Eurostars — Call 12
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Eurostars
Free Eurostars intakeEurostars funds one R&D project carried out by partners in different countries. You file a single application, led by an innovative SME, but the money never arrives as one European grant: each partner is paid by the funding body of its own country, under that country’s own rules and at that country’s own rate. Call 12 opens on 17 December 2026 and closes on 4 March 2027 at 14:00 CET. This page is about the question that decides most Eurostars applications months before anyone writes a word — whether the consortium you already have clears the seven eligibility criteria.
- Funding
- There is no European grant amount here and no European funding percentage — not a low one, none at all. The official call page states that the amount your organisation receives is managed by your National Funding Body, that funding rules vary from country to country, and that your national body decides which organisations can be funded, which activities can be funded and at what rate. Your national body may also cap the amount per project or per partner. Two partners doing identical work in two countries can therefore be funded at two different percentages, and each of them carries the remainder itself. For Call 12 specifically, the call page states that national and regional funding information is still being confirmed and is subject to change before the call opens, so nobody — including us — can tell you today what your national rate for this call will be. What we can tell you before then is whether your consortium is eligible at all, which is the question that removes applicants.
- Who can apply
- An innovative SME from a Eurostars country leads the consortium. “Innovative” is a low bar here and it is worth knowing: the guidelines state that to be innovative, SMEs do not need a proven track record of R&D activities, so a first-time applicant is not disadvantaged. SME means the EU definition (Recommendation 2003/361): fewer than 250 staff and either turnover of €50m or less or a balance sheet total of €43m or less, counting group companies where a larger group is involved. Larger companies, universities and research organisations can join the consortium as partners; they just cannot lead it.
- The partner requirement, in plain terms
- You cannot apply alone. You need at least two organisations that are independent of one another, based in at least two different Eurostars countries, and at least one of those two countries must be an EU Member State or a Horizon Europe Associated Country. In practice that last clause only bites in one situation: all Eurostars countries are EU or Horizon Europe Associated except Canada, the Republic of Korea, Singapore and South Africa, so a consortium made up only of those four fails. Independent means what it says: neither partner may hold more than 50% of the other’s share capital or voting rights, neither may hold decision-making power over the other, and they may not sit under the same control. Two companies in the same group are one partner for this purpose. Shared ownership by the same venture-capital fund, institutional investor or public body does not by itself count as control.
- The two budget rules
- Two arithmetic conditions decide eligibility and neither is rounded, so 49.9% fails. First: the budgets of the SMEs from Eurostars countries, with their own subcontracting costs subtracted, must be 50% or more of the total project cost. Note what that rule does not say — it counts the Eurostars-country SMEs together, not only the ones in the two countries you used to satisfy the partner requirement. Second: no single participant and no single country may be responsible for more than 70% of the project budget, and for this calculation the budgets of all entities in the same country are added together. One further rule catches consortia that are otherwise well built: subcontracting between project partners is not allowed, for any partner, of any type.
- Duration and purpose
- The project must be completed in 36 months or fewer, and it must have an exclusively civilian purpose. Dual-use is not automatically excluded: the guidelines allow military partners to participate and allow results that serve both civil and military end-users, provided the project itself has an exclusive focus on civil applications. This criterion is checked automatically from your answer to question 13 of the application form, and a negative result disqualifies the application outright; applications that pass then get a second check by the ethics panel.
- One rule about money that is easy to miss
- At least one participant in the application must actually receive public funding. A consortium in which every partner self-finances cannot be approved as a Eurostars project, however good the science. Organisations from non-Eurostars countries are welcome to join and cover their own costs — they simply cannot be the ones carrying that requirement.
- Timeline and how you submit
- The call opens 17 December 2026 and closes 4 March 2027 at 14:00 Brussels time. Submission runs through the Eureka project platform, myeurekaproject.org: the innovative SME leading the consortium opens the application and invites the other partners into it, which means the lead company controls the timetable. Eureka confirms whether your application is eligible within one week of the deadline. Before applying, the call page asks you to contact your national or regional funding body to discuss your project idea, funding in your country, and legal and financial viability.
- Deadline
- 4 Mar 2027(closes 14:00 CET)— 187 days remaining
- Max grant
- Set by your national funding body
Is this the right call for you? 8 conditions decide it
- 01You want to apply on your own. Eurostars funds consortia only: at least two legal entities, independent of one another, from at least two different Eurostars countries. There is no solo route and no exception for a large SME.
