The Commission says the Recovery and Resilience Facility “reached the end of its implementation on the ground on 31 August 2026”. For anyone in the EU, that means a €573 billion pandemic-era recovery fund has stopped financing projects, and €450 billion of it, or 79% of the envelope, has already been paid to governments.
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The record is clearer on payments than on recipients. The Commission can list what it paid to each government. The European Court of Auditors says the trail gets harder to follow once governments hand the money on.
The recovery fund’s books close in December, the questions stay open
Every member state has now filed its final payment request. The Commission is assessing 32 of them, worth €123 billion, and expects to present preliminary assessments by 20 November. Payment decisions are due towards the end of December, and all payments linked to fulfilled milestones must be completed by 31 December 2026.
In September alone the Commission received 21 final requests worth €105.4 billion, covering 1,539 milestones and targets. The fund pays when the Commission judges that a milestone has been met, and the Commission’s annual report counts 4,082 milestones behind the payments so far.
Of the €450 billion paid out, €279 billion went as grants and €171 billion as loans. The pace differs sharply between countries. By 1 October one member state had received its full allocation, while Hungary, Luxembourg and the Netherlands had received less than 60%.
By mid-August, Poland had been paid €34.15 billion of its €54.71 billion, and Romania €12.97 billion of €21.41 billion. Hungary’s money was frozen until von der Leyen and Hungarian prime minister Péter Magyar agreed on 29 May 2026 to unfreeze €16.4 billion, and the Council adopted a new Hungarian plan on 10 July.
Read also: EU Releases Hungary Funds Before Reforms Are Done
More than 900 milestones were cut on the way
The checklist got shorter during the final stretch. A simplification exercise removed more than 900 milestones and targets from national plans, and the Commission adopted 27 simplification revisions and 36 targeted revisions in the last reporting year.
Penalties stayed small. Since 2021 the Commission has suspended 34 milestones and targets across 18 payment requests, 0.9% of those assessed by 31 August 2026. Of the €3.1 billion suspended in closed procedures, €266.3 million, or 8.55%, was finally reduced.
Some cases are still open. The Commission lists €1.55 billion currently suspended for Bulgaria, Spain, Malta and Romania, and it is reassessing a reversed Spanish milestone worth €626.6 million.
Public bodies take most of the visible money
The Commission’s own figures show where the largest cheques land. Public entities made up 63% of the largest final recipients in April 2026, down from 70%, and received about 82% of the funds. About a third of the largest 100 are private companies, with about 18% of the funds, and SMEs are 49% of those private recipients.
The auditors’ sample, which runs to mid-2025, shows a similar split. Half of the 100 largest recipients were public bodies, and they accounted for over 80% of the amounts.
The fund’s rules require each country to publish its 100 largest final recipients. None of the ten countries the auditors examined went beyond that minimum, so the remaining recipients stay out of public view.
The auditors say they cannot see the rest
Ivana Maletić, the Court of Auditors member who led the audit, said: “We do not have a complete picture of how RRF funds are used.” The Court’s report of 6 May 2026 found “unacceptable gaps in the traceability and transparency of spending”.
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France could not provide the names of final recipients for three of the five measures the auditors sampled. Only four of ten sampled countries collected data on what recipients actually spent.
The cost results are mixed. Of 19 sampled measures, 15 showed cost savings, typically between 7% and 25%, and four ran over. The auditors add that possible losses cannot be quantified while measures are still running until December 2026.
The Commission answers with the regulation
The Commission rejects the criticism. Its reply says the fund’s regulation “already strikes a balance between enhanced transparency and minimising administrative burdens”. On collecting actual-cost data, it said: “There is no legal basis for requesting this data.”
That argument is a legal one: the rules ask for 100 recipients and nothing more. On those terms it is hard to answer. It does nothing for a citizen who asks where €573 billion went, and the auditors have already said the picture is incomplete.
The last cheques are signed before the losses can be counted
Payment decisions fall at the end of December. The auditors say losses cannot be counted while measures are still running, and the last of them end in the same month.
By the time anyone can put a figure on what went wrong, the Commission will have nothing left to pay out and no payment left to hold back.
BASIS OF ANALYSIS
Basis of analysis. The analysis rests on six sources, of which three are Commission documents and the rest report the Court of Auditors’ findings and country payment data. The Court’s own report text could not be read, so its findings are taken from two reports of its briefing.
Sources
- European Commission: Report on the implementation of the Recovery and Resilience Facility, COM(2026) 546 (7 October 2026) – payments, milestones, suspensions, final recipients.
- European Commission: Member States submit their final payment requests (1 October 2026) – September requests, envelope and timetable.
- European Commission: Recovery and Resilience Facility Annual Report 2026 (7 October 2026) – end of implementation, amount under assessment.
- Brussels Times: EU auditors decry lack of transparency in funding of pandemic recovery fund (12 May 2026) – findings of the Court of Auditors, sample results, Commission reply.
- Eunews: Recovery, the Commission and the EU Court of Auditors clash again over fund transparency (6 May 2026) – recipient publication minimum, Commission reply.
- MrEast: By the Numbers, Eight States, One Recovery Deadline (18 August 2026) – payments to Poland and Romania, Hungary agreement.
