Erasmus+ KA220 Cooperation Partnerships: How to Write the Application

KA220 Cooperation Partnerships are the main Erasmus+ format for organisations in education, training and youth that want to build something together across borders. The rules are short and strict, the money is paid as a fixed lump sum, and the evaluation is a 100-point grid published in advance. That makes KA220 unusually writable: almost every point lost can be traced to a question in the form that was not answered with evidence. This guide follows the 2026 Programme Guide, and the definitions of the terms it uses are in the EU funding glossary.

What KA220 funds

Cooperation Partnerships aim to raise the quality and relevance of the participating organisations’ work, build their capacity to operate transnationally and across sectors, address common needs and priorities in education, training, youth and sport, and enable transformation and change at individual, organisational or sectoral level. The Slovenian National Agency’s 2026 briefing adds the expectation that matters most for the Impact score: results should be re-usable, transferable and up-scalable, and shared at local, regional, national and transnational levels.

A project is organised in work packages: one mandatory work package for project management and a number of implementation work packages, each with specific objectives and expected results. The Programme Guide recommends a maximum of four implementation work packages.

The five fields and who manages them

Eligibility rules that reject applications before evaluation

These checks are applied before the quality assessment. Failing one ends the application, however good the project.

• At least three organisations from three different countries, each an EU Member State or a third country associated to the programme. There is no maximum. Organisations from non-associated third countries in regions 1 to 3 may join as partners, not applicants, if they bring essential added value; organisations from Belarus are not eligible.
• The applicant must have been legally established for at least two years before the application deadline.
• Duration between 12 and 36 months, chosen at application. An extension on justified request is possible if the total stays within 36 months.
• One organisation, identified by its OID, may be involved in at most ten applications per deadline submitted to National Agencies in school, vocational, adult education and youth, as applicant or partner.
• The same consortium may submit only one application, to one agency, per deadline.
• Higher education institutions need an ECHE to take part as applicant or core partner, if they are from a Member State or associated country.
• All activities take place in the countries of the participating organisations, with exceptions for EU institution seats when justified and for results-sharing events.

Choosing the lump sum: EUR 120,000, 250,000 or 400,000

There are three pre-defined lump sums. The Programme Guide tells applicants to choose according to the activities they want to undertake and the results they want to achieve, and to estimate the overall cost of the project first: because projects are expected to be co-financed, the estimated total cost should be higher than the lump sum requested. The adequacy of the number, scope and complexity of the activities in relation to the amount requested is part of the quality assessment, so an ambitious amount with a thin work plan loses points under the design criterion.

A practical order of work follows from that rule: define the needs, then the objectives and results, then the work packages and activities, cost them, and only then pick the tier nearest the estimate. The form reinforces it by asking, for every work package, how the amount was defined and why it is cost-effective. The Greek National Agency’s published lists show how the tiers are used in practice.

Two things stand out. Every funded Greek project in these lists scored between 89 and 97 points, far above the 70-point threshold, which is the practical bar in a competitive country. And the EUR 250,000 tier is the most common, with EUR 400,000 projects funded where the partnership and activities justify them.

The 2026 priorities

In 2026 every Cooperation Partnership must address one or more priorities. The form asks for one most relevant priority and up to two additional ones, then asks how the project addresses them. Addressing inclusion and diversity raises the relevance assessment explicitly, so it is worth selecting when it is genuine. The most defensible pattern is one horizontal priority and one priority of your own field, with both visible in the needs analysis and again in the impact indicators.

Award criteria and how points are lost

A proposal must score at least 70 of 100 points and reach the minimum on each criterion. The minimums add up to 51, so a proposal can clear every minimum and still fail by 19 points; being adequate everywhere is not enough.

Most lost points come from answers that describe instead of evidencing. Relevance falls when the needs analysis states needs without saying how they were identified. Design falls when indicators are listed without targets or when the lump sum is large for the activities described. Partnership falls when the task allocation gives one or two partners almost everything. Impact falls when sustainability is a promise to seek further funding rather than a named way the results enter the partners’ regular work.

The application form, section by section

The application is filled in the Erasmus+ online form, and the Commission publishes a template of each field’s form for information. The sections and their questions below follow the KA220-HED template; the other fields use the same structure with field-specific wording. Character limits are shown in the online form itself.

