including the possibility to prioritise links based on an attribute and/or user feedback, — the Your Europe content management system to ensure it will be able to realise the SDG project’s potential.	Commission
2.2.4.	Continuously	Monitor: 1. The collection of feedback and statistics of all services; 2. The addition, on national pages that are part of the gateway, of links to: — The common user feedback tool on pages which do not have a national feedback tool. — The assistance service finder, — The Single Market Barriers Tracker (formerly ‘Single Market Obstacles Tool’).	Commission National coordinators
2.2.5.	Q4 2026	Assess the full automation of the JavaScript crawler feature: Conduct an analysis to explore the feasibility of fully automating the JavaScript crawler feature, ensuring that the dataset is updated regularly.	Commission

Objective 2.3: Once-Only Technical System

Reference

Article 14 of the Regulation

Background

As mandated by Article 14 of the SDG Regulation, the Commission in cooperation with the Member States, established the Once-Only Technical System (OOTS) enabling the cross-border automated exchange of evidence between Member States’ competent authorities responsible for the procedures in scope of Annex II of the regulation and its Article 1. In line with the legal deadline, the ‘OOTS Common Services’, i.e. the core infrastructure of the OOTS, developed and maintained by the Commission, successfully went live on the 12th of December 2023.

Throughout 2023, and continuing in 2024, the Commission provided a series of services supporting Member States’ implementation work, notably large-scale testing events called ‘Projectathons’ and ‘Accelerators’. They contributed to the continued technical progress of many Member States, who moved steadily from their development phase towards production readiness for 12 Member States and, for 3 of these, first end-user transactions in a selected procedure.

Challenges remain in the onboarding of the competent authorities acting as either providers or requesters of evidence via their procedure portals. As such, this is a critical step for the actual completion and use of the OOTS, in making Member States’ services fully accessible to citizens and businesses. To support this effort, the Commission’s Once-Only team is building technical bridges with existing systems in specific data domains (e.g. EMREX for education, EUCARIS for vehicle registration). This will allow competent authorities already connected to these specific systems to be onboarded ‘in batch’.

Other synergies are being explored, specifically between the eIDAS2/EUDI Wallet and the OOTS, to optimise investments made by Member States and the Commission in these two initiatives.

How and when?

	When	What	Who
2.3.1.	Continuously	Maintain and evolve OOTS Common Services in Production: — Continue operating the common services in production and finalise the deployment of a fully multi-cloud infrastructure underpinned by multiple cloud providers concurrently to ensure reliability, availability, scalability, and resilience, — Finalise the rollout of the Business Continuity Plan (BCP) of the common services and of a Disaster and Recovery Plan (DRP), — Finalise and adopt a range of IT governance procedures needed for stable and robust operations, — Continue improving the Security of the Common Services at all levels, — Continue providing the service desk of the Common Services.	Commission
2.3.2.	Continuously	Provide Testing and Onboarding Services: — Continue offering the OOTS end-to-end testing services online, in all possible environments and in line with the necessary legal frameworks and continue the organisation of large testing events like the Projectathons, — Continue providing support to the onboarding of competent authorities, eGovernment portals and authentic data sources of Member States, — Continue going local to support Member States in their efforts to onboard competent authorities by organizing national Once-Only events.	Commission
2.3.3.	Continuously	Ensure availability of OOTS Services across the EU: — Continue the evidence mapping of authentic sources for every procedure in scope of Article 1, — Continue developing a domain-specific and commonly agreed/understood language to ensure the precise formulation of procedural requirements and their mapping to evidence types across the EU, — Encourage and monitor the go-live of OOTS powered services which are available online to cross-border citizens and businesses.	Commission National coordinators Competent authorities
2.3.4.	Continuously	Collaborate with eIDAS1 and the European Digital Identity Framework (known as eIDAS2), including the EUDI wallet to exploit as far as possible the synergies identified in the context of the ‘contact group on OOTS and EUDI wallet synergies and interoperability’: — Continue supporting the EUDI wallet to reuse the common services of the OOTS, — Rollout testing services and piloting of synergies between the EUDI wallet and the common services of the OOTS, — Continue to work towards a solution for all representation use cases, including natural person representing legal person.	Commission National coordinators
2.3.5.	Continuously	Develop new functionalities: — Implement dynamic discovery features in the OOTS dataspace, provided by the Service Metadata Published (SMP) solution, — Develop and implement a New Technical Dashboard to govern the OOTS operations, — Implement bridges with sectorial systems in the education, business, and vehicles domain, — Explore the possible implementation of automated translation of evidence.	Commission
2.3.6.	Continuously	Communication Activities: — Continue the Europe Goes Live initiative started in Finland in 2024, — Continue to have the Once-Only Hub online and its newsletter, — Continue the organisation and participation in events that promote OOTS.	Commission
2.3.7.	Continuously	Continue to position the OOTS as one of the most advanced dataspaces and its building blocks at European and national level as reusable elements for other dataspaces and relevant initiatives.	Commission
2.3.8.	Q2 2026	Make OOTS services available to citizens and businesses for all procedures in scope.	National coordinators Competent authorities
2.3.9.	Q1–Q4 2026	Complete Onboarding and ensure all national competent authorities within scope of OOTS are connected as evidence provider and/or requester.	National coordinators Competent authorities

