Cut-off date

The cut-off is enforced by a clock, not by a person. Submission closes at 17:00:00 Brussels time on the stated day (not midnight, not your local afternoon) and the system stops accepting uploads at that second. There is no grace period and nobody has discretion to grant one.

Some calls run a single deadline; others run SEVERAL CUT-OFFS against one budget. Each cut-off is evaluated on its own, so an early one is not a soft option: it competes against whoever else submitted then, and a later one may be competing for whatever money the earlier rounds left.

Submit early and replace. The system accepts a new version until the cut-off and the last accepted one counts, so a complete-if-imperfect proposal uploaded the day before removes the entire category of disasters involving a browser, a network or a colleague at 16:50.

A procedure exists for genuine failures of the Commission's own systems, but it requires evidence and it must be invoked almost immediately, within a very short window after the deadline. It is not a remedy for a slow office connection or a large file, and it is granted rarely.

The last hours are also when the file itself becomes a risk. Fonts, embedded images and unflattened PDFs push documents over size limits and break the validation step, which is a discovery best made on Tuesday rather than at ten to five on Thursday.