A resilient EU budget supporting Europe’s priorities in 2024

This article is brought to you in association with the European Commission.

A Resilient EU budget Supporting Europe’s Priorities in 2024

The Court of Auditors (ECA) published today its Annual Report, auditing the revenue and expenditure of the EU budget. The Commission welcomes the ECA’s findings on the regularity of the implementation of the EU budget in 2024, which once again give the EU’s annual accounts a clean bill of health – for the eighteenth consecutive year. As in previous years, the ECA confirmed that the collection of EU revenues was free from material error.

Significant milestones for the EU Budget in 2024

The EU budget is the backbone of the Commission’s work, helping to deliver on all EU priorities. Since the start of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, the EU budget has provided unprecedented and comprehensive support to the country and its people. By the end of 2024, a total of €130.2 billion had been mobilised to deliver financial, economic, humanitarian, military, and diplomatic assistance.

Moreover, the EU budget provided humanitarian aid to people in need in Gaza, with €237 million. This is part of the €2.5 billion delivered in humanitarian assistance to help address several crises in the world.

The budget continued supporting the climate transition. In 2024 only, climate-related actions prevented around 98 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from polluting our environment. This is thanks to the €662 billion supporting climate mainstreaming objectives, representing 34% of the total budget, surpassing the initial target of 30%, for the 2021-2027 period (including NextGenerationEU).

Among other achievements, the EU budget allowed over 2.2 million patients with rare conditions to access diagnosis and treatment in 24 European reference networks in 2024. Regarding the digital transition, additional capacity of 5000 terabits per second had been created by backbone networks, including submarine cables, deployed by the Connecting Europe Facility by the end of 2024.

Meanwhile, the implementation of the landmark NextGenerationEU recovery plan continued to drive the economic transformation of the EU, notably through support for investments and reforms in Member States from the Recovery and Resilience Facility.

Lastly, 2024 saw the first-ever mid-term revision of the ceilings of the Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF). This agreement was crucial to enable the EU to respond to new and pressing challenges, first and foremost Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.

Strong Controls and Targeted Actions Protect the EU Budget

The Commission has noted the ECA’s adverse opinion on the regularity of spending under the MFF and its qualified opinion on Recovery and Resilience Facility expenditure. At the same time, it welcomes the significant decrease in the error rate calculated by the European Court of Auditors for 2024, which fell from 5.6% in 2023 to 3.6%, confirming a steady and continuous improvement in the management of EU funds.

The Commission also recalls that the estimated level of error reported by the ECA is not a measure of fraud, inefficiency, or waste, but a measure of the level of spending that is not fully in compliance with the applicable rules. In this regard, the Commission acknowledges that further improvements are needed and is taking action accordingly, including through its proposals for simpler and more harmonised financial rules under the next multiannual financial framework.

Furthermore, given their distinct roles as manager of the EU budget and external auditor, the Commission and the ECA apply different audit approaches and methodologies to measure the level of error. Efforts are being undertaken with a view to fostering a common understanding. For example, a series of joint workshops were organised in March 2025. The discussions acknowledged that the differences in methodological approaches are inevitable, due to the distinct mandates. Nevertheless, the two institutions identified specific aspects where the alignment of methodologies might be possible as well as areas for improvement to achieve the shared aim of better protecting the EU budget.

Thanks to the hundreds of thousands of checks performed by national authorities, other partners, and the Commission itself, the Commission is well-informed about the risks to the EU budget and can take targeted actions to address them:

• For cost-based programmes, the Commission aims to keep the final level of error below 2% when those programmes are closed, with all checks and corrections completed. This was achieved again this year.
• For performance-based programmes, such as the 2023-2027 common agricultural policy (CAP), the Commission’s controls focus on the proper functioning of the governance systems put in place in Member States. For the CAP, the Commission concluded that Member States’ systems are functioning well overall.

To protect the EU budget, the Commission continues to use preventive and corrective tools, such as interrupting and suspending payments and applying financial corrections when issues are detected. In 2024, the Commission and Member States implemented preventive and corrective measures amounting to €2.66 billion.

With its 2028–2034 MFF proposal adopted in July 2025, the Commission proposed robust and harmonised audit and control rules to ensure a high level of protection of the EU budget, while reducing administrative burden and making EU funding simpler and more accessible for beneficiaries.

Background

The publication of the Annual Report of the ECA, and the presentation of the Integrated Financial and Accountability Reporting (IFAR) package to the European Parliament, kicks off the annual ‘discharge procedure’, taking stock of the financial management and achievements of the EU budget in 2024. The IFAR package includes five reports from the Commission that offer a comprehensive look at how the EU budget was used.