Administrative capacity is a considered crucial to ensure responsiveness to societal demands and effective enforcement of laws. But how do administrative capacities play out in a multilevel administration in which implementation oversight and actual enforcement authority are decoupled across levels of governance? The paper examines the development of the European Union's Policy on Public Administration Capacities that target capacities in the member states. We observe an incrementally growing policy that expands over time and is marked by layering different steering instruments. At the same time, classifying the instruments that mark the EU's policy today, a step-wise increase in conditionality-based and thus more coercive approaches can be observed. Despite this apparent hardening of EU instruments, still short of any actual competence to legislate or exercise direct authority over (sub)national administrations, the actual thrust of the EU's policy on domestic administrative capacity remains in great part dependent on the member states' responsiveness.