European Commission issues €5 billion in its 10th syndicated transaction of 2025

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

The European Commission has today raised €5 billion of EU-Bonds in its 10^th syndicated transaction for 2025.

The single-tranche transaction concerned a €5 billion tap of the EU-Bond maturing on 14 October 2030. The 5-year bond was priced 99.870% with a re-offer yield of 2.527%. Bids received were in excess of €86 billion which equals oversubscription rates of approximately 17-times.

The proceeds of the transaction will be used to finance EU policy programmes most notably in the context of NextGenerationEU and support to Ukraine.

The Commission has now issued €62.27 billion since July and €148.052 billion since the start of the year. A full overview of all EU transactions executed to date is available online. In line with the EU funding plan, the Commission will finalise its EU-Bond issuances for this semester with an up to €5bn EU-Bond auction on 1 December and a related subsequent non-competitive offer. The next transaction in the EU’s indicative issuance calendar is an EU-Bill auction on 19 November.

Background

The European Commission is empowered by the EU Treaties to borrow from the international capital markets on behalf of the European Union to finance selected EU policy programmes. It is a well-established name in debt securities markets, with a track record of bond issuances over the past 40 years. All issuances executed by the European Commission are denominated exclusively in euro. All EU borrowing is guaranteed by the EU budget, and contributions to the EU budget are an unconditional legal obligation of all Member States under the EU Treaties.

Since January 2023, the EU funds its different policy programmes by issuing single-branded EU-Bonds rather than separately labelled bonds for individual programmes. This follows the creation of a unified funding approach, extending the diversified funding strategy first established in 2021 for NextGenerationEU to other policy programmes funded by EU borrowing.

To finance EU policies as efficiently and effectively as possible, the Commission’s issuances are structured by semi-annual funding plans and pre-announced issuance windows. In parallel, a framework incentivising EU Primary Dealers ─ a network of banks authorised to directly trade EU bonds ─ to provide quotes on EU securities on electronic platforms is in place since November 2023. A repurchase facility is also available to EU Primary Dealers since October 2024 to support the secondary market liquidity through the use of EU-Bonds in repurchase agreements.

With today’s transaction, the EU has now outstanding €560.46 billion in EU-Bonds under the unified funding approach. Of the proceeds raised, over €352.74 billion has been disbursed to Member States under the NextGenerationEU Recovery and Resilience Facility. A further €75.88 billion has been allocated to other EU programmes benefitting from NextGenerationEU funding. Furthermore, almost €21.07 billion has been disbursed to Ukraine under the Ukraine Facility that will finance up to €33 billion in loans to Ukraine between 2024 and 2027. In addition, the last tranche (€4.1 billion) has recently been disbursed under the €18 billion EU exceptional Macro Financial assistance loan which will be repaid with proceeds from immobilised Russian State assets as part of the G7-led Extraordinary Revenue Acceleration (ERA) loans initiative.*

The EU’s total debt outstanding now stands at about €732.899 billion, of which €35.29 billion in the form of EU-Bills.

Information on the allocation on the investors in this transaction is available in the transactions section of the EU as a borrower website. More information on EU’s issuance activities is available here: The EU as a borrower – investor relations – European Commission (europa.eu)

* Under the Commission’s unified funding approach amounts raised are not necessarily equal to amounts disbursed at a specific point of time.