EIC Accelerator eligible costs are the costs the EU accepts as the base for your grant: personnel, subcontracting, travel, equipment depreciation, other goods and services, plus a 25% flat rate for overheads on most of them. The grant covers at most 70% of that total, stays below EUR 2.5 million, and pays only for innovation work at TRL 6 to 8 completed within 24 months, all set out in the EIC Accelerator guide for applicants.
That sentence is accurate and almost useless when you are staring at the budget workbook at midnight. The real questions are narrower. Does the 25% apply to your subcontractor? Is the pilot plant a cost or an investment? Who pays the other 30%? This guide answers them in the order you build the budget. If you need the wider map of instruments first, start with EU funding for deep tech startups.
The short answer
- Eligible: direct personnel costs, subcontracting, travel and subsistence, equipment (usually as depreciation), other goods, works and services, and indirect costs at a 25% flat rate.
- Not on the overhead base: subcontracting. It is funded at 70% but earns no 25%.
- Not eligible: VAT you can recover, costs outside the project period, and anything that is not real, recorded and needed for the project.
- Not grant territory at all: TRL 9 deployment and scale up. That belongs to the investment component.
- Always yours: the 30% co-financing of the grant work packages.
What the grant pays for: activities before cost lines
Founders tend to start with cost categories. Evaluators start with activities. A cost is only eligible if it sits inside a work package the grant is allowed to fund.
TRL 6 to 8 work packages
The grant component funds innovation activities from TRL 6 to 8. In practice that means building and testing prototypes, pilots and demonstration in an operational environment, minimum viable products, preparation for industrialisation, commercialisation strategy, market studies, user testing and IP protection, the list CARA gives for the 2025 call. If a cost line serves one of those activities and the work package is coherent, you are in the right territory.
IP is worth flagging because founders often leave it out. Patent work tied to the innovation is a legitimate grant activity, but price it properly before it enters the table. Our sister company EX IX breaks down the cost of filing a European patent application, which is the number most first budgets underestimate.
What moves to the investment component
Under blended finance, the investment component covers the remaining expenditure, including TRL 9 activities onward and any TRL 6 to 8 work packages you flag for equity. One rule catches people: an individual work package cannot be funded by a mixture of grant and investment. You choose per work package. The EIC lump sum FAQ adds that the financial plan should document when investments are planned, for example building a plant or increasing working capital to support sales. Those are investment needs, not grant costs. We cover how that side is negotiated in the EIC Accelerator investment component guide, and when you should skip it in grant only or blended finance.
The cost categories in the lump sum budget table
Since 2024 the Accelerator has paid its grant as a lump sum. For 2026 the Accelerator uses lump sum Type 2: you submit a detailed budget table with estimates per cost category, per beneficiary and per work package, and that table generates the breakdown that becomes Annex 2 of your grant agreement.
A lump sum does not loosen the rules. As the Silicon Capital Partners implementation guide puts it, cost estimates must approximate actual costs and follow the same eligibility logic as actual cost grants. The categories are these.
A. Personnel
Salaries for people working on the action, including the founding team. The EIC confirms that personnel costs for work on the action belong in the detailed budget table under direct personnel costs (the EIC Pre-Accelerator FAQ, which uses the same Horizon Europe lump sum grant agreement). Personnel is usually the biggest line and, for overheads, the most valuable one.
B. Subcontracting
Allowed, and often essential for certification, specialist testing or manufacturing runs you cannot do in house. The German National Contact Point FAQ is clear on the conditions: subcontracting must be well justified, there is no upper limit on its share of the budget, the costs must be reasonable and affordable for the SME, conflicts of interest must be ruled out, and you must show best price and quality. The EIC adds that subcontracted parts should in principle not be core parts of the project, because implementation lies with you.
One hard exclusion: entities established in China, Russia, Belarus or non government controlled areas of Ukraine, and entities under EU restrictive measures, cannot take part in any capacity, subcontractors included, as Ipernovation notes for spin-offs working with academic partners.
C.1 Travel and subsistence
Eligible when the work plan needs it: pilot sites, customer trials, regulatory meetings. High travel without a visible link to a task is challenged.
C.2 Equipment and depreciation
Equipment normally enters as depreciation, not purchase price. The workbook has a depreciation sheet: purchase cost, multiplied by the share of use for the project, multiplied by the share of the asset's useful life that falls inside the project. Two traps from the same Silicon Capital guide: the result is not carried into the main budget sheet automatically, so you must enter it by hand under C.2, and services, subscriptions or software licences do not belong in equipment at all. Rental and leasing go in C.2 as usage costs, explained in the comments tab.
C.3 Other goods, works and services
Consumables, testing and QA services, software licences, cloud access, dissemination and publication fees. Any purchase item above 15% of personnel costs must be listed and justified individually. A large, undifferentiated C.3 block is one of the most common triggers of evaluator concern.
E. Indirect costs
Overheads such as rent, utilities and general admin are not itemised. They are a flat 25%, calculated automatically on personnel plus purchase costs. You do not prove them, and you cannot claim more.
