Market surveillance ensures that products on the EU market do not endanger health and safety of European consumers and workers. It also ensures the protection of other public interests such as the environment, security and fairness in trade.
It includes actions such as product withdrawals, recalls and the application of sanctions to stop the circulation of non-compliant or unsafe products and/or bring them into compliance.
The major objective of the Commission is to ensure that EU market surveillance legislation provides:
- clear and uniform rules applying to non-food products and economic operators
- requirements (infrastructure, organisation, legal powers, etc.) to ensure that market surveillance can cope with enforcing EU legislation
- streamlined market surveillance procedures for controlling products within the EU and at its borders (import controls)
- tools to coordinate activities carried out by national surveillance bodies across the EU (e.g. discussion forums, IT databases, and common market surveillance campaigns).
Investigations per Member State
This chart shows the number of investigations per Member State in 2024 (left axis) and the percentage change since 2019 (right axis).
Note: As the obligatory data collection started only a few years ago, it is likely that there was underreporting in some countries in the early years, partly explaining the strong growth rates comparing 2024 to 2019.
Source: Information and Communication System for Market Surveillance, ICSMS (2024)
Investigations per million inhabitants
This chart shows the number of investigations per million inhabitants. The EU median value is displayed for comparison.
Source: ICSMS (2024)
Cases of non-compliance per Member State
This chart shows the number of cases of non-compliance found per Member State in 2024 (left axis) and the percentage change since 2019 (right axis).
The significant number of detected cases of non-compliance (as a percentage of the total number of checks) shows that national authorities’ use of the ICSMS data and closer cooperation has allowed them to better focus their controls on cases where the risk of non-compliance is higher.
Source: ICSMS (2024)
Cases of non-compliance per million inhabitants
This chart shows the number of cases of non-compliance found per million inhabitants.
Source: ICSMS (2024)
Sectors with the highest number of investigations and cases of non-compliance
The left axis of the chart shows the sectors with the highest number of inspections and cases of non-compliance in 2024. The right axis shows the growth rates in the number of inspections since 2019.
Source: ICSMS (2024)