Three European Defence Fund calls close at the same moment: 29 September 2026, 17:00:00 Brussels time. Together they carry €92 million. They are not interchangeable. SMERO-NT will not fund a prototype. DIS-NT will not fund a test campaign. SME-NT will not admit a non-SME beneficiary, and will not fund design at all unless two Member States have jointly agreed harmonised capability requirements. Consortia often choose between the three by comparing the €5 million, €6 million and €3 million ceilings. That comparison misleads. The ceilings mark the outer limit of an admissible request, not the size of a typical award — across the two published rounds, the awards made were eleven, eight and six in 2024, and nine, eight and five in 2025, with averages nowhere near those figures. The real question is which route can lawfully carry the critical path of a given project, and it has to be answered before any drafting begins.
Our new manual is built for that decision. It maps the nine statutory activity categories against all three topics, works the SME test through Commission Recommendation 2003/361/EC article by article, and traces the ownership-control regime of Article 9, including the two derogations that are routinely confused in practice. It reconstructs the document baseline from the adopting act rather than the publication page, and it flags where the governing documents disagree: the technology-readiness formulation differs between the work programme and the topic descriptions in a single implementing decision adopted on the same day. The manual does not resolve that contradiction. It sets out which reading each formulation supports and drafts the question to put to the granting authority. Sixteen primary sources, eighteen decision tables, a ten-stage calendar counted back from the deadline, and an error register that marks each failure as fatal, correctable or competitive. The full manual is available to subscribers, along with the complete Defence Finance Monitor archive and every new edition on publication.
The full manual is available to subscribers. See the complete contents and download the PDF on the report page — a subscription also gives you the entire Defence Finance Monitor archive and each new edition on publication.