Article 45 TFEU Explained: Free Movement of Workers

Article 45 is where one of the four fundamental freedoms — the free movement of workers — lives in the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. It is short, concrete and full of enumerable rights and exceptions, which is precisely why it keeps appearing in the EPSO EU Knowledge test: it lets question-writers build clean distractors out of real treaty language.

The series also covers Article 107 (State aid), Article 191 (environment), Article 207 (common commercial policy), Articles 15 and 16 TEU and Article 47 of the Charter.

This explainer covers what the article actually says (grounded in the consolidated text, OJ C 202), what each paragraph does, and the three traps EPSO builds from it. It is part of our TFEU series for EU Knowledge candidates — see also Article 258 (infringement), Article 267 (preliminary rulings), Article 288 (legal acts) and Article 294 (the ordinary legislative procedure).

What Article 45 says, paragraph by paragraph

Paragraph 1 states the principle in one line: freedom of movement for workers "shall be secured within the Union". Present tense, unconditional — this is directly effective law, not an aspiration.

Paragraph 2 gives the principle its teeth: it entails the abolition of any discrimination based on nationality between workers of the Member States as regards employment, remuneration and other conditions of work. A German employer cannot pay an Italian worker less, or hire her under different conditions, because of her nationality.

Paragraph 3 enumerates the four practical rights — and enumerations are EPSO's favourite raw material:

1. to accept offers of employment actually made;
2. to move freely within the territory of Member States for this purpose;
3. to stay in a Member State for the purpose of employment, under the same rules that govern national workers;
4. to remain in a Member State after having been employed there, under conditions set out in Commission regulations.

Note the qualifier that opens the paragraph: these rights are "subject to limitations justified on grounds of public policy, public security or public health". That triad is a recurring answer option — and a recurring distractor when one element is swapped (watch for invented grounds like "public morality" or "economic necessity", which are not in the list).

Paragraph 4 is the exception everyone forgets: the Article "shall not apply to employment in the public service". The Court of Justice has read this narrowly — it covers posts that involve exercising public authority and safeguarding the general interests of the State, not every job with a public employer. A hospital nurse employed by the State is covered by free movement; a senior police commander may not be.

How EPSO tests it

Three patterns dominate.

The swapped-beneficiary trap. A statement reads correctly except that "workers" has become "all citizens" or "any person". Free movement of workers is an economic freedom; the general residence rights of non-economically-active citizens flow from the citizenship provisions instead. If the statement mixes the two regimes, it is wrong.

The exception inversion. "Article 45 applies fully to employment in the public service" — false, by paragraph 4. Or the mirror image: "no worker may ever be refused entry" — false, because paragraph 3's public policy, security and health limitations exist. Correct answers usually preserve both the rule and its limits.

The enumeration edit. One of the four rights is subtly rewritten — "to accept any employment offer anywhere in the world", "to remain indefinitely without conditions". Verify each element of a list against the treaty's actual wording; EPSO rarely invents whole rights, it stretches real ones.

The paragraph the questions keep coming back to

Paragraph 3(d) looks like housekeeping — the right "to remain in the territory of a Member State after having been employed in that State, subject to conditions which shall be embodied in regulations to be drawn up by the Commission". It is not housekeeping. In our own EU Knowledge bank it is the single most examined thing about this article.

Of the 20 active questions built on Article 45, 8 ask who draws up those regulations, and 17 of the 20 have the European Commission somewhere in the correct answer. The triad of limitations — public policy, public security, public health — accounts for another 4.

Two practical consequences.

First, learn the institution, not just the right. The answer is the Commission, and the distractors are the institutions a reasonable person would guess instead: the Council, the Parliament, the Council and Parliament acting jointly under the ordinary legislative procedure, or "the Member States". All plausible, all wrong for this sub-paragraph — which is precisely why question-writers keep reaching for it.

Second, do not let the concentration fool you into skipping the rest. A bank that leans on one sub-paragraph is telling you where the easy marks are, not where the ceiling is. The non-discrimination principle in paragraph 2, the four enumerated rights in paragraph 3 and the public-service exception in paragraph 4 are all live material, and the harder questions combine two of them in one statement.

A note on what these figures are and are not: they describe our question bank, built from the consolidated treaty text — not EPSO's, which is not published. They are a good guide to what this article makes examinable, not a forecast of any particular paper.

Why this article matters beyond the test

Free movement of workers is one of the founding economic freedoms of the internal market, and its logic — equal treatment, mobility rights, narrow public-interest exceptions — repeats across the freedoms for goods, services and capital. Understand Article 45 well and you have a template for reasoning about the other three, which is exactly the kind of structural understanding that survives paraphrased exam questions.

Test it: our EU Knowledge practice hub rotates free questions weekly, every one grounded in an official citable source. For the full campaign plan, start with the EPSO Preparation 2026 complete guide.