Aveiro: Most of the single-stage Horizon Europe calls that opened in early 2026 close on 23 September, which means research offices across the Union spent this week on the familiar ritual of chasing partner signatures and checking budget tables against the portal’s validation rules. The clustering is an artefact of the work programme’s publication schedule rather than a design choice, but it has the effect of concentrating a large share of the year’s proposal effort into a single fortnight.
The 2026-2027 work programme is the last biennial cycle of Horizon Europe, which runs to the end of 2027. It carries more than EUR 14 billion, and the Commission has used it to introduce a structural novelty: horizontal calls, which cut across the thematic clusters rather than sitting inside them. The largest is a EUR 540 million call supporting the Clean Industrial Deal, split between clean technologies for climate action and the decarbonisation of energy-intensive industries. Consortia that would previously have had to choose between a climate cluster and an industry cluster can now apply to something that spans both.
Whether that helps depends on who is reading the proposal. Horizontal calls solve a real problem – genuinely interdisciplinary work has historically been penalised by evaluation panels assembled around a single cluster’s expertise – but they solve it only if the panels are assembled accordingly. A horizontal call evaluated by two disciplinary panels in sequence reproduces the problem it was meant to fix, with the added disadvantage that the applicant wrote one proposal for two audiences.
The final cycle also means the programme is now operating in the shadow of its successor. The Commission is consulting on the architecture of FP10, and the structural questions are open in a way they have not been since Horizon Europe was designed: whether the cluster model survives, whether the European Innovation Council’s blended finance instrument is expanded or absorbed, whether defence-adjacent research stays fenced off, and whether the widening measures that channel funding to lower-participation member states are strengthened or replaced. The answers will be shaped by the 2028-2034 financial framework negotiation, in which research competes with agriculture, cohesion and defence for a budget envelope that several net contributors want held flat.
For applicants, the practical consequence is that a project starting in late 2027 will run most of its life under administrative arrangements designed for the next programme. Grant agreements will be honoured, but the reporting systems, the audit approach and the model consortium terms will migrate. Anyone who lived through the transition from Horizon 2020 to Horizon Europe remembers the two years in which coordinators maintained parallel procedures for projects in two frameworks.
The less discussed issue is success rates. Horizon Europe has run at oversubscription levels that mean the great majority of proposals scoring above the quality threshold go unfunded. A proposal that clears 13 out of 15 and is rejected represents months of effort by a consortium of eight to twelve partners, and the aggregate cost of preparing unfunded proposals is a real charge on the European research system that appears in no budget line. The two-stage format used in some calls exists precisely to reduce it, and its limited application in the 2026 calls is a choice with consequences that will show up in nobody’s evaluation report.
The portal will hold. It usually does, though the last hour before a deadline remains the moment at which European research infrastructure is most visibly tested.
