Only 34% of government support programmes publish what they pay
We hold 2,216 government, public-body and institutional support programmes across 25 countries. 754 of them — 34% — publish an amount you can read before you apply. The other majority tell you the support exists and leave the figure to be calculated later.
Why the number is missing so often
Usually because it genuinely depends on you. A means-tested payment tapers with income; a housing benefit depends on local rent levels; a childcare subsidy scales with hours used. The authority is not being cagey — there is no single figure to publish, and publishing a maximum would mislead more people than it helped.
But the effect on the claimant is the same either way. The most common reason people do not claim what they are entitled to is not that they refuse: it is that they cannot tell whether the paperwork is worth the afternoon, and an unpriced programme gives them nothing to weigh that against.
What we do with the gap
Nothing, is the honest answer, and that is deliberate. When a record publishes no amount we leave it empty and count it as zero in any total. That makes our headline figure an understatement — your real entitlement is almost certainly higher than the number we show, not lower. The alternative is to estimate, and an estimated benefit amount is the worst possible error for this kind of product: it is the number people plan a month around.
The same gap, in startup funding
It is not only a welfare problem. Of 1,684 startup funding programmes, 701 (42%) publish a figure. Grant calls are often announced with a total programme budget and no per-award ceiling, which tells a founder how big the pot is and nothing at all about whether it is worth a week of writing.
What would fix it
Not a mandate to publish a single number — that would produce fictional precision. What is missing is a published range and the variables that move it. "Between €400 and €2,100 a year, depending on household income and number of children" is a sentence any of these authorities could write, and it would let a person decide in ten seconds instead of ninety minutes.
Every number above is computed, not typed. They come from the 2,216 records behind this site at the moment the page was built, so the post cannot drift away from the data. Where a programme publishes no figure we count it as zero rather than estimate — which makes the totals here understatements, and deliberately so.