How to read a grant eligibility rule

Every eligibility rule on this site is one of a small number of shapes, and knowing the shape tells you what to check first.

• A ceiling or floor ("turnover under €10 million", "at least 2 years old") — check which date or period it is measured at. Most company-size and turnover rules use the last approved accounting period (the EU SME definition says so explicitly, in Article 4 of its Annex), not today's numbers, and most age rules count from legal incorporation, not from when the business actually started trading.
• A category ("SME", "early-stage", "a registered charity") — these usually point to a formal legal definition, not a plain-English one. "SME" in an EU context specifically means Recommendation 2003/361 (see our explainer), which counts a parent company's numbers alongside yours — a small-looking subsidiary of a large group very often fails this test even though it feels like a small business.
• A location rule ("registered in France", "operating in this region") — check whether it means your registered address, where the funded activity happens, or both; these are sometimes different requirements stacked on top of each other.
• An exclusivity rule ("not already subsidised", "no other State aid for this project") — these interact with each other. Taking a grant can disqualify the same spend from a separate R&D tax credit (see our explainer), and a small grant can still count against a de minimis ceiling (see our de minimis explainer) even though the ceiling is set by a completely different regulation than the grant itself.

When a rule is genuinely ambiguous for your situation, the funder's own published guidance — not a third-party summary, including this one — is the only authoritative answer; every programme page here links straight to it.