Consulting and study contracts of the Ville de Paris in 2024: profile of contract holders

The national debate on consulting firms in the public sphere has been dominated, since the 2022 French Senate report, by a few iconic names: McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Roland Berger, plus the audit Big Four (EY, KPMG, Deloitte, Mazars). At the scale of a large city such as Paris, the actual composition of the consulting-and-study portfolio can be read directly from public data. That is the subject of this article.

This investigation describes, based on public contracts notified by the City that year, who actually receives Parisian public money under the "consulting and studies" label, for how much, and on what topics. It does not cover delegated public service contracts, contracts of CASVP or social-housing operators, or contracts of attached public operators. It covers only City contracts in the strict sense, within a perimeter identified as "consulting, project-management assistance, audit, study, expertise".

Method: a filter by subject and CPV family

The 151 public contracts retained correspond to the intersection of two filters:

• either the contract's subject contains a consulting keyword ("conseil", "étude", "audit", "AMO", "assistance", "expertise", "évaluation", "schéma directeur")
• or the CPV family (European public-procurement classification) is "Business services"

The perimeter therefore covers strictly advisory contracts (strategic consulting, one-off audits) and AMO contracts — assistance à maîtrise d'ouvrage, project-management assistance — which form a dominant share of real municipal consulting. It does not include: pure works contracts, supplies, delegated public service contracts, operating contracts.

Cumulative total on this perimeter: €87.6 million (maximum notified amounts). That is around 0.9% of the City's operating budget in 2024 (~€9.4Bn) — an order of magnitude in line with large French municipalities.

The named top 10 of firms in 2024

Filtering for contracts with an identified contractor (excluding "multi-awardee contracts", excluding nameless suppliers — these caveats are discussed below), the 2024 ranking is:

Top 10 cumulative: ~€35M, or 40% of the total envelope. No US strategy consulting firm appears in this ranking.

The Big Four under the microscope

To answer the implicit question of public debate directly — "how much does the City pay the Big Four and the major strategy firms?" — here is the answer, contract by contract, for 2024:

Total Big Four + strategy firms: less than €6M out of €87.6M of City consulting-studies contracts that year. That is less than 7% of the total. And the bulk of that figure is carried by a single BearingPoint contract on the redesign of the financial information system — a specific case where the in-house competence does not exist and outsourcing is technically defensible.

McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Roland Berger: not identified in City contracts in the strict sense in 2024. This composition contrasts with the common image of the public-sector consulting ecosystem, which is more accurately located at the scale of central administrations (see below).

CPV families: a dominant weight on IT and AMO

Breakdown by CPV family of the 151 consulting-studies contracts:

Reading: 5 IT contracts capture 39% of the total amount, because they are large-scale AMOAs (IS overhauls, multi-year programmes). The 65 "Business services" contracts are numerous but individually modest (median probably < €100k).

Why the composition differs from the national scale

Three complementary explanations help understand the gap between the national image and the Parisian reality:

1. The City has a large, structured administration

Paris employs around 50,000 municipal and départemental staff (a figure regularly cited in City activity reports and social reports). That size makes it possible to internalise most strategic functions that central administrations — often smaller in specialised headcount — are forced to outsource.

2. Parisian needs are operational, not strategic

City orders for consulting and studies are massively oriented towards technical AMO (district heating, Finance IS, hydraulics, signage, audio-video) — areas where generalist Big Four firms have historically had no specific competitive advantage. The active players (MC2I, AEC, Manergy, Sémaphores) are French firms specialised in their niche, often small or mid-sized, sometimes based in Paris for decades.

3. City contracts are frequently lotted and technical

Many contracts are structured as narrow technical lots ("legal-financial AMO district heating, lot 1") that discourage generalist strategy firms. The latter typically position themselves on broader, more visible missions — which are more commonly found in central administrations (ministries, national operators).

Important methodological caveats

The analysis presented covers contracts where the contractor is identifiable by name. Two pockets of data raise issues for a fully exhaustive reading:

Multi-awardee contracts (€24M in 2024)

2 contracts out of 151 are notified under the label "MULTI-AWARDEE CONTRACT" for a cumulative amount of €24M (27% of the total). These are framework agreements with several contractors selected simultaneously, whose actual list does not appear in the Open Data Paris export. To reconstruct the real contractors, one would have to cross-reference individual purchase orders — which are not, to our knowledge, systematically published.

Contracts with no supplier name (57 contracts, €18.6M)

57 contracts out of 151 (38% by count, 21% by amount) have an empty or missing "supplier_name" field in the export. This may reflect a technical defect (missing data at export time, unhandled exception) or a completeness issue on the portal. Either way, those €18.6M cannot be attributed to identified firms.

In total, around 48% of the cumulative amount of 2024 consulting-studies contracts is attributable to identified firms. The remaining 52% is partly "invisible" in the sense that it cannot be attributed by name to a specific actor. This partial opacity probably does not change the overall picture (nothing suggests the Big Four would be massively hidden behind multi-awardee contracts), but it limits the precision of the table.

Comparison with central administrations

For framing: according to the March 2022 French Senate report on consulting firms, certain central administrations (ministries, national agencies) display "consulting-studies / operating budget" ratios that can reach 2 to 3%. Paris at ~0.9% is well below that.

The national debate on the weight of consulting firms in public decision-making is therefore not playing out at the scale of large French cities. It is playing out at the scale of central administrations, where:

• Outsourced missions are more strategic (structural reforms, multi-year plans)
• Strategy firms (McKinsey, Roland Berger…) have historically had their core target market
• Financial ratios are higher

At the municipal scale, and in Paris in particular, the players and the topics are different.

What these figures do not say

This analysis stops at what the 2024 public contracts published by the City make it possible to measure. It does not say:

• Who pays what at the level of attached operators — the contracts of the public social-housing operators (Paris Habitat, RIVP, Elogie-Siemp), CASVP, Paris Musées are not in this perimeter. Some of the consulting consumed by the "extended City sphere" sits there, in volumes likely greater than those of City contracts in the strict sense.
• Evolution over time — at this date, the open-public-data pipeline has not enriched CPV codes for contracts before 2024, which prevents a robust multi-year trajectory analysis on this perimeter. That is upcoming work.
• The quality of the consulting delivered — a firm can be very well rated (solid deliverables, useful recommendations) for a modest amount, or disappointing for a high amount. Notification resolutions only capture the how much, not the how well.

What it does say, in one sentence: the profile of firms receiving Parisian public money in 2024 — French firms specialised in technical AMO at the top, international IT-services providers next — differs from the composition emphasised in the national debate on McKinsey and the Big Four. This difference does not settle the question of whether the City "outsources well" or "outsources poorly" — that is a separate evaluation question. It indicates that the nature of the contracted providers is primarily technical and operational, rather than generalist strategy consulting.

Sources: open-public-data pipeline, file marches-publics/marches_2024.json (Open Data Paris "Notified contracts" export + partial DECP data.gouv.fr enrichment) · Filter: subject containing one of the keywords conseil, étude, audit, AMO, assistance, expertise, évaluation, schéma directeur OR CPV family = "Business services" · Big Four / strategy-firm search by strict substring on the contractor's name. The analyses are strictly limited to 2024; CPV enrichment of earlier fiscal years remains to be completed in the pipeline to enable historical comparison. Perimeter: Ville de Paris in the strict sense, excluding attached EPLs and SPLs.