A new report shows Horizon Europe success rates varying between 8% and 80% depending on the instrument. And Switzerland moves closer to EU programme association.
June was a very hot month in Brussels, not only in terms of weather but also in the political debate on the next EU multiannual financial framework (MFF) post-2028. For many months now, the future continuity of Horizon Europe, Erasmus+ and other programmes with links to education, research and innovation is up in the air. At a high-level STOA conference on 4 June 2025, Commission President von der Leyen repeated her recent confirmation that Horizon Europe will be continued after all as “a self-standing programme in our next seven-year budget”, even keeping the same strong brand name. In her speech, she also proclaimed that “Europe will always remain the home of scientific freedom”. Lastly, she also made reference to her recent initiative ‘Choose Europe’ with the ambition to “make Europe the best place in the world to pursue science, not only for fundamental research but through the entire lifecycle of innovation”.
Two days later, on 6 June 2025, the European Commission published its annual report on the R&D activities and Horizon Europe monitoring of 2024. This annual report often only gets very little attention compared to the Horizon Europe work programmes or its recent mid-term evaluation. However, it includes various interesting figures on the performance of the framework programme. The report, for example, states that only 54% of all proposals passed the minimum threshold after evaluation. Out of those remaining proposals, only 30% were finally funded with the available budget. This leads to an overall success rate of 16,4%, with a total of about 15’000 funded projects for a total of €43 billion in 2024. This success rate, however, varies considerably between the instruments: While the ERC and MSCA are roughly near the average with 14,5% and 16,3% respectively, the EIC’s success was much lower with only 8,8%, while the EIT’s success rate amounts to a high 80%. The annual report also measures the impact of the programme: In 2024, Horizon projects led to almost 7’000 peer-reviewed academic publications and roughly 40’000 new jobs that were created. For the EIT specifically, 112 start-ups stemmed from EIT innovation projects. And finally, the report also shows that 35,8% of the programme participants were SMEs.
Switzerland and the EU advanced further on their route to association: On 24 June 2025, the Swiss Foreign Minister, Federal Councillor Ignazio Cassis, and Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič signed a joint declaration detailing the cooperation until the new package of agreements would enter into force. This includes transitional measures on various topics, such as also the full activation of opening Horizon Europe, Euratom and Digital Europe to Swiss applicants, which is in retroactive effect from 1 January 2025 already. Yet another positive step towards the signing of the association agreement expected for the end of this year.