The figure appears regularly in the public communication around Horizon Europe: an aggregate success rate of around 17 per cent across the framework programme's first years[2]. Set against the roughly 12 per cent under Horizon 2020, that looks like an improvement[5]. For most companies and institutes actually applying, though, the figure is a fiction. Behind the arithmetic mean hide individual rates ranging from under six per cent in the EIC Accelerator to over thirty per cent in some widening instruments — and an average time to grant of 240 days between the call deadline and signature of the grant, with only 77 per cent of grants concluded within the statutory eight-month limit of 245 days[3]. This piece takes the aggregate rate apart along the European Commission's primary sources and places it in the context of what it actually means for an individual application.
The aggregate rate
Regulation (EU) 2021/695 originally set up Horizon Europe as the framework programme for 2021 to 2027 with a total budget of €95.5bn; after the revision of the multiannual financial framework (MFF) in February 2024, the programme envelope was reduced to €93.5bn. Horizon Europe is organised in three pillars — Excellent Science, Global Challenges and European Industrial Competitiveness, Innovative Europe — plus the cross-cutting part Widening Participation and Strengthening the European Research Area[1]. The aggregate success rate routinely quoted in EU reporting adds up all eligible proposals received across all pillars, clusters, missions and call types and sets them against the grants signed.
For 2021 and 2022, the factsheet "Horizon Europe implementation — Key data for 2021-2022" from the Directorate-General for Research and Innovation reports around 45,000 proposals submitted to 236 calls; the average success rate over that period was around 15.9 per cent[2]. In later reporting that includes 2023, the mean shifts slightly upwards — among other reasons because the widening instruments and ERA calls have very high individual rates that pull the average up[5]. The widely quoted "17 per cent" refers to this smoothed annual series.
The Commission's interim evaluation of 30 April 2025 sets two findings side by side that force a more open reading. On the one hand, 15,148 grants with an EU contribution of €43.2bn were signed between 2021 and 2024[3][4]. On the other, success rates in individual calls in 2024 sit at around 5 per cent, with a marked spread downwards in the instruments where demand is strongest[3]. The average therefore describes a programme producing rising demand and a falling hit rate per call at the same time. The mean obscures both movements.
Operationally, a first reading follows: the 17 per cent is not the probability that a given application gets through. It is the quotient of a population of very heterogeneous calls — ERC grants, collaborative research in the clusters, missions, EIC Pathfinder, EIC Accelerator, widening — whose individual rates run between 4 and 35 per cent. Choosing a call means choosing a sub-population whose rate often differs from that mean by a multiple.
EIC Accelerator: 6 per cent
The EIC Accelerator is the most prominent instrument for research-intensive SMEs and startups within Pillar 3, "Innovative Europe". For the October 2024 cut-off, whose results the European Innovation Council and SMEs Executive Agency (EISMEA) published on 17 February 2025, 1,211 proposals were submitted, 431 companies were invited to the jury interview and 71 companies were selected for funding[7]. The success rate is therefore exactly 5.86 per cent — rounded to "6 per cent" in EISMEA's communication.
"The EIC Accelerator has selected 71 companies to receive funding from among 1 211 proposals submitted for the October 2024 cut-off date, the most competitive funding round so far since the launch of the Accelerator under Horizon Europe."— EISMEA, press release of 17 February 2025[7]
Taken across the 2024 calendar year the rate is lower still, because the October cut-off was preceded by a March cut-off with a 7 per cent success rate, and the sum of all rounds sits well below the instrument's average in earlier years. The total funding volume of the October cut-off is up to €161m in grants and around €226m in equity investment; 79 per cent of the selected companies take the blended finance option[7].
The asymmetry within the instrument is as notable as the overall rate. At step 2 — the written full proposal — around a third of applications reach the jury stage; at step 3, 71 are selected from the remaining 431 companies interviewed. The stage rates of 35.6 per cent (step 1 to step 2) and 16.5 per cent (step 2 to step 3) multiply out to the quoted overall rate of around six per cent[7]. An application therefore has to reach the top half of the field twice in a row before it has any real chance of funding.
For the operational planning of an EIC Accelerator application, that means the aggregate Horizon Europe rate of 17 per cent is misleading as a guide by a factor of roughly three. Anyone basing their business planning on a seventeen per cent probability systematically overestimates the odds. EISMEA has explicitly named the growing oversubscription in its own comparisons within the instrument[8].
Mission vs pillar — the variance between work programmes
The spread of success rates between the parts of the programme is the second reason the aggregate figure is deceptive. The Commission's interim evaluation documents differences between the pillars spanning a factor of around three: the highest average is measured in Widening Participation and Strengthening the European Research Area, the lowest in Pillar 3, "Innovative Europe", with its core EIC instruments[3][2].