- 02Your partner is a company in your own group, or one you control. Independence means neither entity holds more than 50% of the other’s share capital or voting rights and neither holds decision-making power over the other, directly or indirectly, nor do both sit under the same control. A parent and its subsidiary count as one partner. Shared ownership by the same venture-capital fund, institutional investor or public body does not by itself count as control.
- 03Neither of your two countries is an EU Member State or a Horizon Europe Associated Country. All 37 Eurostars countries qualify except Canada, the Republic of Korea, Singapore and South Africa, so this only removes a consortium built exclusively from those four.
- 04Your partner sits in a Horizon Europe Associated Country that is not a Eurostars country. Albania, Armenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Kosovo, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, Tunisia and Ukraine are associated to Horizon Europe but do not participate in Eurostars. Being in a Horizon Europe country is not the test.
- 05Your consortium is not led by an SME from a Eurostars country. The lead must meet the EU SME definition — fewer than 250 staff and turnover of €50m or less or a balance sheet total of €43m or less, counting group companies — and be legally and operationally based in a Eurostars country. A university, research organisation or large company can be a partner but cannot lead.
- 06The Eurostars-country SMEs in your consortium carry less than half the total project cost, after subtracting their own subcontracting. The figure is not rounded, so 49.9% is a rejection. The same applies to the second rule: any single participant, or all participants in any one country combined, holding more than 70% of the project budget.
- 07Your project runs longer than 36 months, or it does not have an exclusively civilian purpose. The civilian check is automatic, based on your answer to question 13 of the application form, and a negative result disqualifies the application before evaluation.
- 08Every partner in your consortium would self-finance. At least one participant has to actually receive public funding, otherwise the application cannot be approved — which is why each partner needs to check its own national rules before you file, not after.
Not a match on one of these? Then this call is not the one, which says nothing about the next. Calls open continuously: the free Match Report tells you which call does fit, or tells you plainly that none of them do, and our weekly digest tells you when a call you can enter opens.
Do you have to find your own partner for Eurostars, and will a consultant find one for you?
You bring the partner. That is the honest answer for us and it is worth checking against anyone who tells you otherwise: matchmaking a consortium is a months-long relationship question, not a document, and a partner introduced late is the single most common reason a Eurostars application either falls apart or reads as two projects stapled together. What the programme requires is at least two organisations that are independent of one another, in at least two different Eurostars countries, with at least one of those countries in the EU or associated to Horizon Europe. If you already have a research group, a customer, a supplier or a joint-development partner abroad, you probably have your consortium and simply have not framed it as one. If you do not, the sequence matters: arrange the partner first and treat the call deadline as the second problem. Note also who drives the paperwork — the leading SME opens the application on myeurekaproject.org and invites the partners in, so the lead company controls the timetable, not the partner.
How much money do you get from Eurostars, and what is the funding percentage?
There is no single answer, and any source that gives you one for Call 12 today is guessing. Eurostars does not set a European grant amount or a European funding rate. The official call page is explicit: the amount your organisation receives is managed by your National Funding Body, funding rules vary from country to country, and your national body decides which organisations can receive funding, which activities can be funded and at what rate — and may also cap the amount per project or per partner. So two partners doing identical work in two countries can end up on two different percentages, and each one covers the remainder from its own resources. For Call 12 specifically the call page states that national and regional funding information is still being confirmed and is subject to change before the call opens on 17 December 2026. The practical consequence: ask your own national funding body what your rate will be, and use the intervening months to settle whether you are eligible at all — that part is knowable now.
What gets a Eurostars application rejected before anyone reads it?
Eligibility is checked within one week of the deadline, against the information in the application form as submitted, and failure on any one of the seven criteria disqualifies the application without evaluation. Two of the seven are pure arithmetic and neither figure is rounded, which is where well-built consortia quietly fail. The SMEs from Eurostars countries, with their own subcontracting subtracted, must carry 50% or more of the total project cost — note that this counts all Eurostars-country SMEs, not only the ones in the two countries you used to satisfy the partner requirement, and that the subcontracting is subtracted from their budgets but not from the project total. And no single participant, and no single country once you add up everyone based there, may hold more than 70% of the project budget. A third trap sits alongside them: subcontracting between project partners is not allowed at all, for any partner of any type. If your consortium was designed around one partner buying work from another, it needs restructuring before it needs writing.
Can a defence or dual-use company apply to Eurostars?
Possibly, and this is more open than the wording suggests. The criterion is that the project has an exclusive focus on civil applications. The guidelines then state plainly that this does not rule out the participation of military partners, nor the development of results that meet the needs of both civil and military end-users — dual-use goods as defined in Regulation (EU) 2021/821 — provided the project itself keeps an exclusive focus on civil applications. So the test lands on the project, not on your customer list or your sector. Two cautions. The check is automatic, run against your answer to question 13 of the application form, and a negative result disqualifies you outright, so that answer is not a place to be approximate. And applications that pass go to a further review of civilian purpose by the ethics panel.
