Thirty-six topics where you needed a perfect score

Horizon Europe publishes a funding cut-off with many of its evaluation results: the score at which the money ran out. As at 6 August 2026 we hold 276 topics with a plausible published cut-off. In 36 of them the cut-off had reached the top of the scale.

A worked example

From the published results for HORIZON-CL4-2026-05-MAT-PROD-25:

• 108 proposals submitted
• 99 above threshold
• 24 of them scored between 14 and 15
• 3 funded
• Cut-off: 15 out of 15

Read the third and fourth lines together. Twenty-four proposals scored 14 or better. Three were funded.

The same announcement gives the reason without editorialising. The 99 above-threshold proposals in that topic requested €682 million; the whole call, across three topics, had €85.5 million. And its ranking distribution runs in bands down to 10, which is where the quality threshold sat — so the gap between passing and winning was a full third of the scale.

What a threshold stops being useful for

At 15 out of 15 the quality bar is no longer selecting anything: every remaining decision is made by ranking, and by the tie-break rules in the call conditions rather than by the evaluation criteria most teams optimise for. A common approach to scoring — find where you are weak and lift that section over the bar — cannot work here, because there is no margin between passing and winning.

What a project team should do

It does not mean do not apply. It means apply knowing that the marginal point is where the entire outcome sits, and budget your effort accordingly rather than spreading it evenly. Before you start, check whether the previous edition of your topic published a cut-off. If it sat at or near the maximum, decide deliberately whether you are writing to win or writing to build a track record — in that call, those are different projects.