The Recovery and Resilience Facility is entering the last weeks of its payout phase, and the Commission’s assessments of Austria and France on 30 September show how the biggest EU spending instrument ever launched will close. Austria’s final request of €306 million brings its total under the plan to about €3.96 billion. France’s fifth and final request is worth €6.1 billion out of a national allocation of €40.3 billion.
Both countries follow the same Recovery and Resilience Facility calendar. Member states had to complete every milestone and target by 31 August 2026, the final payment requests were due by 30 September, and the Commission must settle all payments by 31 December 2026. Austria submitted on 29 July and says it completed all 166 milestones and targets, including eight milestones and ten targets tied to its last tranche. France lodged its request on 26 June and covers the remaining ten milestones and seventeen targets.
The content of those tranches is revealing. Austria’s package includes nineteen projects that cut greenhouse gas emissions in industry and transport, upgrades on the Koralm railway that shrink the Graz to Klagenfurt journey from three hours to 45 minutes, and high-speed broadband for more than 80,000 households. France’s tranche rewards the renovation of over 1,000 public buildings and roughly 400,000 private homes through the MaPrimeRénov scheme, plus work on more than 140 cathedrals and historic monuments, hospitals, transport and digital public services.
A positive assessment is not yet a payment. The Council’s Economic and Financial Committee has four weeks to give its opinion, after which the Commission can adopt the formal payment decisions. That sequence matters because the Commission has ruled out any extension of the Recovery and Resilience Facility deadlines, and every remaining request across the 27 capitals must pass through the same pipeline before the year ends.
The scale explains why the final stretch is watched so closely. Earlier Commission figures put disbursements above €315 billion after more than 2,000 milestones and targets were met, and the financing came from bonds issued by the Commission on capital markets. Unlike traditional cohesion money, the Recovery and Resilience Facility pays only when agreed results are verified, so the money that is not earned is simply not paid out.
The performance-based design of the Recovery and Resilience Facility is the lasting policy lesson. Governments that revised their plans in 2025 and 2026 to drop unrealistic projects and concentrate on deliverable ones are now collecting the rewards, while slower implementers risk cuts to their final payments. The same logic is already shaping the debate on the 2028 to 2034 budget, where Parliament and the Commission are discussing how far results-based financing should replace conventional grants.
Austria and France therefore offer an early read on how the Recovery and Resilience Facility will be judged once the accounts are closed. If the remaining payment decisions are adopted before 31 December, the facility will end as a delivery exercise that met its calendar, even if the audits and debates about its value for money will continue well into 2027.
