Primo-création pays €2,000 a month for up to 6 months, capped at €12,000, to first-time founders of newly created micro-enterprises in the commerce and craft sectors. Fit 4 Start runs to €150,000 equity-free for a team of at least 2 whose company is under 5 years old.
Young Innovative Enterprise aid tops out at €1,000,000. There is no single Luxembourg grant queue: each scheme has its own gate, its own ceiling and its own clock, and the table below routes a situation to the row that fits it.
Where a programme publishes a call year, this page states it: the EU instruments are re-budgeted annually and can close before their nominal end date once the money is gone.
The routing table
Read this by situation, not by amount. The expensive mistake is reading the biggest number first and building a narrative backwards from it, when the row that fits sits further up the table and asks for a fraction of the paperwork. The middle column matters too: some of these are cash, some reimburse an invoice you have already paid, one arrives later as a lower tax bill.
| Situation | Scheme | Form of money | Headline figure |
|---|---|---|---|
| First business ever, commerce or craft, micro-enterprise | Primo-création | Non-repayable capital grant, monthly instalments | €2,000/month, up to 6 months, €12,000 cap |
| Team of 2+, company under 5 years, in digital technologies, health or space, or the field specified in the Fit 4 Start call | Fit 4 Start | Equity-free grant, paid in instalments | up to €150,000 |
| Project with genuine technical uncertainty | R&D and innovation aid | Co-funding of eligible project costs | 60% of industrial research for a small enterprise |
| Small unlisted company under 5 years, R&D at least 15% of operating expenses | Young Innovative Enterprise | Co-funding against a funding plan | up to €1,000,000, max 70% |
| Operating SME buying in expert work | SME Packages | Reimbursement of consultant costs | 70% of costs in the €3,000–25,000 band |
| SME with no digitalisation plan yet | Fit 4 Digital | Fully covered assessment | €5,000 assessment |
| Company earning from its own software or patents | IP Box | Corporate tax exemption | 80% of net eligible income |
| Needs debt alongside the bank | SNCI | Loans, direct or through your bank | see the SNCI table below |
| Deep tech aiming at EU scale | EIC Accelerator | Grant, optionally plus equity | grant up to €2,500,000 |
| Filing a trade mark or a design | EUIPO SME Fund | Fee reimbursement voucher | 75% up to €700 in the 2026 call — check availability first, see below |
Before revenue: the entry cheques
Primo-création is the least competitive money in the country and the most narrowly defined.
Eligibility matcher
Which programmes fit your project?
Answer a few questions about your company, your sector and your plans. The matcher shows the programmes worth applying for and the ones to skip. No email needed.
Check eligibilityIts guichet.public.lu page sets gates that catch people out: the business authorisation must be no more than 6 months old, the applicant must not have held a business authorisation in their own name or as a partner in the previous 10 years, and must not hold more than 25% of the shares in any other company, in Luxembourg or abroad. A serial founder is out on the lookback gate, not on the merits.
Fit 4 Start is the competitive one. The grant arrives in instalments — €50,000, then €80,000, then €20,000 — alongside 6 months of acceleration, and the company-age test is measured against the call rather than against your submission date, so read the call document for the exact reference date. Our selection guide covers what the tranches are gated on.
Once there is R&D to fund
R&D aid is the workhorse, and its rates are set by company size rather than negotiated. The rate table on guichet.public.lu distinguishes industrial research from experimental development, the classification decision that moves the number most:
| Project category | Small enterprise | Medium enterprise | Large enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|
| Industrial research, base rate | 60% | 50% | 40% |
| Experimental development, base rate | 40% | 30% | 20% |
There is a floor as well as a ceiling: the same page sets a minimum aid amount of €1,000 for an SME and €100,000 for a large enterprise. A weekend side project does not clear it, which is why small technical improvements belong in the SME Packages route instead.
Young Innovative Enterprise aid, running under the loi du 6 juin 2025, is the one built around a raise. It reaches €1,000,000 at a co-funding rate of up to 70%, for a small unlisted company registered less than 5 years ago that turned over at least €40,000 in its last financial year and can show R&D spending of at least 15% of total operating expenses.
The plan you submit covers a financing need of at most 3 years — the YIE guide goes through how that plan is read.
For an operating SME
SME Packages reimburse 70% of eligible project costs in the €3,000–25,000 band, across the themes the scheme publishes — the most accessible aid for a company that already trades. Fit 4 Digital sits a step earlier: a digital-maturity assessment fixed at €5,000 and covered in full by a grant of the same amount, which usually produces the shopping list the packages then pay for.
