Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A Horizon Europe RIA declares Work Package 3 complete at the end of a reporting period and receives the pre-agreed lump sum for that work package, with no itemised cost report required.
- Is an instance
At the project's final reporting period, a partially completed work package is declared as such and paid pro-rata to its accepted degree of completion, rather than withheld in full.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A standard Horizon Europe cost-reimbursement RIA, which reimburses 100 percent of eligible actual direct costs plus a flat indirect-cost rate, is not a lump-sum grant even though both models use the same 25 percent indirect-cost logic.
Editorial commentary
Under a lump-sum grant, a Horizon Europe beneficiary still builds and submits a detailed budget at proposal stage, as though the project were cost-reimbursement — but once the Commission evaluates and fixes that amount per work package in the Grant Agreement, actual expenditure is no longer tracked or reported. Payment depends on completing the work, not on what it actually cost to do it.
How payment actually triggers
Under Grant Agreement Articles 22.3.3 and 22.3.4, payment is in principle triggered only by fully completed work packages, declared as such in the periodic technical report. At the end of the project’s final reporting period, partially completed work packages can still be declared, with the lump-sum share paid pro-rata to the accepted degree of completion rather than withheld entirely. Because there is no cost-based financial statement to submit, the financial report is generated automatically from which tasks and work packages a beneficiary has declared complete, rather than compiled from actual-cost ledgers.
What this removes, and what it does not
Lump-sum funding removes detailed cost-eligibility checks, unit-cost calculations, and cost-related audits of actual expenditure — the administrative burden that dominates cost-reimbursement grants. It does not remove the flat indirect-cost logic: the same 25 percent rate applied to eligible direct costs in a standard Horizon Europe grant still shapes how the lump-sum amount is calculated and allocated across beneficiaries at proposal stage, and it does not remove technical reporting — beneficiaries must still demonstrate, in narrative and evidence, that a declared work package was genuinely completed.
Adoption and open questions
Lump-sum funding has expanded steadily since its introduction and now covers a substantial share of Horizon Europe Work Programme calls (secondary sources report roughly half of 2026-2027 calls); the exact proportion moves with each Work Programme and should be checked against the current call documentation rather than treated as fixed. The model raises real practical questions the Annotated Grant Agreement addresses in detail: how partial completion is assessed, how scope changes are handled once amounts are fixed per work package, and how budget can be reallocated between work packages before the amounts are locked in.
References
- Horizon Europe Model Grant Agreement Articles 22.3.3-22.3.4; European Commission Horizon Europe lump-sum funding guidance — WebSearch-corroborated secondary aggregation, 2026-08-22 (multiple consultancy/NCP summaries convergent); re-verify against the current Annotated Grant Agreement if citing exact article wording as load-bearing.
Also known as
Lump sum funding (HE) · HE lump sum · Lump-sum model
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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