The 25% rule, with numbers
The most common budget error is putting the 25% on top of everything. Subcontracting is reimbursed at 70% but the flat rate for indirect costs does not apply to it. Ipernovation's worked example on funding rates shows the order of operations for an SME at 70%:
| Line | EUR | In the 25% base? |
|---|---|---|
| Personnel | 300,000 | Yes |
| Other goods and services | 40,000 | Yes |
| Subcontracting | 60,000 | No |
| Indirect costs, 25% of 340,000 | 85,000 | |
| Total eligible costs | 485,000 | |
| Grant at 70% | 339,500 | |
| Company share at 30% | 145,500 |
Scale that logic to a typical Accelerator project. Here is our own illustration, not an official figure: EUR 1.8 million personnel, EUR 400,000 purchase costs and EUR 500,000 subcontracting give an overhead base of EUR 2.2 million, indirect costs of EUR 550,000 and total eligible costs of EUR 3.25 million. At 70% the grant is EUR 2,275,000 and your company funds EUR 975,000.
Two readings. First, every euro of personnel or purchase cost carries 87.5 cents of grant (70% of 1.25), while every euro of subcontracting carries 70 cents. Second, the ceiling arrives faster than you think. Move that EUR 500,000 of subcontracting in house and the grant would compute to EUR 2,572,500, above the line. The application platform FAQ says you must request less than EUR 2.5 million unless it is justified to ask for more. Do not restructure the team for overhead, but know which way the maths moves.
What is not eligible
Lump sum or not, the basic test holds: eligible costs are real, recorded, needed for the project and incurred in the project period. From that test and the guidance above, these lines do not survive:
- Recoverable VAT. If your company deducts VAT in its tax return, budget net of VAT. Only non-recoverable VAT is eligible, as EUACC summarises from the annotated grant agreement.
- Costs outside the project period. Work done before the start date or after the end is not in the lump sum.
- Overheads on subcontracting. See above.
- Indirect costs if you hold an operating grant. The flat rate has to be removed from the requested amount in that case.
- Deployment and scale up. TRL 9 work, plant build out and working capital are investment component territory, not grant costs.
- Inflated or padded lines. Evaluators ask whether the costs in each work package are reasonable and non-excessive, and their recommendations are implemented during grant preparation. If the table contains ineligible costs, the grant can be reduced even after the project has started or ended.
Underbudgeting fails too. A budget that is implausibly light tells evaluators you do not understand the work.
Lump sum changes what eligible means in practice
Here is the part most guides skip. Under a lump sum, eligibility is decided when the budget is accepted. After that, you are paid for finished work, not for receipts.
Paid for finished work packages
The EIC states that subcontracting costs are considered entirely covered by the lump sum contribution for the work package, irrespective of the actual costs incurred. The flip side: a work package is paid only when it is fully completed. Ninety per cent done at the interim report earns nothing until the end. Design work packages small enough to finish inside one reporting period.
The 30% you fund
The grant covers at most 70%, so the company carries 30% of the grant work packages from its own resources. The EIC no longer adds that 30% to the investment needed in the financial plan, because it normally should not be covered by the equity investment. Plan it from revenue, existing shareholders or a private round, and show it credibly.
The cash gap
Pre-financing plus interim payments stop at 90% of the grant, and the final 10% arrives only after the final report is approved. A Mutual Insurance Mechanism contribution of 5% to 8% is held back from the first payment and returned at the end. Pre-financing remains EU property until accepted work clears it. Bridge the gap in your financial plan, not in your head.
The operator view
At EX EPIC we finance, patent and deploy science that would otherwise stay in the lab. That covers EUR 160M+ of capital, 24 patent families filed through EX IX and 200+ Zero-X waste-to-energy units installed in 11 countries, per exventure.co. The pattern we see is consistent. The budget line that hurts a project is rarely the one an evaluator cut. It is the one nobody priced: the certification run, the second prototype, the patent family in a market you did not plan for. Price TRL 6 to 8 honestly in the grant, and put everything that looks like deployment where it belongs.
Before you build the table, confirm you can apply at all with our EIC Accelerator eligibility checklist, check the odds in EIC Accelerator success rate, and follow the full sequence in how to apply for the EIC Accelerator.
FAQ
Can founders' salaries be an eligible cost in the EIC Accelerator?
Yes. Personnel costs for founders and staff working on the action go into the lump sum budget table as direct personnel costs, and they also carry the 25% flat rate for overheads.
Is there a cap on subcontracting in the EIC Accelerator?
There is no percentage cap. Subcontracting must be justified, reasonably priced, selected on best value for money and should not cover the core of the project. It is funded at 70% but earns no 25% overhead.
Are patent filing and IP costs eligible?
IP protection is a typical activity of the grant component, so patent costs linked to the innovation can sit in a grant work package, priced and justified like any other line.
Can I ask for more than EUR 2.5 million in grant?
Only with justification. Applicants must request less than EUR 2.5 million unless it is justified to ask for more, and the grant can never exceed 70% of total eligible costs.