Home / Programmes / EDF

European Defence Fund

The European Defence Fund co-finances collaborative defence research and capability development between companies and research bodies from several Member States.

Check my fit, free Browse all 37 calls →

Open calls

open and forthcoming

Published budget

€7.3B

summed across topics

Grants expected

not published for this programme

Closing within 30 days

move now or wait for the next round

What this programme is

The European Defence Fund co-finances collaborative defence research and capability development between companies and research bodies from several Member States. Its calls carry heavier eligibility conditions than civilian programmes, ownership and control of the applicants, security requirements, and a minimum number of participating countries, and those conditions are gates, not preferences.

17 calls use lump-sum funding, where you are paid for delivering work packages rather than for reporting costs. The next cut-off is 29 Sept 2026.

When it closes

3 months carry a cut-off. Each links to every call closing that month, across all programmes.

September 202627 cut-offs October 20264 cut-offs February 20276 cut-offs

Closing soonest

See all 37 calls →

The nine nearest cut-offs under this programme. Everything else is in the full list, where you can filter by deadline, applicant type and funding rate.

CallNext cut-offPer grant

Other funders in European Union

Programme	Open calls	Published budget	Soonest cut-off
Horizon Europe	482	€16B	09 Sept '26
LIFE Programme	31	€775M	08 Sept '26
EU External Action (EuropeAid)	23	,	24 Aug '26
Digital Europe Programme	23	€329M	24 Sept '26
Connecting Europe Facility	11	€2.7B	30 Sept '26
Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values	8	€163M	15 Sept '26
Research Fund for Coal and Steel	7	€65M	16 Sept '26
Erasmus+	5	€125K	17 Sept '26

Figures are computed from what European Defence Fund itself publishes. A call appears here only while a cut-off is still ahead of it.

About European Defence Fund

Who can apply to European Defence Fund calls?

It is set per call, not per programme. 0% of these calls accept a single applicant; 0 require a consortium, and 37 do not say. Where the conditions state the requirement we quote the sentence they state it in; where they do not, we infer it from the type of action and mark it as inferred, and an inferred value never appears without that mark.

What does the budget figure mean?

It is the sum of what the funder published per call, in the funder's own currency, converted once at the European Central Bank rates this build holds. Calls that publish no budget contribute nothing rather than an estimate, so the total is a floor, not a guess.

How often does this page change?

The corpus is re-synced nightly and the site is rebuilt with it. Cut-offs and countdowns are recomputed at build time, so a call that closed since the last sync leaves this page rather than sitting here with a stale date.

Can I see only the calls I could win?

Yes, the fit check reads every call on this page against your organisation on the gates that decide admissibility, and it runs in your browser with no account. Calls that block you are shown with the condition that blocks them, because sometimes it is one you can change.

Become the beneficiary.

Eight questions, no account, nothing sent anywhere. You will know which of the 1526 open calls you can actually enter before you finish your coffee.

Check my fit