Can your eligibility change after you submit?
Yes, and this is the condition applicants most often do not know about. Your application has to comply with all seven criteria from the moment you submit until you sign your consortium agreement — roughly five to six months later. You are obliged to report new information that could affect eligibility, and Eureka is obliged to re-review eligibility if it receives or discovers such information. An application that was eligible at submission can be removed from the process later: the guidelines give the examples of a legal and financial viability check revealing that the main partner is not an SME after all, or that two entities are not independent of one another. If an acquisition, an investment round that changes control, or growth past the SME thresholds is plausible in your next six months, that belongs in the conversation before you file. If you are ruled ineligible, redress is available but only on procedural grounds and only with clear evidence.
The deadline is March 2027. When do you actually have to start?
Work back from two fixed points. The call opens 17 December 2026 and closes 4 March 2027 at 14:00 Brussels time, and the application platform does not accept anything before it opens. The writing itself is realistically eight weeks: the form runs to fourteen assessed questions, three summary questions and nine questions per consortium member, plus work packages and a budget per partner, which is well over ten thousand words of narrative that has to hold together across two sets of accounts. Everything else has a longer lead time than the writing. Settling a partner takes months. Registering each partner on the platform, and having a PIC in place, has to be done before submission. And every partner should have spoken to its own national funding body first, which the call page asks for explicitly. That is why a March deadline is an autumn decision rather than a January one — not because the document takes long, but because the things that make the document possible do.
How much does it cost to have the application written, and what happens first?
The first step is free and written: send us the consortium you intend to file with and you get a Joint Report — a written verdict on whether it can actually file and whether this route is worth your time, including a plain no with the reason if that is the answer. Five of the seven conditions are settled outright by what you tell us; on the two that are budget ratios we tell you whether the split you have in mind clears them, since those numbers only settle as the application is written. Nothing is owed for it and there is no sales call. If you then decide to go ahead, writing the application is €9,950 for a two-partner consortium, fixed and agreed before we start, with €2,500 for each partner above two, because every extra partner means an extra budget, an extra work package and an extra alignment round. A three-party consortium is therefore €12,450. Those amounts are exclusive of VAT: as an intra-EU business-to-business supply the reverse-charge mechanism applies once you provide a valid VAT number, so no VAT is added to the invoice, while a Dutch customer pays 21% on top. There is no success fee and no percentage of your grant — which matters more here than on most calls, since your grant is set by your national funding body and nobody knows its size yet. You pay half on signing and half on submission. One thing we do not sell: we do not find the partner.
Verified against The official Eureka call page for Eurostars Call 12, retrieved 27 August 2026 (dates, the seven criteria, national funding arrangements, participating countries and the submission route), and the Eurostars eligibility guidelines version 5.3, June 2026, published by the Eureka Network (the definition of an innovative SME, the independence test, the 50% and 70% calculations, the self-financing rule, the civilian-purpose check and the re-review of eligibility up to consortium agreement).. Official source: https://www.eurekanetwork.org/programmes-and-calls/eurostars/eurostars-call-12-for-projects-deadline-march-2027/ ↗
Everything above is a consortium question, not a writing question — which is exactly why the writing is worth buying and the consortium is not something we can sell you. You bring the partner. We do not broker consortia and we will not introduce you to companies we have not worked with. What we do is write the application: your technology and market case set out as one project against the programme’s own evaluation criteria, and a budget that holds together across partners while satisfying each country’s separate funding rules. That costs €9,950 fixed for a two-partner consortium, with €2,500 for each partner above two, so a three-party consortium is €12,450. Those amounts are exclusive of VAT; for a business customer elsewhere in the EU the reverse-charge mechanism applies once you supply a valid VAT number, and for a Dutch customer 21% is added. No success fee and no percentage of your grant, ever. Half on signing, half on submission. The first step costs nothing and is written, not a sales call: send us your intended consortium and you get a free Joint Report — a written verdict on whether it can actually file and whether this is worth your time, including a plain no with the reason if that is the answer. To be precise about what that verdict covers: five of the seven conditions are settled outright by what you tell us, and on the two that are budget ratios we tell you whether the split you have in mind clears them, because those numbers only settle as the application is written. If you do not have a partner yet, say so and we will tell you what the programme requires; you are welcome back when it is arranged.
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