Horizon Europe is the European Union’s framework programme for research and innovation, running from 2021 through 2027 with an indicative budget of roughly €93.5 billion (some tallies cite €95.5 billion once additional top-ups from external sources are included) — the largest multinational research funding programme in the world. It succeeded Horizon 2020 (2014–2020) and is administered by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, with individual actions delegated to executive agencies such as the European Research Council Executive Agency (ERCEA) and the European Research Executive Agency (REA).
For a research administrator or investigator encountering Horizon Europe for the first time, the programme can look like a wall of unfamiliar acronyms — RIA, IA, CSA, MSCA, ERC, EIC, TRL — layered on top of application mechanics that differ meaningfully from a US federal grant or a UK Research Council award. This guide is the entry point: it lays out the three pillars, the main funding instruments and cost model, who is eligible to apply, and how a proposal moves from a call topic to a signed Grant Agreement, with links out to the more granular Horizon Europe mechanics already covered elsewhere on this site.
What Horizon Europe Funds, at a Glance
Horizon Europe is organized into three funding "pillars," plus a separate cross-cutting part aimed at broadening participation across the EU. Each pillar has a different logic for how it selects what to fund — investigator-driven excellence, challenge-driven collaboration, or market-proximate innovation — and understanding which pillar a call sits under is usually the fastest way to understand what a funder is actually looking for in a proposal.
The Three Pillars
Pillar I: Excellent Science
Pillar I funds investigator-driven, bottom-up research selected primarily on scientific excellence rather than a predefined policy theme. It contains three main components:
- European Research Council (ERC) — frontier research grants (Starting, Consolidator, Advanced, and Synergy Grants) awarded to individual principal investigators based solely on the excellence of the proposed research and the track record of the applicant, with no thematic priorities set in advance.
- Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) — funds researcher training and mobility across career stages, including Doctoral Networks (Horizon Europe’s renamed successor to Horizon 2020’s Innovative Training Networks), Postdoctoral Fellowships, Staff Exchanges, and COFUND. See CASRAI’s dedicated guide on Innovative Training Networks (ITN) — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions for the doctoral-training mechanics in depth.
- Research Infrastructures — funds the development, integration, and open access provision of pan-European research infrastructure (large-scale facilities, distributed digital infrastructure, and infrastructure networks).
Pillar II: Global Challenges and European Industrial Competitiveness
Pillar II is the largest of the three by budget share and funds collaborative, consortium-based research and innovation organized around six thematic clusters aligned to EU policy priorities: Health; Culture, Creativity and Inclusive Society; Civil Security for Society; Digital, Industry and Space; Climate, Energy and Mobility; and Food, Bioeconomy, Natural Resources, Agriculture and Environment. It also funds the non-nuclear activities of the Joint Research Centre (the Commission’s in-house science service) and the EU Missions — a small set of large, outcome-oriented programmes (such as climate adaptation and cancer) that coordinate research, policy, and investment toward a specific measurable target rather than funding open calls alone.
Pillar III: Innovative Europe
Pillar III funds innovation closer to market and the ecosystem around it: the European Innovation Council (EIC), which backs breakthrough and market-creating innovation from early-stage research through scale-up (Pathfinder, Transition, and Accelerator schemes); European Innovation Ecosystems, which funds connections between national and regional innovation actors; and the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), which runs thematic Knowledge and Innovation Communities linking business, research, and higher education.
Widening Participation and Strengthening the European Research Area
Alongside the three pillars, a dedicated part of the programme funds two things: "widening" measures that help institutions in EU member states and associated countries with historically lower research-funding uptake build competitive capacity (teaming, twinning, ERA Chairs), and structural reforms intended to strengthen the European Research Area as a whole — researcher careers, gender equality, and research assessment reform among them.
Funding Instruments and the Cost Model
Most Pillar II and III collaborative calls use one of three standard funding-instrument types, each governing different eligibility and reporting expectations:
- Research and Innovation Actions (RIA) — funds research activity, generally reimbursed up to 100% of eligible direct costs.
- Innovation Actions (IA) — funds activity closer to market deployment (prototyping, testing, demonstration), generally reimbursed at a lower rate, commonly around 70% of eligible costs for for-profit participants (100% for non-profits) — confirm the exact rate in the specific call’s Model Grant Agreement rather than assuming a fixed percentage across every topic.
- Coordination and Support Actions (CSA) — funds networking, dissemination, standardization, and policy-support activity rather than research itself, typically reimbursed at 100%.
Across all three, Horizon Europe applies a flat 25% indirect-cost rate on eligible direct costs (excluding subcontracting, third-party financial support, and unit costs that already embed indirect costs) — a simpler, uniform alternative to the individually negotiated indirect-cost rates used in the US federal system. The programme has also progressively expanded lump-sum funding, under which a project is paid a fixed amount per deliverable-triggered work package rather than reimbursed against actual incurred costs; by the 2026–2027 Work Programme, a substantial share of calls use this model. See CASRAI’s dictionary entries on the lump-sum grant (Horizon Europe), work package (Horizon Europe), and task (Horizon Europe) for how project work is structured and paid out under this model, and the Grant Agreement (Horizon Europe) entry for what the resulting legal document actually contains.
