The Horizon Europe pre-submission checklist, from admissibility to scoring

Every year, proposals that took a consortium months of work are removed from the competition before an expert reads a single line of the science. Not because the idea was weak, but because a hard rule was missed: a page over the limit, a missing annex, a consortium that does not qualify. In Horizon Europe, scoring is the last stage of a sequence, not the first. Before your proposal reaches the three evaluation criteria, it must clear two gates. The first is admissibility: was the proposal submitted correctly, complete and within the limits. The second is eligibility: do the consortium and the project qualify for this call at all. Fail either gate and there is no score to discuss, because no evaluator ever reads your proposal.

That is why this checklist, part of our guide on how to write a winning Horizon Europe proposal, is built in four layers, in the order in which the rules are applied: admissibility, eligibility, formatting, then the content checks that decide your score. It covers collaborative Pillar 2 calls, Research and Innovation Actions (RIA) and Innovation Actions (IA). Work through it top to bottom, and treat the first two layers as non-negotiable.

Submitted proposals Gate 1 Admissibility on time · complete · page limit Gate 2 Eligibility 3 entities · 3 countries · GEP rejected, never scored Evaluation Excellence · Impact Implementation
Figure 1. The two gates a proposal must clear before it is ever scored.

Layer 1: admissibility, the hard gates

Admissibility is checked before anything else. These are binary conditions: pass or fail, with no judgement involved and no appeal to the quality of your idea.

  • The proposal is submitted before the deadline, through the Funding and Tenders Portal. A late proposal is not accepted, with no exceptions.
  • The proposal is complete: all parts (A, B and C) and every mandatory annex are present, readable, accessible and printable.
  • The page limit is respected: 40 pages for RIA and IA (45 pages for lump-sum funding) in the 2026 application form. After the deadline, any excess pages are made invisible and are not taken into consideration by the experts, so an argument on page 42 does not exist. Writing directly in the exact template for your call is the simplest way to keep the page budget under control.
  • A draft plan for the dissemination and exploitation of results, including communication activities, is included in the proposal. This is an admissibility condition unless the topic states otherwise. See our guide to the dissemination, exploitation and communication plan.
  • The ethics self-assessment is completed.

Layer 2: eligibility, who and what qualifies

Eligibility determines whether your consortium and your project can be funded under this call. Check these conditions when you build the consortium, then again before submission, because partners and budgets move.

  • The consortium has at least 3 independent legal entities, each established in a different country. At least 1 is established in an EU Member State, and the others in Member States or Associated Countries.
  • No participant is a natural person. Natural persons are not eligible, except under exceptional conditions set by the call.
  • Third-country participation is verified. Entities from Low- and Middle-Income Countries are automatically eligible for funding. Entities from other non-associated third countries may participate but are generally not eligible for funding unless the call explicitly allows it.
  • The budget and duration fit the topic envelope. There is no general cap: the topic page sets the indicative budget and the expected duration.
  • The budget uses the correct funding rate: 100% of eligible costs for RIA, and for non-profit legal entities in an IA. 70% for profit-making legal entities in an IA. Budget your consortium with that split in mind.
  • A Gender Equality Plan (GEP) is declared. Having a GEP is an eligibility criterion for public bodies, research organisations and higher education institutions from Member States and Associated Countries. Note that the GEP (an institutional requirement) is different from the gender dimension in the research content (which is scored under Excellence).
  • Open science obligations are acknowledged: mandatory open access to peer-reviewed publications, responsible research data management under the FAIR principles, and a data management plan.
  • Conditional rules that apply to some projects are checked. If the project uses satellite-based Earth observation, positioning, navigation or timing data or services, beneficiaries must use Copernicus and/or Galileo/EGNOS (other sources may be added but not substitute the EU infrastructures). Projects involving artificial intelligence must meet the AI Act robustness and trustworthiness requirements where applicable. Projects processing personal data must comply with the GDPR, and may need a data protection impact assessment. Horizon Europe funds civil applications only: work with an exclusive military or dual-use application is excluded.
  • The use of generative AI in preparing the proposal is declared, with the tools used and the sources behind any AI-generated text, and that text is checked for plagiarism. Using AI does not disqualify you, but failing these obligations can render a proposal ineligible.