The IP Box is not a grant but lands on the same bottom line, exempting 80% of net eligible income under article 50ter L.I.R. The condition founders skip is the nexus test: the 80% exemption applies only to the share of net eligible income produced by the modified nexus ratio in article 50ter, alinéa 6 L.I.R. Outsourcing development to a related party abroad shrinks that ratio.
Loans rather than grants
SNCI lends alongside your bank rather than instead of it, packaged as proStart, proDevelop, proInnovate and proTransfer. Its comparison table for direct loans gives the bands outright, and the longest term across the direct instruments is 15 years.
| Instrument | What it funds | Amount band | SNCI's share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Prêt Création-Transmission | starting or taking over a business | €5,000 – €250,000 | up to 40%, own equity at least 15% |
| Prêt Entreprises Novatrices | innovative companies registered under 8 years | up to €1,500,000 | up to 35% |
| Prêt Recherche Dév. Innovation | research, development and innovation | up to €250,000 | up to 40% |
| Prêt moyen/long terme | business investment | €25,000 – €25,000,000 | — |
| Crédit d'équipement (indirect) | equipment, applied for through your own bank | €12,500 – €2,500,000 | — |
The indirect products are the ones founders miss, because you never contact SNCI: the file goes through your own bank, which means the bank relationship has to exist first.
The EU layer
The EIC Accelerator keeps grant and investment apart, and reading them as a single number is the standard error. The grant runs to €2,500,000 over at most 24 months; blended finance there means a grant component plus direct equity or quasi-equity such as convertible loans, and the investment component is sized between €1,000,000 and €10,000,000.
For the 2026 calls the EIC published €220,000,000 for the Challenges strand and €414,000,000 for the Open strand. Whether it is a repeatable source is settled in the work programme itself: under the EIC Work Programme 2026, grant-only support can be provided only once to a beneficiary during Horizon Europe, for a maximum of EUR 2.5 million covering activities of TRL 6 to 8.
Horizon Europe consortium work is rate-driven rather than ceiling-driven. Under the 2026-2027 work programme's general annexes, a research and innovation action is funded at 100% and an innovation action at 70%, with the caveat that other funding rates may be set out in the specific call or topic conditions.
The EUIPO SME Fund is the smallest instrument here and the clearest illustration of why call years matter. Its 2026 call carries a budget of €18,000,000 and reimburses 75% of EU trade mark and design fees up to €700, or 50% outside the EU.
But as of 7 August 2026 the IP Scan and the trade mark and design vouchers are closed to new applications because their funds are exhausted, while the patent and plant variety vouchers remain open. A ceiling on a page is not the same thing as money still in the pot.
The parts that actually sink a file
Almost every gate here is a clock. Fit 4 Start measures 5 years at the call opening date, Young Innovative Enterprise measures 5 years from registration, SNCI's innovative-enterprise loan runs to 8 years, and Primo-création wants an authorisation no older than 6 months. Incorporating early "to look established" burns months off every one of those windows at once, and no assessor can give them back.
Another recurring failure is a mismatch between the story and the ledger. A budget line that no accountant would recognise — a round number for "development", a salary for a founder who is also invoicing through another company — turns a readable file into a queried one. The R&D route in particular turns on how you classify the work, because industrial research and experimental development carry different base rates for the same company size.
Then sequencing. Fit 4 Digital's assessment produces the cost lines that SME Packages later reimburses; a raise dated before the Young Innovative Enterprise plan is a different conversation from one dated after it. Once a founder has picked their row of the table, the remaining work is clerical and unforgiving — assembling the application file and its annexes in the order each programme's form expects, with cost lines that match the accounts they will eventually be checked against.
Check which programmes you qualify forCommon questions
Which scheme has the highest ceiling?
Of the national schemes here, Young Innovative Enterprise aid at €1,000,000 is the largest published grant ceiling, ahead of Fit 4 Start at €150,000. R&D aid is expressed as a percentage of eligible costs rather than a fixed ceiling, so its size follows the project budget.
How old can my company be?
It depends which row you are on: under 5 years at the call opening for Fit 4 Start, under 5 years since registration for Young Innovative Enterprise, under 8 years for SNCI's Prêt Entreprises Novatrices. Primo-création works the other way round, requiring an authorisation of 6 months or less.
Do the amounts change from year to year?
The EU ones are set per call: the EIC's 2026 strands were budgeted at €220,000,000 and €414,000,000, and the EUIPO SME Fund's 2026 budget is €18,000,000 with vouchers closing individually as they exhaust. Check the call year before planning against any of them; the long-form treatment sits in the funding reference.