Research Funding in Greece: HFRI, GSRI, IKY and Greece in Horizon Europe

Research money in Greece comes from three directions at once: national competitive grants run by HFRI, national and EU co-funded programmes coordinated by the General Secretariat for Research and Innovation, and EU programmes applied for directly, from Horizon Europe to Erasmus+ and CERV. Each has its own agency, portal and calendar. This page lays them out side by side, with every figure taken from the funder or the Commission, so it can be forwarded to a colleague or pasted into a strategy document.

Who funds what

Greece’s research base in numbers

Greece spent EUR 3.66 billion on research and development in 2024, 1.54 percent of GDP and 8.6 percent more than the year before. The growth is real and fast; the gap that the European Semester keeps flagging is in what comes out the other end, not in what goes in.

Two numbers in that table matter when you write an Excellence or Impact section for a Greek-coordinated proposal: business performs the majority of R&D spending, so an industrial partner is easy to justify, and patent output per euro is an eighth of the EU average, which is the gap a widening-oriented impact section can credibly address.

HFRI: the national competitive funder

Same body, two names

HFRI is the English name of ΕΛΙΔΕΚ, the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation. It was established in 2016 by Law 4429/2016, amended by Law 4782/2021, to support unrestricted research and to help reverse the outflow of scientists abroad. Its calls have no thematic or geographic restrictions and use scientific quality and excellence as their sole criterion. All applications are submitted online through portal.hfri.gr.

The standing call categories

HFRI groups its calls into PhD candidate scholarships, postdoctoral research projects, faculty member and researcher research projects, high-value research equipment, Science and Society and emblematic actions, and other actions. Its calls list also carries partner-funded actions, such as scholarships and field studies funded by the Natural Environment and Climate Change Agency and the US–Greece Program for Collaborative Research in the Humanities. Calls in each category recur, but not on a fixed annual cycle, so the calls page and funding lists are the reliable signals.

Greece 2.0: basic research financing through HFRI

HFRI is the implementation body of the subproject “Basic Research Financing (Horizontal support for all Sciences)”, part of component 4.5, “Promote Research and Innovation”, of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, Greece 2.0, funded by NextGenerationEU. The call has two sub-actions: “Funding New Researchers” and “Funding Projects in Leading Edge Sectors”, each with funding lists published per scientific or thematic area on HFRI’s Greece 2.0 page.

Where HFRI’s money comes from

HFRI’s resources include the State budget, EU and international funding, donations and a 2016 agreement between the Hellenic Republic and the European Investment Bank, under which EUR 180 million was registered for the Foundation, alongside EUR 120 million from the co-financed Public Investment Program. A EUR 5 million donation from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, within a EUR 10 million action, funds a bridge for researchers whose ERC proposals were ranked A or B at the second evaluation step but not funded.

GSRI: policy, research centres and national programmes

The General Secretariat for Research and Innovation is the public service responsible for planning and coordinating Greece’s RTDI policy. Its mandate under Law 4130/2014 covers defining the national RTDI strategy, launching and funding RTDI actions and programmes approved by the minister, supervising the research bodies under its purview and representing Greece in the EU and international organisations. It runs the Smart Specialisation Strategy that steers ERDF-funded research interventions, and states that a significant share of RTDI funding comes through the Competitiveness 2021–2027 programme, with further money from the Recovery and Resilience Facility, the Just Transition Fund, regional programmes and the State budget.

For applicants, GSRI matters in three ways. First, its calls page publishes nationally run actions, many in Greek only: examples in 2024 included “Research – Innovate” and bilateral scientific and technological cooperation between Greece and Germany under the Competitiveness programme, and in August 2026 a call for national co-funding of approved CHIPS JU 2024 and EuroHPC JU 2024 projects. Second, it supervises the national research centres, among them Athena, NOA, the National Hellenic Research Foundation, CERTH, NCSR Demokritos, the National Centre for Social Research, the Hellenic Pasteur Institute, HCMR, BSRC Alexander Fleming, FORTH and the Biomedical Research Foundation of the Academy of Athens. Third, it designates the Horizon Europe National Contact Points.

IKY and INEDIVIM: Erasmus+ in Greece

IKY, the State Scholarships Foundation, was appointed by Ministerial Decision 28159/Η1/16-03-2021 as the Erasmus+ National Agency for education and training for 2021–2027. It manages Key Action 1 mobility, Key Action 2 cooperation including KA220 Cooperation Partnerships in school, vocational, higher and adult education, Key Action 3, and support for Jean Monnet and European Universities, and it is the national support organisation for EPALE. The youth and sport fields, and the European Solidarity Corps, are run by the Youth and Lifelong Learning Foundation, INEDIVIM.

IKY publishes approved projects rather than application totals, so Greek success rates for KA220 cannot be calculated from its files. What the files do show is the competition level: the 2026 adult-education results approved four projects worth EUR 1,150,000, with scores between 90 and 94, and IKY also publishes reallocation lists that fund additional projects when money is returned. The full breakdown, including the objections procedure, is in the Erasmus+ KA220 application guide. For rights, equality and civic projects managed centrally in Brussels, see the CERV programme guide.

Greece in Horizon Europe

Greece is one of the strongest widening countries in Horizon Europe. The National Documentation Centre’s analysis of the first two years, drawn from the Commission’s eCORDA database, and the Commission’s own widening report give the picture below.

What widening status gives Greek organisations

As a widening Member State, Greece has access to the Widening part of Horizon Europe. The Commission’s report lists Teaming, to build or modernise centres of excellence with advanced partners and national co-funding; Twinning, the most popular widening action, linking institutions with leading counterparts; ERA Chairs, to recruit an outstanding researcher and team; Excellence Hubs for place-based innovation ecosystems; ERA Fellowships for individual researchers moving to widening countries; ERA Talents for intersectoral mobility; and Hop-on, which lets a widening-country partner join an ongoing Pillar II or EIC Pathfinder project that has none (section 2.1, p. 7). For the competition levels in these actions, see the widening rows of Horizon Europe success rates by pillar, cluster and country.

The Greek National Contact Points

The Horizon Europe NCPs are designated by GSRI and hosted by two organisations. EKT, the National Documentation Centre, covers MSCA, the Health and the Digital, Industry and Space clusters and the Cancer Mission. The PRAXI Network at FORTH covers thirteen further areas. NCP advice is free and is the first call for eligibility questions, info days and proposal pre-checks. For finding consortium partners, including the portal partner search and an expression-of-interest template, see finding Horizon Europe partners; for doctoral training networks, see the MSCA Doctoral Networks guide. Terms such as National Contact Point and widening country are defined in the EU funding glossary.

A monthly funding scan for a Greek research office

1. HFRI: check the calls page and funding lists; submissions always go through portal.hfri.gr.
2. GSRI: check the calls for proposals and news pages for national actions and co-funding calls, many published in Greek only.
3. IKY and INEDIVIM: check Erasmus+ announcements, results and reallocation lists for education, training and youth.
4. Horizon Europe and CERV: search the Proposia open calls database, filter by status and by Europe, and sort by the nearest deadline.
5. NCPs: check EKT and PRAXI Network events for info days in the clusters you target.
6. Regional programmes: watch the managing authority of your region for Competitiveness and regional RTDI calls announced through GSRI.

The open calls database is refreshed daily from official portals, including the EU Funding and Tenders Portal. It can be searched by title, funder or research area, filtered by location, including a Europe filter, and by open, upcoming or closed status, and it lists calls by nearest deadline, with a detail page for each call. National Greek calls from HFRI and GSRI should still be checked on their own sites.