Erasmus+ grant management: Individual Support and Travel grants explained

Managing mobility funding means administering two distinct Erasmus+ payments: Individual Support, the monthly grant that covers a participant's living costs abroad, and Travel Support, a distance-based contribution toward getting there. Both are paid directly to the student, trainee, or staff member — separate from Organisational Support, the funding the European Commission pays to institutions themselves.

This guide covers how each grant works, how the amounts are calculated, and what it takes to manage them at scale.

What is an Erasmus+ Individual Support grant?

Individual Support is a monthly stipend intended to offset the difference in cost of living between a participant's home country and their destination. The European Commission groups destination countries into cost bands, and each band has its own monthly rate, set by the National Agency.

The total grant a participant receives is the monthly rate multiplied by the length of their mobility — a longer exchange means a larger total grant, calculated down to partial months or days depending on how the institution's programme rules are set.

What is an Erasmus+ Travel grant?

Travel Support is a separate, distance-based contribution toward the cost of getting to the host institution. Rather than being tied to duration, it is tied to the straight-line distance between the home and host institution, measured using the European Commission's official distance calculator.

Distances are grouped into bands (for example, 10–99 km, 100–499 km, and so on), and each band carries a fixed grant amount. A participant travelling further receives a higher Travel grant, regardless of how long their exchange lasts.

How do institutions calculate and pay these grants today?

For an institution running a handful of exchanges, this is manageable in a spreadsheet: look up the country band, look up the distance band, multiply by duration, and produce a payment list. At scale — hundreds of participants across dozens of destination countries — that same process becomes a significant source of manual work and calculation errors:

• Country and distance bands need to be looked up and kept current for every participant, every year
• Partial-month and date-range calculations are easy to get wrong by hand
• Payment lists need to be reconciled against the institution's finance system, often in a specific export format
• Any change to a participant's exchange dates after the fact means recalculating the grant manually

What does grant management software actually do?

Purpose-built grant management software automates the calculation layer rather than replacing institutional judgment. In practice, this covers:

Automatic amount calculation — a monthly (or daily) rate configured per grant type, so the system calculates the Individual Support total directly from the participant's exchange duration rather than a staff member doing the arithmetic.

Automatic travel grant calculation — distance bands and their corresponding amounts configured once, so the Travel grant is calculated automatically once the host institution's location is known.

A structured decision and payment workflow — an application is submitted, a decision maker approves it and sets the amount granted, a payment handler defines instalments and payment dates, and the confirmed instalments are exported as a payment form or CSV report for the finance system.

Configurable grant types — because grant types are freely defined rather than hard-coded, the same system can manage Erasmus+ Individual Support and Travel grants alongside bilateral exchange stipends or other institution-specific funding, each with its own calculation rules.

How SoleGrant handles grant management

SoleGrant is SoleMove's grant management module. It calculates Individual Support amounts automatically from exchange duration and Travel grants automatically from distance, runs the full application-to-payment workflow, and exports payment forms and transaction reports for your finance system — configured to match your institution's grant types rather than a fixed Erasmus+-only model.

For a closer look at the day-to-day workflow — applications, decisions, instalments, and payment forms — see our guide to how SoleGrant works.