The European Research Council represents the excellence track in Pillar 1. For the 2024 Starting Grant call, 3,474 proposals were submitted and 494 grants awarded, giving a success rate of around 14.2 per cent[9]. For the 2024 Consolidator Grant call, 2,313 proposals were submitted and 328 grants awarded — again around 14.2 per cent[10]. The ERC rates therefore sit noticeably below the programme-wide mean, but they are considered stable: submission and award numbers have moved within a similar corridor for several years.
The missions — Adaptation to Climate Change, Cancer, Restore our Ocean and Waters, Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities, A Soil Deal for Europe — form a category of their own. For the evaluation of the mission calls concluded by CINEA in autumn 2023, 133 proposals were submitted and 34 consortia taken through to grant agreements; the arithmetical overall rate is around 25.6 per cent[11]. That figure bundles very different sub-calls with smaller fields of participants; in some topics the rates are considerably higher, in others considerably lower, than the programme-wide aggregate.
Clusters 4 (Digital, Industry and Space), 5 (Climate, Energy and Mobility) and 6 (Food, Bioeconomy, Natural Resources, Agriculture and Environment) typically sit between 10 and 15 per cent in their standard RIA calls. The interim evaluation reports slight improvements over Horizon 2020 for clusters 1 to 3 — two percentage points in cluster 1 (Health), six in cluster 2 (Culture, Creativity and Inclusive Society), four in cluster 3 (Civil Security for Society)[5]. The differences between clusters are therefore not as large as those between pillars, but still larger than the year-to-year corridor of a single cluster.
The upshot is that the phrase "Horizon Europe success rate" says nothing without naming a specific work programme and a specific call. A realistic planning figure only emerges once you know the topic, the call type (RIA/IA/CSA/EIC), the reporting cut-off and, where applicable, the specific stage rates.
Time to grant — a 245-day target, a 240-day average
The time horizon matters as much as the probability of success. Time to grant denotes the span between the call deadline (the submission date) and the grant agreement entering into force. For Horizon Europe, the Commission's interim evaluation reports an average time to grant of 240 days. The statutory target under Article 31 of Regulation (EU) 2021/695 is eight months (245 days); only 77 per cent of all grants are concluded within that target, with almost one in four completed later[3].
Those 240 days are the average between submission deadline and signature. For the applicant, the effort starts considerably earlier: the topic is published in the work programme typically six to nine months before the call deadline, and finding partners and forming the consortium takes another three to six months in collaborative calls. Add the lead-in phases and the span between starting substantive work on the application and receiving the first instalment regularly runs to 15 to 18 months. A calendar year is not the exception but the norm — with the funding decision still open throughout.
The Commission's communication has addressed the lengthening time to grant as an operational weakness. The interim evaluation explains the finding by rising demand, more complex work programme structures and capacity bottlenecks at the executive agencies[3]. Communication COM(2025) 189 final announces process reforms for the successor programme FP10, but gives no reason to expect the trend to reverse over Horizon Europe's remaining term[4].
For the business assessment of a Horizon Europe application, time to grant has a second, less obvious dimension: it affects how much capital is actually tied up. A consortium preparing an application carries the staff costs of the application phase without refinancing until the grant agreement is signed. If the application is rejected, those costs are lost for good. If it is accepted, the Commission refinances them retroactively within the approved project person-days, to the extent these are demonstrably linked to the application phase — but in practice only part of them. The 240 days are therefore not just patience but risk exposure.
What the aggregation obscures
The aggregate success rate has a communicative function, not a planning one. It makes the programme comparable across legislative and budget periods, it allows rough comparisons with Horizon 2020 or national funding programmes, and it fills press releases. But it obscures three structural effects that are central to any concrete decision to apply.
First: oversubscription. In the documents accompanying the interim evaluation, the Commission reports that around seven in ten proposals rated "excellent" have to be rejected for budgetary reasons; funding all high-quality proposals from 2021–2022 in full would have required an additional EU contribution of around €34bn[5][3]. That means: in the majority of cases, rejection is not a quality decision but a rationing decision. A rejected application is not necessarily worse — it is placed in an oversubscribed topic.
Second: the widening effect. The widening instruments pull the aggregate rate up. The interim evaluation reports average success rates of around 20 per cent for widening member states, and for five individual member states even at the level of the EU average; that is considerably more than in the clusters or the EIC[3]. For eligible institutions in Germany this sub-population is not accessible in most instruments; it distorts the programme-wide figure in favour of a group that is not relevant to the typical German application situation.
Third: stage rates. In two- or three-stage procedures — the EIC Accelerator, certain ERC reviews, parts of the missions — the aggregate rate is usually calculated as the product of the stages. For planning purposes, though, what matters is the conditional rate: an applicant who has already passed step 1 faces a different distribution from a first-time applicant. Conversely, the second stage distributes rejections systematically, not randomly: the jury is more selective than the written evaluation, and the criteria for rejection shift between the stages. The aggregate product does not capture that heterogeneity[7].
