The European Commission has today raised €5 billion in EU bonds in its 6th syndicated transaction for 2025.

This single-tranche transaction involves a €5 billion tap of the EU bond maturing on October 4, 2039. The 15-year bond was priced at 99.209% with a re-offer yield of 3.445%. Bids received exceeded €93 billion, resulting in an oversubscription rate of approximately 19 times.

The proceeds from this transaction will finance EU policy programs, particularly within the context of NextGenerationEU and support for Ukraine.

The Commission has now issued approximately €80 billion since the start of the year. A full overview of all EU transactions executed to date is available online. The next transaction in the EUs indicative issuance calendar is an EU-Bill auction on June 18, 2025. In line with the EU funding plan, the Commission will finalize its bond issuances for this semester with an auction of up to €6 billion on June 23.

Background

The European Commission is empowered by the EU Treaties to borrow from international capital markets on behalf of the European Union to finance selected EU policy programs. It is a well-established name in debt securities markets, with a track record of bond issuances over the past 40 years. All issuances executed by the European Commission are denominated exclusively in euros. All EU borrowing is guaranteed by the EU budget, and contributions to the EU budget are an unconditional legal obligation of all Member States under the EU Treaties.

Since January 2023, the EU funds its different policy programs by issuing single-branded EU bonds rather than separately labeled bonds for individual programs. This follows the creation of a unified funding approach, extending the diversified funding strategy first established in 2021 for NextGenerationEU to other policy programs funded by EU borrowing.

To finance EU policies as efficiently and effectively as possible, the Commissions issuances are structured by semi-annual funding plans and pre-announced issuance windows. In parallel, a framework incentivizing EU Primary Dealers to provide quotes on EU securities on electronic platforms has been in place since November 2023, and a repurchase facility has been available to EU Primary Dealers since October 2024 to support secondary market liquidity through the use of EU bonds in repurchase agreements.

With this transaction, the EU has now issued €510.85 billion in EU bonds under the unified funding approach. Of the proceeds raised, over €304.68 billion has been disbursed to Member States under the NextGenerationEU Recovery and Resilience Facility. A further €74 billion has been allocated to other EU programs benefiting from NextGenerationEU funding. Furthermore, almost €16.20 billion has been disbursed to Ukraine under the Ukraine Facility, which will finance up to €33 billion in loans to Ukraine between 2024 and 2027. In addition, €7 billion has recently been disbursed under the new €18 billion EU exceptional Macro Financial assistance loan, which will be repaid with proceeds from immobilized Russian State assets as part of the G7-led Extraordinary Revenue Acceleration (ERA) loans initiative.

The EUs total debt outstanding now stands at about €686.89 billion, of which €30.68 billion is in the form of EU Bills.

Information on the allocation to investors in this transaction is available in the transactions section of the EU as a borrower website. More information on the EUs issuance activities is available here: The EU as a borrower – investor relations - European Commission (europa.eu)

* Under the Commissions unified funding approach, amounts raised are not necessarily equal to amounts disbursed at a specific point in time.