Objective 2.4: Reporting on the functioning of the gateway and the single market

Reference

Articles 26, 27 and 36 of the Regulation

Background

The Single Market Barriers Tracker (formerly ‘Single Market obstacles tool’) is a user-friendly online environment foreseen by the Regulation to signal and give feedback anonymously on obstacles encountered by citizens and businesses in exercising their internal market rights. The Regulation also foresees that Member States and the Commission analyse and investigate the problems raised by users through the Barriers Tracker and address them, wherever possible, by appropriate means. Therefore, the tool has been relabelled Single Market Barriers Tracker.

The Regulation also lays down that the Commission publishes online summary of the problems which have emerged from reports provided by users of the gateway through the Single Market Barriers Tracker as well as highlighted by collected user feedback and statistics.

In addition, the regulation foresees every two years reports on its implementation including an assessment of the internal market based on the collected statistics, user feedback and reports on the Single Market obstacles.

Several tools mentioned in the regulation which will help the Commission collect relevant information related to the digitalisation of public services in the EU. The summary overviews of problems and the bi-annual reports will support the Commission in taking informed decisions in the field of the internal market, together with other tools (i.e. statistical report based on selected indicators published on an upgraded Single Market Scoreboard; the Annual Performance Report on the Single Market). They will also help Member States identify and address in the appropriate way the problems reported.

How and when?

	When	What	Who
2.4.1.	Q1–Q4 2025	Exploration of integration of analytical reporting of the Single Market Barriers Tracker in SDG management tool.	Commission
2.4.2.	Q1–Q4 2026	Consideration of integration of citizen association for reporting of single market obstacles, similarly to business associations in 2023/2024.	Commission

3.   ASSISTANCE SERVICES

Objective 3.1: Ensuring assistance services that are findable and continuously improve quality

Reference

Articles 7, 11 and 16 of the Regulation

Background

The SDG offers users easy access to a broad range of assistance services, informs them about what they can expect from the services and guides them towards the most appropriate one.

In addition to the assistance services listed in Annex III, others have voluntarily joined the SDG since its launch: the European Consumer Centres, the Intellectual Property Help Desk, Your Europe Advice, SOLVIT and the Europe Direct Contact Centre.

Where necessary to meet the needs of the users, national coordinators may also propose to the Commission to opt-in private or semi-private assistance services if they fulfil the quality requirements of the gateway. The German Office for the Equal Treatment of EU Workers has opted in in line with this rationale.

The focus of this work programme will be on making the quality improvement loop function fully and on improving findability.

How and when?

