Frankfurt: Banks in the euro area will pay nothing into the Single Resolution Fund in 2026 for the third year in a row, the Single Resolution Board announced on 13 February 2026, unless circumstances change. The decision follows from the size of the fund, which stood at more than €81 billion at the end of 2025, according to Agence Europe.

The Single Resolution Fund is the common safety net for failing banks in the 21 euro area countries. Its target level is 1 percent of covered deposits, and the Board will check again at the beginning of 2027 whether that level still holds. If the fund falls below the target after any use, banks would have to pay again, which gives the mechanism a built-in refill rule.

A pause in payments to the Single Resolution Fund affects banks directly. Lenders save the annual levy, though the sources I reviewed give no total for earlier years. The cushion exists because earlier contributions built it.

The European Banking Authority is working on the rules around the fund. On 16 June 2026 it published a review of the capital framework for banks that, in its words, does not call for a fundamental redesign. It says changes should improve consistency, predictability and effectiveness, with four principles: preserving overall resilience and capital neutrality, following international standards, proportionality and deepening the Single Market.

The resolution proposals bear most closely on the Single Resolution Fund. The Authority wants to streamline the minimum requirement for own funds and eligible liabilities, known as MREL, to align the definitions of eligible resources under MREL and the international loss-absorbing capacity standard, and to reduce the number of metrics. These changes would make it clearer how much loss-absorbing debt a bank must hold before the fund is ever touched.

Other proposals reach beyond resolution. The Authority would merge the countercyclical capital buffer and the systemic risk buffer into one releasable buffer with a common method, turn the leverage ratio requirement into a buffer, and update the framework for other systemically important institutions. The press report on the plan gives no consultation timetable, no figures and no named officials.

Both items share one limit, because they come from secondary reports that I did not check against the original documents. The next signal is the Board’s review at the start of 2027, and the answer will show whether the Single Resolution Fund still meets its 1 percent target after a third year without new levies.