Erasmus+ 2028–2034: What’s Actually Being Proposed for the Next Programme

Erasmus+ 2028–2034 is still a European Commission proposal, not adopted law — here’s what’s actually on the table, and what it would mean for staff mobility courses.

If you’re planning teacher training years ahead, you’ve probably heard that Erasmus+ is getting a new seven-year cycle starting in 2028. What’s actually on the table right now is a European Commission proposal — not a finished law. It’s still moving through the EU’s ordinary legislative procedure, with the Council and European Parliament each negotiating changes to it. Nothing here is final, and nothing here changes how the current 2021–2027 programme works today.

We’ve been reading through the proposal itself, the European Parliament’s Legislative Train tracker, and the European Court of Auditors’ Opinion 12/2026 on it, so you don’t have to. Here’s what’s actually being proposed, what’s still up for negotiation, and what it would mean for school staff mobility specifically.

Where the proposal actually stands

The Commission presented the draft regulation, COM(2025) 549, on 16 July 2025. Since then it’s gone through the normal back-and-forth of EU lawmaking: the Council of the EU agreed a partial negotiating position in May 2026, and the lead committee in the European Parliament presented its draft report in June 2026. As of the most recent update to the Parliament’s own tracker, the file is still listed as “Tabled” — meaning Council and Parliament haven’t agreed a common text yet, let alone signed it into law. That typically takes another round or two of negotiation (called “trilogues”) before a final regulation is adopted.

Practically, that means the earliest anyone will know the actual rules with certainty is sometime before the 2028 programme starts — and even the budget figure below is still being argued over.

The budget being proposed

The Commission’s draft sets the financial envelope for 2028–2034 at €40.827 billion in current prices (around €36.2 billion in 2025 prices). That figure already folds in something new: the European Solidarity Corps, which currently runs as its own programme, would merge fully into Erasmus+. Measured against the combined budget of both programmes today (€27.7 billion in 2025 prices), the Commission’s proposed figure is roughly a 30% increase.

The European Parliament’s rapporteur has already pushed back on that number, calling for €47.39 billion instead. That gap — between what the Commission proposed and what Parliament wants — is exactly the kind of thing that gets settled in the trilogue negotiations still ahead. We wouldn’t treat either figure as final.

What might actually change for staff mobility

For schools sending staff on “courses and training” mobility under KA1 — what we run — the proposal keeps the same basic architecture: the same intervention types, the same use of accreditation to give organisations a structured, repeatable route into funding. It’s not a rebuild. A few specific things would shift, though:

• A new safeguard on inclusion. The draft states explicitly that the cost of measures supporting participants with fewer opportunities cannot be used as a reason to reject an application. Today that support exists, but this would put it into the regulation itself.
• Green travel becomes standard practice, not just an incentive. Where the current programme mostly encourages lower-emission travel with a top-up grant, the proposal frames it as something built into how mobility is expected to run by default.
• A new horizontal priority: “preparedness” and resilience. Alongside the existing green and digital priorities, the Commission wants to add a focus aligned with the EU’s Preparedness Union Strategy — building skills like crisis response, media literacy, and civic engagement into project content.
• Fewer National Agencies. The proposal explicitly aims to reduce the number of National Agencies administering the programme, framed as a way to cut duplication and manage the merged programme at scale.
• Smaller, simpler grants. A new “very low value grant partnership” category is proposed, with a much lighter administrative burden than today’s grant applications — alongside a stated push to use lump sums and unit costs wherever possible instead of itemised budgets.

None of this is guaranteed to survive negotiation in its current form. But it gives a reasonable sense of the direction the Commission wants to take the programme, and none of it points toward staff mobility courses becoming harder to access or fund.

What the EU’s own auditors are saying

It’s worth knowing the proposal isn’t getting a free pass. The European Court of Auditors published Opinion 12/2026 specifically on the Erasmus+ proposal, at the European Parliament’s request. Separately, in its broader assessment of the whole 2028–2034 budget package, the ECA titled its overview report “EU budget 2028-2034: The ECA’s view: Many changes may not make it better” — a fair summary of its stance. Its focus for Erasmus+ specifically, as for the other programmes in the package, is whether the proposed changes genuinely deliver sound financial management, real accountability, and simplification that actually reduces burden — rather than just relabelling it. That’s a useful reality check against any headline that reads the proposal as a done deal.

What this means for your planning right now

If you’re a school coordinator thinking about mobility two or three years out: nothing changes today. Courses booked and delivered under the current 2021–2027 rules — the ones covered in our walkthrough of the current Programme Guide — are unaffected by any of this. The 2028–2034 programme won’t take effect until this regulation is actually adopted, and that’s realistically still some way off.

What we’d suggest is simply not over-reading any single headline about the “new Erasmus+” as settled fact — including this post. We’re tracking the official sources as the negotiation moves through Council and Parliament, and we’ll update this when there’s something genuinely decided, not just proposed.