Needs analysis: the section that decides relevance

The form asks four questions under needs analysis, and assessors score relevance largely on whether the answers are specific and evidenced. The block below maps one paragraph to each question plus a fifth that links the needs to the chosen priority.

1. Needs addressed
   <Target group> in <countries/regions> face <specific problem>. Evidence: <statistic, source, year>;
   <second statistic, source, year>. The gap is <what existing provision does not cover>.

2. Target groups and how partners reach them
   Primary: <group, estimated number reached>. Secondary: <group>. <Partner A> works with <group>
   through <regular activity>; <Partner B> through <activity>.

3. How the needs were identified
   <Survey of n respondents in month/year> / <focus groups with n participants> / <analysis of national
   report X>. Each partner contributed <what>.

4. How the project addresses the needs
   Need 1 → objective O1 → WP<n> result <R>. Need 2 → O2 → WP<n> result <R>.

5. Why this needs a transnational partnership and which priority it serves
   <What partners in different countries bring that one country could not>. This responds to the
   <horizontal or sector> priority <exact priority name>.

A worked mapping: STEAMroots (fictional)

STEAMroots is an invented EUR 250,000 school-education project used only to show the mapping the form rewards. It runs 24 months with four partners: a Greek lower-secondary school as applicant, a Spanish teacher-training centre, an Estonian education-technology SME and an Italian NGO working with families. It addresses the school priority on STEM and STEAM education and the horizontal priority on inclusion and diversity.

Work packages in KA220 and in Horizon Europe

Applicants coming from Horizon Europe tend to over-engineer KA220 work plans, and applicants coming from KA1 mobility tend to under-specify them. The two formats differ in ways that change how you write.

A Gantt chart is not required in KA220, but drawing one in the Gantt chart creator is still the fastest way to check that activities, meetings and results fit the duration you chose. For the Horizon Europe equivalent, see the work package and Gantt worked example.

Timeline: from deadline to results to start

Greece: applying through IKY

In Greece the National Agency for school, vocational, adult and higher education is IKY, the State Scholarships Foundation. IKY publishes a results page per field with a PDF of approved applications, listing each project’s form ID, organisation, title, region, total score and grant, and in reallocation lists the score on each of the four criteria. Objections must reach IKY by email within five working days of notification, signed digitally by the legal representative. IKY accepts objections about procedure, substantial errors, documents not taken into account or misapplied rules; it rejects general disagreement with the scores and comparisons with other applications. National Greek funders and agencies beyond Erasmus+ are covered in research funding in Greece.

The practical lesson from the lists in Table B is the level of the bar: funded Greek projects in 2025 and 2026 scored 89 points or more. The reallocation lists also show criterion scores for those projects of 22 to 24 on relevance, 25 to 28 on design, 18 to 19 on partnership and 21 to 23 on impact. Research offices preparing several applications can find other open Erasmus+ calls in the open calls database, though Erasmus+ coverage there is still thin, and institutional support is described on the institutions page.

Common reasons KA220 applications fail

1. Fewer than three organisations from three eligible countries, or an applicant established for less than two years.
2. An organisation involved in more than ten applications per deadline, or the same consortium applying twice.
3. A higher education institution without a valid ECHE, or an informal youth group listed as a partner.
4. A project-management work package above 20% of the grant.
5. A lump sum out of proportion to the activities, duration and partnership described.
6. A needs analysis that states needs without saying how they were identified or for whom.
7. Tasks concentrated in one or two partners, with the others present in name only.
8. Indicators without targets, and sustainability that depends on finding new funding.
9. Core activities subcontracted, which the Programme Guide does not allow.
10. A total just above 70 points in a country where funded projects score close to 90.

Many of these are partnership problems before they are writing problems. The advice on due diligence and task allocation in the Horizon Europe consortium guide applies to KA220 partnerships at a smaller scale. For partner-finding channels and an expression-of-interest template, see finding Horizon Europe partners; for rights, equality and civic projects, see the CERV programme guide; for large vocational partnerships of eight or more organisations, see the Centres of Vocational Excellence guide.