Layer 3: formatting, the mechanical rules

The formatting rules are few, but they are enforced, and evaluators notice when they are bent.

  • Body text uses a minimum font size of 11 points, in Times New Roman.
  • Pages are A4, with margins of at least 15 mm.
  • The font has not been reduced below the minimum to fit more text. This is a known move that experts are told to watch for, so do not do it.

Layer 4: content quality, the axes that decide your score

Only a proposal that has cleared both gates gets scored. From here on, the checklist changes nature: these are no longer binary rules but the content axes on which the three criteria are judged. The recurring failures on these axes are catalogued in typical mistakes in Horizon Europe proposals; this layer is the positive version, what a strong draft contains.

Excellence

  • Every objective is measurable, with a baseline, a target and a deadline, and each covers at least one of the call's expected outcomes.
  • Ambition names the closest existing systems, including commercial ones, and quantifies the gap you close. Novelty is demonstrated, not asserted.
  • The methodology is operationalised, not just described: the specific analysis the call's science requires appears by name, with how its output feeds your models. Describing your data pipeline is not describing your method.
  • Each key result has a start TRL and an end TRL, with a justification for reaching the end level.
  • Cross-cutting content is present: the gender dimension used as an analytical variable in the research (not just a paragraph), open science practices, and an early data management plan. Interdisciplinarity and social sciences and humanities are addressed where the call expects them, or justified as not relevant.
  • Call scope coverage: every required activity in the call is mapped to a work package or objective, in a table. This axis is structural: a gap here can drop the criterion below threshold.

Impact

For the full logic of this criterion, from key results to outcomes, see our guide to the Impact section.

  • The pathway is traceable end to end: key results, then dissemination, exploitation and communication, then outcomes, then impacts.
  • Every expected outcome of the topic is answered one by one, mapped to what your project delivers. This axis is structural: an unmapped outcome is the classic below-threshold Impact score.
  • Outcomes are written actor-centric: a named target group, an adoption verb, the key result they take up, a quantified scale, and a timeframe.
  • The societal outcomes carry a baseline, a target and a deadline, not only the technical ones.
  • The dissemination, exploitation and communication plan treats the three as distinct jobs (not one plan written three times), and every DEC task has a KPI.
  • A table of key exploitable results gives each one an owner, a protection route, and a route to uptake.
  • Barriers to impact (external obstacles: regulation, market, behaviour, competition) are separated from project risks (internal).

Quality and efficiency of the implementation

  • Work packages, effort table, deliverables, milestones and risks are all present and internally consistent.
  • Person-months reconcile between the work-package table and the effort table.
  • The work package carrying your novelty is not resourced below peripheral ones, or the split is explicitly justified.
  • Every critical risk has a specific mitigation, especially the high-severity ones.
  • For every core competence your central claim rests on, the consortium names a partner with a track record. A complementarity diagram (partners against fields of expertise) makes the coverage visible.
  • Governance includes a decision-escalation mechanism sized for the consortium.

Consistency, check last

  • Part A and Part B agree on participants, budget and dates.
  • Every objective keeps its indicator through to the tables.
  • Acronyms are defined, and no deliverable or milestone is orphaned.

If your call is two-stage

One caveat before you apply this checklist blindly: if your call is two-stage, stage 1 uses a different bar. Only Excellence and Impact are evaluated, the threshold for each is 4 (not 3), and the overall threshold is normally 8 or 8.5. Stage 1 also uses a separate, shorter pre-proposal template, not a trimmed version of the full one, so do not draft a full proposal and cut it down. For how these thresholds and scores work in detail, see how Horizon Europe proposals are scored.

Run the checklist automatically

The first three layers are mechanical, and mechanical work should not depend on a tired human in the last hours before a deadline. The fourth layer is judgement, and judgement improves when a draft is scored the way a panel would score it, while there is still time to act on what it finds. GrantForge does both: the template and the page budget are enforced by construction, and the evaluation runs your draft through the content axes above.

Run a pre-submission evaluation in GrantForge and arrive at the deadline with the gates already cleared.

Part of our guide on how to write a winning Horizon Europe proposal. See also how Horizon Europe proposals are scored.