Horizon Europe Pillars vs FP10: Four vs Three

Horizon Europe currently runs on three pillars; the European Commission’s FP10 proposal — published 16 July 2025 as “Horizon Europe 2028-2034” — restructures the programme around four pillars, adding a dedicated European Research Area pillar and shifting roughly €80 billion in additional funding toward competitiveness-linked research. For research administrators, the practical task is mapping existing pillar-based compliance workflows onto this new architecture before the programme’s expected 2028 start.

Horizon Europe is the European Union’s current €95.5 billion research and innovation framework programme (2021-2027), organised into three pillars plus a horizontal strengthening-the-ERA strand. Its proposed successor, provisionally branded Horizon Europe 2028-2034 and widely referred to by its sequence number as FP10 (the EU’s tenth framework programme since 1984), would roughly double that budget and reorganise it into four pillars.

• What is the current Horizon Europe pillar structure?
• How does FP10’s proposed pillar structure differ?
• What are the budget and legislative timeline changes?
• Horizon Europe pillars: answer-first Q&A
• What should research administrators do now?

What is the current Horizon Europe pillar structure?

Horizon Europe’s three pillars separate funding by research logic rather than by discipline. Pillar I, “Excellent Science,” funds bottom-up frontier research through the European Research Council (ERC) and researcher mobility through Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA). Pillar II, “Global Challenges and European Industrial Competitiveness,” is the largest pillar, funding collaborative research across six thematic clusters — health; culture, creativity and inclusive society; civil security; digital, industry and space; climate, energy and mobility; and food, bioeconomy and environment. Pillar III, “Innovative Europe,” supports market-creating innovation primarily via the European Innovation Council (EIC).

A horizontal strand, “Widening Participation and Strengthening the European Research Area,” sits outside the three numbered pillars and funds capacity-building in lower-performing research systems — a structural detail that FP10’s proposal absorbs into a new, standalone pillar rather than leaving as a side strand.

How does FP10’s proposed pillar structure differ?

The Commission’s proposal keeps the “Horizon Europe” brand but restructures the programme into four pillars, according to the Commission’s own 16 July 2025 announcement and its accompanying Multiannual Financial Framework factsheet. Pillar I remains “Excellent Science” largely intact. Pillar II is renamed “Competitiveness and Society” and reoriented around four “competitive” research themes — clean transition and industrial decarbonisation; health, biotech, agriculture and bioeconomy; digital leadership; and resilience, security, defence and space — plus three “society” themes covering global societal challenges, the New European Bauhaus Facility, and EU Missions. Pillar III becomes “Innovation,” with an expanded EIC that adds dedicated support for defence and dual-use start-ups. The structural headline is Pillar IV: “European Research Area,” an entirely new pillar funding research and technology infrastructure and a “single, borderless market for research, innovation and technology across the EU.”

The Commission also proposes tying Horizon Europe more tightly to a new European Competitiveness Fund (ECF), enabling joint “moonshot” projects that move research through to real-world deployment. Named moonshot candidates include:

• The Future Circular Collider
• Clean aviation
• Next-generation AI
• Data sovereignty
• Automated transport and mobility
• Regenerative therapies
• Fusion energy
• Space economy
• Zero water pollution and ocean observation

What are the budget and legislative timeline changes?

The Commission’s proposal totals €175 billion for Horizon Europe within a €410 billion European Competitiveness Fund envelope, of which €234 billion covers other funding schemes, per the European Commission’s official 16 July 2025 news release. That compares with Horizon Europe’s current €95.5 billion allocation for 2021-2027 — close to a doubling in nominal terms.

Neither the FP10 proposal nor the wider EU long-term budget (MFF) is final. Both require the ordinary legislative procedure, meaning the European Parliament and the Council of the EU must jointly agree amendments before adoption. The House of Commons Library reports that a final agreement is expected late in 2027, synchronised with the broader MFF negotiations, ahead of a planned 2028 programme start.

The Commission’s interim evaluation of the current programme — cited in its own press materials — states that every euro of EU contribution is estimated to generate up to €11 in GDP gains by 2045, and that Horizon Europe had funded over 15,000 projects worth more than €43 billion as of January 2025. That evaluation, alongside the Draghi and Letta competitiveness reports, forms the explicit policy rationale the Commission cites for the pillar restructuring.

Horizon Europe pillars: answer-first Q&A

What is Horizon Europe Pillar 1?

Pillar 1, “Excellent Science,” is Horizon Europe’s frontier-research pillar, funding investigator-led work through the European Research Council and researcher mobility through Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions. Under the FP10 proposal it keeps its name and structure, with earmarked funding rising to €44.079 billion.

What is Horizon Europe Pillar 2?

Pillar 2 is currently “Global Challenges and European Industrial Competitiveness,” Horizon Europe’s largest and most application-oriented pillar, spanning six thematic clusters. FP10 proposes renaming it “Competitiveness and Society” and raising its budget to €75.876 billion, a 41.8% increase, with roughly €68 billion co-managed alongside the new European Competitiveness Fund.

What is the Pillar 3 of Horizon Europe?

Pillar 3, “Innovative Europe,” funds market-creating innovation chiefly through the European Innovation Council. FP10 renames it “Innovation” and proposes €38.785 billion, expanding EIC support to include defence and dual-use start-ups alongside its existing scale-up mandate.

What should research administrators do now?

The proposal is not yet law, so no institution needs to rebuild compliance workflows immediately. But three planning actions are worth starting now:

1. Map current pillar-owned processes (ERC/MSCA eligibility checks, cluster call monitoring, EIC scouting) against the proposed four-pillar labels, since Pillars I and III largely preserve existing scope while Pillar II absorbs new “society” themes and Pillar IV is genuinely new.
2. Track the legislative timeline rather than the July 2025 proposal text as final — amendments through the European Parliament and Council are expected through 2027, and pillar names, budgets and cluster groupings may still change.
3. Watch association status for non-EU institutions. The UK’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said in September 2024 it was “interested in potentially associating to FP10,” and the UK’s 2025 Spending Review allocated funding to cover the programme’s first two years of association, per parliamentary reporting.

Institutions that already organise grants administration around Horizon Europe’s pillar logic — rather than around individual instruments like the ERC or EIC — will find the FP10 mapping more mechanical: three of the four proposed pillars are renamed continuations of existing pillars, and the one genuinely new pillar, European Research Area, formalises work (widening, infrastructure) that many research administration offices already track as a distinct compliance category today.