There is also an effect of reporting method: the Commission's monitoring counts "eligible proposals" — that is, formally admissible submissions. Applications filtered out because of funding exclusions, formal errors or duplicates do not appear in the count. That is proper, but it does not raise the rate's significance as an estimate of the odds for a carefully constructed application — because the carefully constructed application competes against a population of applications that are themselves carefully constructed[13].
What applicants should take from this
Taking the aggregate rate apart yields three operational consequences for preparing a Horizon Europe application, none of which follow from the mean, only from the underlying sub-rates.
Choosing the topic is the first selection decision. The choice of topic largely determines which success rate applies. Between widening calls, the ERC, cluster RIAs, EIC Pathfinder and EIC Accelerator, the rates differ by a factor of three to five[2][3]. Anyone who takes the trouble to check systematically where their own technical content overlaps with several topics is making, with the choice of topic, the single decision that most affects the probability across the whole procedure. The BMFTR's national contact point for Horizon Europe publishes the topic structure and the updated work programmes on the horizont-europa.de portal[12]; where the executive agencies publish topic-specific award rates, those are available there too.
Portfolio logic instead of a single application. At success rates below ten per cent — and in the core EIC instruments that is where they are — a single application is not a robust project financing strategy. Anyone who wants to use Horizon Europe as a route to funding works in portfolio logic: parallel applications in different calls, dossiers coordinated in substance for different topic overlaps, structured resubmission to later cut-offs. The average 240 days to grant force overlapping application planning, because working through applications one after another is barely viable commercially[3].
The Seal of Excellence as a second use. Applications that pass the quality threshold but are not funded for budgetary reasons receive, under certain conditions, the Seal of Excellence. That mark opens up follow-on financing from national, regional or other EU funds without repeating the quality assessment; member states and structural fund authorities can use the seal directly as a justification for funding[4]. The interim evaluation highlights the use of the Seal of Excellence as an instrument with room to grow; for applicants it shifts the measure of success away from a binary "grant or no grant" towards a multi-stage logic of use, in which even a narrow rejection is a usable output.
Operationally that means: a sober approach to Horizon Europe starts by breaking the aggregate rate down to the sub-population that is actually relevant — cluster, topic, cut-off, stage rate. It accounts for the average 240 days to grant — with only 77 per cent hitting the target — in liquidity planning. It builds parallel applications across several calls. And it plans systematically for second use through the Seal of Excellence and national follow-on funding. The aggregate 17 per cent remains a programme-wide summary. As a basis for assessing a specific application it is a poor estimator — the robust numbers lie in the sub-rates.
upsmart maps the whole Horizon Europe route — from choosing the topic through forming the consortium, working on the application and managing the stages to signing the grant agreement — as a platform, and makes the sub-rate applicable to the specific application, the stage history and the liquidity effect across the time to grant traceable. The aggregate mean then becomes what it can be: context, not a planning figure.
- [1]Regulation (EU) 2021/695 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 28 April 2021 establishing Horizon Europe, the framework programme for research and innovation (Horizon Europe Regulation)European Parliament and Council, EUR-Lex · 2021Open source
- [2]Horizon Europe implementation — Key data for 2021-2022 (factsheet, KI-03-23-236-EN-N)European Commission, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation · 2023Open source
- [3]Commission Staff Working Document — Interim Evaluation of the Horizon Europe Framework Programme for Research and Innovation (2021-2024), SWD(2025) 110 finalEuropean Commission, EUR-Lex · 2025Open source
- [4]Communication from the Commission — Horizon Europe: Research and Innovation at the heart of competitiveness, COM(2025) 189 finalEuropean Commission · 2025Open source
- [5]Horizon Europe programme analysis — Monitoring, Evaluation and Impact Assessment (Directorate-General for Research and Innovation portal)European Commission · 2025Open source
- [6]Horizon Europe — Programme Performance Statement (EU budget, Performance and Reporting)European Commission · 2024Open source
- [7]EIC Accelerator — 71 companies selected in the most competitive funding round so far (October 2024 cut-off, published 17 February 2025)European Innovation Council and SMEs Executive Agency (EISMEA) · 2025Open source
- [8]EIC Accelerator October cut-off — record number of proposals submitted since the EIC's launch under Horizon EuropeEuropean Innovation Council (eic.ec.europa.eu) · 2024Open source
- [9]ERC 2024 Starting Grants — €780m to emerging science talent in EuropeEuropean Research Council (erc.europa.eu) · 2024Open source
- [10]ERC 2024 Consolidator Grants — €678m awarded to 328 researchersEuropean Research Council (erc.europa.eu) · 2024Open source
- [11]34 projects selected for grants under Horizon Europe Mission calls (Climate Adaptation, Restore our Ocean and Waters)European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency (CINEA) · 2023Open source
- [12]National contact point for Horizon Europe — the BMFTR's Kooperation international portalGerman Aerospace Center (DLR) Project Management Agency, BMFTR · 2025Open source
- [13]Commission Staff Working Document — Evidence Framework for the monitoring and evaluation of Horizon Europe, SWD(2023) 132 finalEuropean Commission · 2023Open source
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