This website presents data from 2007 onwards. We cannot publish final information until the accounts have been closed for the financial year in question. This means that, to publish data for a given year, we must wait until halfway through the following year.
As of 1 February 2020, the United Kingdom is no longer part of the European Union and it is presented on the map and within the graphs as a non-Member State (in yellow). The Financial Transparency System publishes information on beneficiaries regardless of their country.
The Financial Transparency System is being built in stages, to take into account the work involved in extracting data from the central accounting system and adapting this system to the requirements of publication on an external website. Information on procurement contracts has been included on this site only as of 2009. However, this information can still be found on the individual websites of Commission departments. Other forms of funding types, i.e. prizes, are published separately as of 2013.
This site publishes data on beneficiaries of various funding types managed directly or indirectly (as of 2020) by the Commission’s departments, its staff in the Union’s delegations, or executive agencies. However, the bulk of the EU budget is not directly administered by the Commission. Farm and regional development subsidies inside the EU, for example, are managed by national governments and some aid to countries outside the EU is administered by the local governments or by international organisations authorised by the Commission. These authorities are responsible for publishing their own data, and the Commission has agreed with them on publication contents and modes. This information is available on national websites.
The financial rules (from 2013) do not allow the publication of low-value contracts from 2012.
Any amount awarded to a beneficiary must first be booked in a budget line in the form of a commitment. The amount committed is a fundamental element of the legal agreement. As many agreements last several years, with the committed amount being spread over that time, annual information on payments cannot give a view of the overall value of the agreement. Therefore the site focuses only on commitments (except for some administrative expenditure where this approach does not apply).
A budgetary commitment is a reservation of appropriations to cover for subsequent expenses. It is the total cost of legal obligations (contracts, grant agreements/decisions) that could be signed in a financial year. The contracted amount is the amount initially validated at the creation of the commitment (signature of the contract). It appears only for the year of creation of the commitment (the year of the signature). The amount of the budgetary commitment in favour of the beneficiary: the maximum amount the beneficiary may receive based on costs incurred. The total amount actually paid out may therefore be smaller. In contrast, the consumed amount (updated on a quarterly basis) represents the sum of payments already made to the beneficiary for the commitment. The estimated contracted amount and the estimated consumption (found within the beneficiary table) are calculated based on the share of the beneficiary available at the time of the first publication on the FTS. Most often this is the repartition at the time of signing the contract.
After the last update, the consumed amount shows financial data up to 02.09.2024. This means that payments made after the aforementioned date are not included into the calculation.
For example, on the FTS there is a 2020 project, which was initially published in June 2021 with commitment contracted amount equal to €100,000 and commitment consumed amount equal to €75,000. After the publication, the consumption evolved over time (see breakdown below). In Q4 2021 (after a quarterly update), the commitment consumed amount displayed on the FTS is €85,000 (€75,000 + €10,000). In Q1 2022 (after the next update), the commitment consumed amount is €100,000 (including €15,000, which were consumed in Q4 2021).
No – the database does not contain this information. The Commission collects only the type of information necessary to carry out the required payments and other financial operations. Beneficiaries are not obliged to indicate which type of organisation they are, only whether they represent an individual (private person) or an organisation. You can search for Non-governmental organizations (NGO) and Not-for-profit organizations (NFPO).
In the absence of a universally applied definition of NGO, the Commission considers as NGO any non-profit, non-public law body (NFPO) independent of public authorities, political parties and commercial organisations. The NGO information that the Commission has available is based on self-declarations by entities receiving funding from EU funds through grant agreements or contracts directly managed by the Commission. These self-declarations are mainly requested for statistical purposes and are not subject to a general validation by Commission services. However, the non-profit status of an entity (NFPO), that is practically an essential element of an NGO, is subject to validation as this criterion can be objectively assessed through the non-profit making legal form of the entity.
FTS and the Financial Report cover completely different ground:
| FTS | Financial Report |
|---|---|
| Amounts awarded ("committed") to beneficiaries in a given year | Amounts actually paid out to the EU countries associated with the beneficiaries |
| Information on funds managed by the Commission centrally, across all headings | Structured around the policy headings of the 2007-13 financial framework |
| Uses the address of the beneficiary as the sole indication of its nationality, since this is the relevant information from an accounting point of view | Uses criteria such as the location of the project activity, which can differ from the address/country of the beneficiary recorded in the Commission's accounting system |
Horizon 2020, the current framework programme for research and innovation, is the EU programme with the largest budget in direct management. Structural funds and Common Agricultural policy have greater budgets but in shared management. As the Seventh Framework programme (FP7) in the previous 2007-2013 period, Horizon 2020 aims at supporting research and innovation activities for the 2014-2020 period. The vast majority of the projects funded by Horizon 2020 are grants to researchers under direct management, which is the only management mode published on the FTS.
As EDF expenditure is not part of the EU budget it was not initially included in the FTS. However, the current edition of the EDF (i.e. the so called 12th EDF), is subject to the same publication rules as other EU expenditure. The information on commitments for the 11th EDF is available on this site as of 2010. See also the EuropeAid website for information on all forms of external assistance, including EDF.
The Financial Regulation allows the EU to set up trust funds managed by the Commission - information on funds awarded by the Commission to these trust funds is not published at the moment on this website. More information on the funding of the trust funds could be found on EU Aid Explore.
The European Commission has signed specific agreements with some non-Member States countries so that they could contribute and participate in some EU programmes. Examples of such agreements are the EEA agreement; the international cooperation with Switzerland or other countries in the field of research and innovation.
All data relating to one financial year are published in one step the following year by end of June, with the exception of the additional/reduced amount and consumed amount – updated on a quarterly basis. By example, data relating to financial year 2021 will be published by end of June 2022. Multiple checks are performed to ensure the highest data quality and integrity, however in case an issue would be discovered after publication, a correction would be made. This was the case on 08 November 2013 when a correction was made to financial year data 2012 published on FTS. 39 commitment positions have been added to the publication, on a total of 32.172 published for 2012. This correction was necessary due to a technical issue affecting the publication of data covering financial year 2012 only.
When consulting this website from a mobile device (smartphone, tablet) you might experience stability issues, where no result is displayed after clicking on the budget reference of a project. We are currently investigating this.
EU funding is managed by the Commission, jointly with the Member States, or through implementing partners. The management mode determines the procedure for applications and how they are evaluated. More information is available on a dedicated webpage.
In accordance with Article 38(3)(d) of the Financial Regulation (see About page ) the information concerning Afghanistan and Russia is not disclosed.
The “Beneficiary country” is the country in which the beneficiary has its legal address (e.g. the “Beneficiary country” for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is the United States). The “Benefiting country” is the country which benefits from the implementation of a grant or a contract (e.g. Albania, Kenya, etc.). The “Benefiting country” can be different from the “Beneficiary country”. The “Benefiting country” field is useful when you perform a search in the area of “indirect management” where the intermediate beneficiary is an international organisation.
Please read our privacy policy to learn more about how we process and protect your personal data.
You can download in machine readable format all FTS publications, including the period 2007-2013, from the Help Page.
The different amounts used on the Financial Transparency System (including downloadable datasets) can be categorized into two groups:
On the Financial Transparency System website, there are four amounts published under the first category:
a. Most often the realisation of a project takes several years, beyond the initial FTS publication which in accordance with Article 38 of the Financial Regulation must be made publicly available no later than 30 June of the year following the financial year in which the funds were legally committed (e.g. data concerning 2023 is going to be published on the FTS in June 2024). A project can involve changes to the amount agreed in the initial contractual agreement;
On the Financial Transparency System website, there are three amounts published under the second category:
