The Erasmus+ budget is now the sharpest line in the fight over the 2028-2034 EU budget, after Parliament’s Committee on Culture and Education voted on 29 September 2026 to ask for far more money than the European Commission has proposed. The committee backed its report by 24 votes to 1, with one abstention, and it puts the Erasmus+ budget at €47.39 billion against the Commission’s offer of €40.8 billion. The difference of about €6.6 billion, roughly 16 percent, sets the terms for the negotiation ahead.
The Erasmus+ budget report was drafted by Bogdan Zdrojewski, a Polish member of the European People’s Party, and it treats the Commission’s number as a floor that cannot cover the programme’s ambitions. The Commission’s proposal merges Erasmus+ with the European Solidarity Corps for the 2028-2034 period, which means one envelope must now pay for student exchanges, school partnerships, youth projects, volunteering and sport. Lawmakers fear that a merged programme with a modest increase will force painful choices between those strands.
The committee’s text also proposes how the larger Erasmus+ budget should be shared among strands. Education and training would receive 74.6 percent of the money, youth and volunteering 15 percent, and sport 4.1 percent. Writing the split into the legal text matters because it limits how much freedom the Commission would have to move money between strands once the programme is running. Parliament wants predictability, particularly for youth organisations and sports bodies that have often felt like junior partners next to higher education.
Mobility is the second pillar of the Erasmus+ budget report. The committee calls for what it describes as greater mobility for all, and it asks that the programme account for regional differences in living costs so that a student from a poorer region is not priced out of a placement in an expensive city. It also sets a minimum of 20 percent participation from disadvantaged groups. The aim is to turn the inclusion goals that every Erasmus+ proposal repeats into a measurable commitment.
The third demand concerns conditions attached to grants. Members want funding to respect the financial interests and the values of the Union, which signals that the rule-of-law debates shaping other parts of the budget will also reach education grants. Universities and civil society groups will watch the wording closely, because compliance duties can be heavy for small organisations.
The path forward is long. A plenary vote on the Erasmus+ budget position is targeted for November 2026, and the Council of the EU will only open its own negotiations after Parliament has approved its text. Talks on the funding agreements are expected in January or February 2027. Governments that already worry about the overall size of the 2028-2034 budget are unlikely to endorse a rise of this scale without a fight.
That tension is the real story behind the committee vote. Parliament has chosen to defend Erasmus+ as one of the most recognisable products of European integration, and its figure is a bargaining position as much as a forecast. The Commission will argue that its proposal already delivers a larger programme, while the Council will ask what can be trimmed elsewhere. How far the final Erasmus+ budget lands from €40.8 billion will show how much political weight student mobility carries in a budget squeezed by defence, competitiveness and debt costs.