	When	What	Who
3.1.1.	Continuously	Monitor and enforce the compliance of service providers regarding provision of landing pages, feedback loops, and provision of statistics about cases.	Commission National coordinators Competent authorities
3.1.2.	Continuously	Encourage service providers and organise exchanges of good practices to make full use of feedback and case statistics for continuous service improvement.	Commission National coordinators Competent authorities
3.1.3.	Continuously	Work towards bringing additional assistance and problem-solving services within the scope of Annex I.	Commission National coordinators
3.1.4.	Q4 2025	Improve findability of assistance services by developing a combined search function for information, procedures, and assistance.	Commission

4.   PROMOTION

Objective 4.1: Promoting the gateway

Reference

Articles 22 and 23 of the Regulation on promotion, name, logo and quality label

Background

The launch of the SDG, on 12 December 2020, marked the start of the use of the Your Europe logo on all EU and national SDG pages.

Several communication activities have been planned, launched, monitored and re-adjusted from the SDG launch in order to raise awareness on SDG’s practical benefits for its target audience (citizens and businesses, especially SMEs, living, working and doing business cross-border in the EU).

A mix of channels has been used according to the target audience and the specific campaigns’ objectives, including social media (aiming at awareness and engagement), online advertising (with the main goal of increasing website findability), events throughout Europe and mentions in EU press materials (e.g. the SME Relief package).

The campaigns along with SEO activities managed to bring 34 million visits to the website in 2024, making it the most visited European Commission website.

The main objectives of the promotion activities for the 2025-2026 period are the following:

—	To further improve public awareness about EU rights and obligations in the EU’s single market;

—	To inform Europeans about EU and national rights and rules within the single market and to get them actively involved in claiming those rights and reporting any problems they encounter;

—	To promote Your Europe as a brand among citizens and businesses, especially SMEs and potential entrepreneurs (across EU) that allows them to obtain high-quality and updated information and assistance;

—	To increase findability of Your Europe and national information;

—	To encourage users to send feedback on public services;

—	To demonstrate how Your Europe is an added value for businesses and citizens;

—	To keep interacting and collaborating with partners (e.g. national authorities), SDG assistances services and other European institutions in order to amplify Your Europe’s branding and develop strategies together;

—	To start planning the Your Europe-branded communications of the procedures listed in Annex II, as soon as end user transactions using the Once-Only Technical System gather momentum.

How and when?

	When	What	Who
4.1.1.	Continuously	Run promotion activities for the Your Europe portal, assistance services, Single Market Barriers Tracker, digitalised procedures and OOTS for citizens, SMEs and administrations and evaluate the success of the promotion activities. Involve MS and Competent authorities in the communications amplifying as co-coordinators of campaigns and as initiators of national campaigns and events. Coordination with other institutions to co-campaign on topics hosted on Your Europe.	Commission National coordinators Competent authorities
4.1.2.	Q4 2025 Q4 2026	Yearly review the communication plan and implement the revised communication plan.	Commission National coordinators Competent authorities
4.1.3.	Continuously	Monitor the performance of the search engine of Your Europe notably through search engine optimisation and search engine advertising and continue providing the best possible outcome of the national websites via the search of Your Europe to the wider public.	Commission National coordinators Competent authorities
4.1.4.	Continuously	Promote the OOTS in the context of EU Data Strategy and provide information brochures or factsheet for competent authorities, whereby the connections between OOTS, IMI; EUCARIS etc. can be explained.	Commission National coordinators Competent authorities

5.   HORIZONTAL

How and when?

	When	What	Who
5.1.	Q4 2026	Adopt a Work Programme for 2027-2028.	Commission
5.2.	Q3 2025	Publish an implementation report according to Article 36 of the SDG Regulation.	Commission
5.3.	Q1–Q4 2025	Explore and discuss possible evolutions of the SDG to further contribute to reducing administrative burdens for citizens, businesses and authorities including those stemming from fragmented or untransparent permitting procedures.	Commission National coordinators

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(1)  Previous work programmes have covered the periods 2019/2020 (OJ C 257), 2021/2022 (OJ C 71) and 2023/2024 (OJ C 172) respectively. 030’ (C(2023) 168 final, 16 March 2023).

(2)  The Technical Support Instrument is providing tailor-made technical expertise to Member States to design, develop and implement reforms, including on the

(3)  Without prejudice to Recitals 23 and 50 of the Regulation.

(4)  The Technical Support Instrument is providing tailor-made technical expertise to Member States to design, develop and implement reforms, including on the digital transition agenda of national governments.