Non-repayable funding for digitalizing your company: the real 2026 picture

The explanation is simple and checkable: the pages publishing them were never updated after the calls closed, and some date themselves. You can still find material announcing a programme as open with a 2023 window, eligibility text requiring incorporation by 31 December 2021, or 2025 headlines over schemes from the previous financial cycle. The practical rule for a reader: if a page states an amount without also stating the call's opening and closing dates, treat the amount as historical until proven otherwise.

The same caution applies to regional ceilings. The digitalization lines run by the regional development agencies have different ceilings from one region to another, and a figure read for one region does not transfer to another. This is not a subtlety: some material displays three different regional ceilings for the same topic on one page, without saying to whom each applies.

Open: SME Eco-Tech, with the deadline and ceilings given above. Through the order published in Monitorul Oficial no. 558 of 7 July 2026 the programme is no longer restricted to manufacturing — trade and services companies and micro-enterprises become eligible too. The minimum project value is RON 668,100 in eligible costs, and the loan contracted with a partner bank must be at least RON 400,860.

Open, but narrowly addressed: POCIDIF Action 2.1, until 30 September 2026 at 17:00, for SMEs with ICT CAEN codes developing an innovative software product for commercialisation. It is not an internal digitalization call and does not suit a company that wants to buy an ERP.

Announced, without dates: Start-Up Nation session 2, with up to RON 250,000 and spending allowed until 8 December 2027. Conditional on the adoption of the 2026 MEDAT budget: Microindustrializare and Comerț — the allocations circulating publicly are proposals, not commitments. In the payment phase rather than the registration phase: Femeia Antreprenor.

Closed but still relevant: the PNRR C9 SME digitalization call, closed since 2023. Contracted beneficiaries have completion deadlines on 30 June and 31 July 2026, and payments run until 30 October 2026. For them the question is no longer how to apply but how to deliver and have it accepted on time.

Many lists mix three different instruments under one heading, and the difference changes a company's financial plan completely. A grant is non-repayable money, with co-financing and durability obligations. A guaranteed credit instrument means a loan you repay, with a state guarantee or interest subsidy. Non-financial aid, such as the support received through European Digital Innovation Hubs, means services granted under a contract rather than money in the account — and there the applicant to the call is the hub, not the company.

SME Eco-Tech is the clear example of a mixed instrument: the grant of at most 40% works only together with a bank loan of at least 60%. A company budgeting as if it were receiving a clean grant discovers the credit condition at the bank, that is, too late to correct it in the file.

The broad list of digital categories — presentation website, e-commerce, ERP and CRM, licences, cloud services, automation, cybersecurity, electronic signature, training — comes from the PNRR C9 call and remains a good reference for what a complete digitalization mix looks like. It is not, however, a menu available today: every open programme has its own list and its own per-category ceilings. In SME Eco-Tech, for instance, the software needed to run the business is eligible up to RON 15,000 excluding VAT, per the implementation procedure.

Splitting the roles matters as much as the cost list. The consultant writes and submits the application and answers clarification requests. The software supplier delivers the technical offer, the budget by category, the draft contract, then the implementation and the acceptance documents. The company defines the scope, provides the co-financing and owns the indicators. Overlapping these roles is a real risk: several programmes check whether price offers come from the entity that produced the submission documentation, and suspicion of an accommodation offer is penalised.

Indicatively, digitalizing a small company sits in three bands: EUR 1,000–5,000 for online presence, EUR 5,000–25,000 for internal processes and above EUR 25,000 for integrated flows. The figures are indicative, move with the number of connected systems and the volume of migrated data, and the firm estimate comes in writing after analysis.

We do not write the funding application, we do not submit files, we do not promise approval and we issue no eligibility verdicts for your company. We do not sell call calendars the authority has not published.

The limit that costs us: if the available budget does not justify the solution you asked for, we say so before the offer, even when that means a smaller contract or none at all. And we issue no accommodation offers for anyone's file — an offer of ours describes something we can deliver at the price written in it.