Warsaw: The Recovery and Resilience Facility has reached its final stretch, after all 27 member states filed their last payment requests by the 30 September 2026 deadline. The requests cover the full allocation of €360 billion in grants and €213 billion in loans, a combined envelope of €573 billion, the European Commission announced on 1 October.

Governments had to finish every agreed milestone and target by 31 August 2026, the date on which the implementation period of the Recovery and Resilience Facility ended. The Commission received 21 final requests in September alone, worth €105.4 billion and covering 1,539 milestones and targets. Austria, Czechia, Denmark, France, Slovakia and Sweden had already filed theirs earlier in the year.

So far the Commission has paid out €450 billion from the fund. In the same week it announced more than €9.8 billion in further disbursements to Poland, Sweden, Belgium, Estonia and Cyprus, after the Council approved the payments. Those transfers show the pattern that defines the Recovery and Resilience Facility, in which money follows verified milestones rather than invoices.

The hard work now shifts to assessment. The Commission reviews the evidence that national authorities submit and, if it finds the milestones met, issues a positive preliminary assessment. It then seeks the opinion of the Economic and Financial Committee before it adopts a payment decision. Preliminary assessments of the final requests should arrive by 20 November 2026, and payment decisions are expected toward the end of December. All payments linked to fulfilled milestones must be completed by 31 December 2026.

Scrutiny of the Recovery and Resilience Facility will not end with the last payment. The European Court of Auditors, in Special Report 14/2026, found that most sampled member states can trace the money but that only some collect the necessary data systematically. The auditors also found that the Commission does not collect actual cost data by measure, and that published information on final recipients, actual amounts and results falls short.

Those findings matter because the Recovery and Resilience Facility promised performance-based funding under NextGenerationEU. Without cost data, observers cannot easily judge what each reform delivered for every euro spent. The Commission will publish its annual report on the facility in October, which should give the latest overview of implementation across the Union.

For national governments, the next eleven weeks carry real stakes. Ministries in every capital are now answering follow-up questions from Commission staff ahead of the 20 November assessments, and each unresolved milestone can complicate a payment. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the process offers “tangible proof of what Europe can achieve when it acts together.”

The Recovery and Resilience Facility now moves from spending to accounting. By late December the Commission will have decided on the last payments, and the audit trail that follows will show whether one of the largest recovery programmes in Union history delivered the reforms it promised.