Who Can Apply: Eligibility Across EU, Associated, and Non-Associated Countries
Legal entities established in an EU member state are automatically eligible to apply for, and receive funding from, essentially all Horizon Europe actions. Beyond the EU itself, a defined list of "Associated Countries" — non-EU states that have signed an association agreement and pay into the programme — participate on largely the same footing as member states, including eligibility to coordinate a consortium and receive EU funding directly (rather than only participating at their own national funder’s expense). The list of associated countries changes over time as agreements are negotiated or lapse; Norway, Iceland, and several Western Balkan and Eastern Partnership countries have long-standing association, and the United Kingdom formally re-associated to Horizon Europe after a negotiated agreement, with UK-based researchers eligible to participate on equal terms — including leading consortia — from the 2024 Work Programmes onward. Always check the current associated-country list on the Funding & Tenders Portal before assuming a specific country’s status, since it is one of the more time-sensitive facts in this programme.
Entities from countries with no association agreement (including the United States, most of the time) can generally still participate as project partners in most collaborative topics, but are typically not eligible for EU funding themselves — they participate "at own cost," funded by their home institution or a national funder, unless a specific call topic explicitly opens funding to them or a bilateral scheme applies. Most Pillar II collaborative projects also carry a minimum consortium size — commonly at least three independent legal entities, each established in a different EU member state or associated country — though the exact minimum varies by instrument and call topic and should be confirmed against the specific topic text.
From Call to Grant Agreement: How the Process Works
Calls for proposals are published on the EU Funding & Tenders Portal under each year’s Work Programme, organized by pillar, cluster, and destination (a thematic sub-grouping within each cluster). Applicants submit through the portal against a specific topic, and proposals are evaluated by independent expert reviewers against published criteria — typically excellence, impact, and quality/efficiency of implementation, each scored and, for most instruments, subject to a minimum threshold. Successful applicants proceed to grant preparation, negotiating the final Grant Agreement and, for multi-partner projects, a consortium agreement among partners that allocates roles, intellectual property terms, and budget among the coordinator and other beneficiaries. This division of pre-award and post-award work mirrors the general grants-management lifecycle covered in CASRAI’s Pre-Award vs. Post-Award Office Roles guide, though the specific portal, forms, and evaluation criteria are Horizon Europe-specific.
How Horizon Europe Fits Alongside National and Other International Funding
Horizon Europe is the flagship EU-level programme, but it sits alongside — not in place of — national funding councils in each member and associated state (such as national research councils, equivalents to UKRI in the UK, or Germany’s DFG) and other international funding bodies research administrators may be coordinating with, including Canada’s Tri-Agency, the US federal agencies, and Australia’s ARC/NHMRC. A researcher assembling an international consortium frequently needs to reconcile Horizon Europe’s flat 25% indirect-cost, RIA/IA/CSA instrument logic against a very different cost-recovery model on a US or UK-funded portion of the same collaboration — understanding the Horizon Europe model on its own terms, as covered here, is the first step toward reconciling it with whatever else a given project involves.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Horizon Europe?
Horizon Europe is the European Union’s research and innovation framework programme for 2021–2027, funding investigator-driven research, collaborative challenge-based projects, and market-facing innovation across three pillars, with an indicative budget of roughly €93.5 billion.
What is the difference between the ERC and MSCA?
Both sit under Pillar I (Excellent Science), but the ERC funds individual principal investigators’ own research projects based purely on scientific excellence, while MSCA funds researcher training and mobility — doctoral networks, postdoctoral fellowships, and staff exchanges — rather than a specific research project’s outcomes.
Can non-EU institutions receive Horizon Europe funding?
Institutions in Associated Countries (a defined list of non-EU states with a signed association agreement, currently including the UK following its re-association) participate and receive funding on largely the same terms as EU member states. Institutions in non-associated countries can generally still join a consortium as partners but typically must be funded from their own resources rather than by the EU, unless a specific call explicitly opens funding to them.
What is Horizon Europe’s indirect-cost rate?
A flat 25% of eligible direct costs, applied uniformly regardless of the beneficiary’s actual overhead rate — a simpler model than individually negotiated indirect-cost rates used elsewhere, though certain cost categories (subcontracting, third-party financial support, and unit costs that already embed indirect costs) are excluded from the base it’s calculated against.
How is Horizon Europe funding paid out?
Depending on the action, either as reimbursement of actual eligible costs incurred (the traditional model) or, increasingly, as fixed lump-sum payments tied to completing predefined work packages and deliverables rather than to actual cost documentation — see CASRAI’s lump-sum grant (Horizon Europe) entry for how that model works in practice.
