Errors in European Union spending have risen again in 2025, the European Court of Auditors (ECA) said on October 8, and the bloc’s debt is on course for €1 trillion.
The estimated level of error was 3.8 per cent, up from 3.6 per cent in 2024. The auditors’ materiality threshold is 2 per cent.
This error level is worth around €6.7 billion.
They signed the accounts as reliable, as they have every year since 2007, and found revenue free of material error.
On spending they issued an adverse opinion for the seventh year in a row, meaning the errors were material and pervasive.
The error rate is not a measure of fraud. It is the share of money the auditors judge was not spent in line with EU and national rules. The auditors separately flagged 17 suspected fraud cases to EU authorities.
The rise undoes part of last year’s fall.
The overall rate was 3 per cent in 2021, 4.2 per cent in 2022 and 5.6 per cent in 2023, then dropped to 3.6 per cent in 2024 before climbing to 3.8 per cent in 2025.
The worst record is in cohesion, the regional-development money paid to member states for infrastructure, training and jobs schemes in poorer areas.
Errors there reached 9.3 per cent in 2023, fell to 5.7 per cent in 2024 and are back at 6.6 per cent.
Spending on agriculture and the environment, the other large slice, rose from 2.6 per cent to 3.9 per cent.
Those two headings make up almost two-thirds of the €130.8 billion the auditors examined, and both sit well above the 2 per cent line.
The most common issues were ineligible costs, projects and beneficiaries, which accounted for 51 per cent of quantified errors, broken procurement rules (26 per cent) and missing paperwork (19 per cent).
The Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), paid for milestones rather than invoices, was given a qualified opinion. Irregularities affected part of the €45.4 billion disbursed in 2025.
The ECA highlighted persistent weaknesses in the design of milestones, gaps in the European Commission’s monitoring and unreliable national control systems in the RRF.
By the end of the year €237.5 billion of the €359.9 billion in committed grants had gone out, leaving €122.4 billion for the final year — far above the €70.1 billion the European Commission projected for 2026 when it last estimated the run-off in July 2024.
Debt is the other half of the warning by the auditors. EU debt rose from €601.3 billion in 2024 to €738.9 billion in 2025.
The auditors say borrowing could reach €1 trillion by 2027, as NextGenerationEU loans run on and support for Ukraine is financed.
Loans approved or agreed for Ukraine since 2014 come to €170.1 billion, of which €70.3 billion had been paid out by the end of 2025.
Interest on the non-repayable part of NextGenerationEU could reach €93 billion over 2028-2034, the auditors said.
ECA President Tony Murphy said there was “a worrying tendency” to treat common debt as “virtual money”.
“It’s real debts, which have to be paid back,” he said.
Repayments, he said, would take 8 per cent of the proposed €2 trillion budget for 2028-2034.
“Ambitious budgets demand equally ambitious safeguards,” Murphy said.
Negotiations on that budget are still open.
📢 The estimated level of error in #EUspending remains too high, according to the European Court of Auditors’ Annual Report on the #EUfinances for 2025. 💶🌍 pic.twitter.com/uLxXbit3tE
— European Court of Auditors (@EUauditors) October 7, 2026
