ICMA publishes its semi-annual report that provides detailed data on EU and UK sovereign bond market trading activity
27 August 2025 ICMA’s Secondary Market Practices Committee (SMPC) has published its semi-annual report that provides detailed data on EU and UK sovereign bond market trading activity.
Starting from H1 2025, following member feedback, ICMA has chosen to include bonds issued by the EU in its European Sovereign Bond Data report. This is intended to reflect the growing scale of issuance and turnover in EU bonds and a wider market shift toward the classification of the EU as a sovereign borrower.
The report will be published in two separate editions:
- A sovereign edition (this report)
- A corporate edition (to follow)
One of the core objectives of MiFID II/MiFIR was to provide greater public transparency of secondary trading activity in the EU and UK markets. As solutions have evolved to consolidate the disperse sources of public data, ICMA has sought to leverage the capabilities of such initiatives to provide a detailed and holistic view of bond market activity in the EU and UK.
It is estimated that the report captures more than 80% of all secondary bond market transactions reported in the EU and UK and is therefore relatively representative of the aggregated bond market data as reported under the MiFID II/MiFIR obligation.
This report, which follows the report published for H2 2024, provides 42 months of bond market data, covering the period January 2022 through to June 2025. ICMA believes that this latest data set provides a more accurate representation than the previous report.
ICMA commits to updating this report on a semi-annual basis in order to be able to track long-term trends in secondary bond market structure and activity.
ICMA also expects that in time both the depth and quality of the underlying data will improve, particularly as reports such as this seek to present a definitive picture of the European bond markets.
