Fabian Bohnenberger

How many laws does it take to run the European Union? According to Mario Draghi’s recent report, the EU passed around 13,000 legal acts between 2019 and 2024. But this figure, as impressive as it sounds, significantly underestimates the true scale of EU law-making.

What’s the real number? And perhaps more importantly, why is it so hard to pin down?

In this post, I’ll explore some of the hidden layers of law-making and explain why even Draghi’s eye-catching estimate falls short.

What does Draghi say?

According to the Draghi report, the EU passed 515 ordinary legislative acts, 2,431 other legislative acts, 954 delegated acts, 5,713 implementing acts and 3,442 other acts over the last six years (p. 318).

While these numbers are largely accurate, they come with a significant caveat: Draghi relies on EUR-Lex statistics, which only account for legal acts that are published.

It’s easy to assume that all EU laws are published in the Official Journal. However, this is not the case – which creates a blind spot when counting EU law.

Why does Draghi’s count fall short?

The main reason lies in the number of implementing acts, specifically so-called implementing decisions, taken by the Commission (and, to a lesser extent, the Council).

Recall that Draghi counts a total of 5,713 implementing acts over six years. But what if I told you that the Commission adopts around 4,000 implementing acts per year? This means the true number of Commission implementing acts from 2019 to 2024 is closer to 24,000 – and we would even need to add a few Council implementing acts to this.

Only a fraction of these implementing acts enter into force through publication – by appearing in the Official Journal. The majority take effect through notification to specific addresses (companies, Member States, others). There are also Commission-internal implementing decisions, such as on budgets. Neither are reflected in the EUR-Lex statistics that Draghi relies on.

My figure below illustrates the scale of these overlooked implementing acts and decisions using approximate numbers for 2023.

Different data sources and numbers

Admittedly, counting EU legal acts is difficult. Worse, the numbers vary depending on the EU data source you consult. The figure above illustrates these discrepancies.

• The Commission Register of documents is the most comprehensive source, capturing all Commission implementing acts and other decisions (although sometimes it only provides the metadata, not the act itself).
• The Register of delegated and implementing acts works for implementing regulations and implementing directives. However, it largely misses implementing decisions because acts that are notified to specific actors are generally not made public. Consequently, this database holds information on only 89 out of around 3,300 implementing decisions adopted in 2023.
• Have Your Say, the Commission’s public consultations platform, is even less helpful. It covers just 79 out of roughly 4,000 Commission implementing acts annually. My advice: Do not rely on public feedback for implementing acts!
• In 2023, 1916 Commission implementing acts passed through an array of committees that allow Member State experts to weigh in – this is known as “comitology”. These acts – and only these acts (plus a few RPS measures) – are counted in the annual reports on the working of committees.

Finally, Draghi’s estimate is incomplete because legal acts enter into force in different ways. While implementing regulations and directives are generally published in the Official Journal, implementing decisions rarely are. Instead, they enter into force through notification or take the form of internal decisions.

Only a small fraction of implementing decisions (229 acts in 2023) were published – and even then, often for information purposes only. The latter are included in Draghi’s count, but they represent only the visible tip of a much larger iceberg.

Commission decisions

To complicate things further, the Commission also takes approximately 3000 “decisions” per year – these are not “implementing decisions”. Most of these decisions do not appear in the Official Journal, so are again not captured by Draghi.

For example, the Commission issues decisions to ensure that state aid complies with EU rules (as per Articles 107 and 108 TFEU) and oversees mergers between large companies (pursuant to Council Regulation (EC) 139/2004). These two areas – in which the Commission acts more as a regulator than as a law-maker – constitute a significant share of these decisions.

Beyond the Numbers

Draghi’s estimate reveals just how challenging it is to keep track of the EU’s regulatory activities. Even with an expert understanding of the processes, the sheer volume of legal acts – and the fragmented, overlapping data sources – make it an uphill task.

Finally, these numbers need to be kept in perspective. EU legal acts serve vastly different purposes and vary enormously in length and complexity, making any comparison of sums inherently uneven – like comparing apples to oranges. Whether the total number of legal acts is closer to 13,000 or 30,000 or even higher ultimately does not tell us much about regulatory complexity. What matters is how EU law is used – for example: does one EU law replace 27 national laws? – and, even more importantly, how EU law is made.

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Special thanks to the practitioners who generously contributed their expertise to this post.