Green Travel in Erasmus+ 2028–2034: What the Proposal Says (and What It Doesn’t Yet)

Green Travel already exists in Erasmus+ today. Here’s what the 2028–2034 proposal actually says about where that’s headed — and what it doesn’t say yet.

Our overview of the Erasmus+ 2028–2034 proposal mentioned that sustainable travel looks set to become a more built-in part of the programme, rather than a separate opt-in grant. Since this affects how staff mobility gets budgeted and planned, it’s worth going through exactly what the draft regulation says — and being upfront about what it hasn’t nailed down yet.

How Green Travel works right now

Under the current 2021–2027 rules, sustainable travel is handled through a specific funding mechanism: participants get a higher travel grant if they use low-emission transport. The current bands, straight from the 2026 Programme Guide, look like this:

• 10–99 km: €56 (green) vs €28 (non-green)
• 100–499 km: €285 vs €211
• 500–1999 km: €417 vs €309
• 2000–2999 km: €535 vs €395
• 3000–3999 km: €785 vs €580

Below 500 km, travelling with low-emission transport is the general expectation. Above that, participants are “strongly encouraged” to combine transport modes to make the trip more sustainable — but it’s framed as encouragement backed by a bigger grant, not a requirement.

What the 2028–2034 proposal changes

The draft regulation doesn’t rewrite Green Travel as a mechanism — it elevates sustainability to sit among the programme’s core specific objectives. Article 3(2)(c) of the proposal lists it directly alongside quality and inclusion as one of the things the whole programme is meant to foster:

“foster quality, inclusion, equity, sustainability, creativity, innovation, excellence and cross-border collaboration, strengthening Europe’s attractiveness and competitiveness globally, across all fields of education and training, youth and sport.”

The proposal also introduces a specific accountability mechanism that doesn’t exist in the current text in the same form: a requirement to uniformly apply the “do no significant harm” principle across expenditure tracking and performance reporting for the whole programme — meaning environmental impact becomes something the programme formally measures and reports on, not just something individual projects are asked to consider.

What’s not decided yet

Here’s the honest gap: the proposal doesn’t include a next-period version of the travel grant table above. Unit costs and specific funding mechanics for 2028–2034 are left to be set later, in the work programmes that get published closer to the programme’s start — a normal part of how these regulations work, since the founding law sets objectives and structure, and the detailed financial rules follow afterward. So we genuinely don’t know yet whether the Green Travel top-up will look the same, get simplified, or change shape. Anyone telling you the exact future rates already isn’t reading from the proposal — they’re guessing.

What this means for planning now

If you’re budgeting staff mobility for 2026 or 2027, none of this changes anything — the table above is what applies today, and it will keep applying until the current programme ends. If you’re thinking further ahead, the reasonable takeaway is that sustainable travel isn’t going away or getting deprioritised — if anything, the proposal treats it as more central than before. The specific numbers for the next cycle just aren’t public yet. We’ll update our 2028–2034 overview once the work programme detail is available.