LIFE household energy poverty
Grants for organisations working together across countries to reduce household energy poverty through public-policy coordination or support for apartment-building renovation.
Această oportunitate este disponibilă momentan în limba engleză.
LIFE ENERPOV funds the organisation and services needed to help households afford adequate heating and cooling. Choose one of two strands for your project; you cannot combine both in one proposal.
- Policy and coordination (Scope A): help public authorities and other organisations establish lasting cooperation across energy, social services, health and housing. This includes structured training tailored to the members’ needs and languages. Identify the authorities involved, show their participation or concrete commitment, for example through tailored letters of support at executive decision-making level, and explain who will host the cooperation after the project ends. If similar structures already exist or are being developed, demonstrate the need for your proposal, its added value and support from or cooperation with those structures.
- Apartment-building renovation support (Scope B): help residential buildings in neighbouring vulnerable districts where most residents experience energy poverty. You can improve building-management decisions, address legal barriers, develop suitable financing strategies or organise advice. Build on existing advice services. Show that measures are affordable both upfront and over time, and that residents can remain in their homes after renovation. Housing organisations and owner or tenant associations are expected to participate or demonstrate concrete commitment.
Projects addressing unaffordable cooling during summer heat or places with less-developed energy-poverty support are encouraged. New IT tools, databases or platforms need justified added value and a credible plan to scale beyond the project.
The 2026 grant reimburses up to 95% of eligible project costs, using actual costs with some unit-cost and flat-rate elements. The suggested EU contribution is up to €1.75 million per project, but proposals for other amounts can be selected. This is an indicative size, not a ceiling.
This grant funds the process that enables investment, rather than household payments or renovation construction. Infrastructure and technologies are not funded. Exceptionally, limited equipment or low-cost devices indispensable solely to the project, such as monitoring devices, can be eligible; equipment costs are depreciated over the project lifetime. You cannot distribute grants to households or other third parties under ENERPOV.
Scope B renovations can happen after the project if completion during it is unrealistic. Your project must still take concrete steps that credibly lead to renovation, supported by evidence such as secured financing. Quantify relevant results and impacts at project end and five years afterwards.
Eligibility
The following conditions describe the closed 2026 call.
- Apply with at least three beneficiaries from three different eligible countries. Affiliated entities do not count towards this minimum. The coordinator must be established in an eligible country.
- Public and private legal entities can apply. Eligible locations include EU Member States and their overseas countries and territories, Iceland, Moldova, North Macedonia, Montenegro and Ukraine. Norway and Liechtenstein do not participate in LIFE. Activities must take place in eligible countries; activity elsewhere is allowed only when necessary for EU environmental and climate objectives and effective interventions in eligible countries.
- Serbia was negotiating association when the 2026 guidance was published. Serbian entities could apply, but EU funding depends on an association covering this call. Without successful association, they can participate without EU funding; exceptional funding is possible only if the granting authority considers their participation essential.
- International organisations are eligible without the usual country restriction. Entities from other countries may receive exceptional funding if their participation is essential. Individuals are ineligible except self-employed sole traders whose business has no separate legal personality. An entity without legal personality may exceptionally participate if its representatives can take legal obligations and provide equivalent guarantees protecting EU financial interests.
- If an association or grouping’s members will carry out project activities, those members must also participate as beneficiaries or affiliated entities for their costs to be eligible.
- You need sufficient financial resources, expertise, staff and other resources to deliver the project and contribute your share. The normal financial-capacity check of coordinators exempts public bodies, international organisations and projects requesting no more than €60,000; these exceptions do not remove the requirement for sufficient resources.
- EU bodies cannot join the consortium, except the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre. EU restrictive measures bar participation in any role. EU conditionality measures bar funded roles, including the Hungarian public-interest trusts established under Act IX of 2021 and entities they maintain. EU exclusion decisions also bar participation. The call excludes bankruptcy or similar proceedings, breaches of tax or social-security obligations, grave professional misconduct, fraud and other listed crimes, serious failures under previous EU contracts, irregularities, arrangements to evade legal obligations and unjustified resistance to EU investigations or audits.
For Scope A, public or private bodies can establish an energy-poverty observatory: a central source of information that monitors energy poverty, collects data and supports professionals and policy development. It should represent the relevant stakeholder groups and authorities. National observatories are normally expected; a regional observatory needs clear justification based, for example, on country size or institutional arrangements.
Completed projects are rejected. Projects already underway are assessed case by case, and costs before the project starting date or proposal submission cannot be reimbursed. Total project revenue plus the EU grant cannot exceed the project’s costs. Outside EU Synergies actions, a project may receive only one EU-budget grant and the same costs must never be claimed under two EU grants. An EU operating grant can be combined only when this project falls outside its work programme and accounting clearly separates the costs.
How to apply
- Statut
- închis
- Se deschide
- Se închide
- Condițiile sesiunii de finanțare
- Closed 2026 single-stage intake; at least three beneficiaries from three eligible countries.
The 2026 single-stage intake closed on 16 September 2026 at 17:00 CEST. CINEA manages the call. Read its official call page and the 2026 rules to assess the recorded opportunity.
For that intake, participants needed an EU Login account and organisation registration in the Participant Register to receive a nine-digit participant identification code (PIC). Proposals were submitted electronically through the Funding & Tenders Portal topic LIFE-2026-CET-ENERPOV, using the submission-system forms; paper applications were not accepted.
Selected projects need a consortium agreement setting out arrangements between the participating organisations.