Farm Europe launches its Budget Simulator
As negotiations on the 2028–2034 Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) and the future of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) enter a decisive phase, Farm Europe is launching its CAP 2028–2034 Budget Simulator: an interactive online tool that allows decision makers, analysts and farmers alike to model the financial architecture of the future CAP and to measure, in real time and at different scales, the concrete consequences of the choices currently on the table at EU, national and farm level.
In its July 2025 proposal, the European Commission (EC) set out to merge the budgets of the main European policies, including the CAP, into a single National and Regional Partnership (NRP) Fund, leaving Member States far greater freedom to arbitrate the allocation of funds previously ringfenced for a given policy. Behind the headline figures, the real impact of such a reform on farmers, on Member States and on Europe’s food sovereignty depends on a dense web of technical parameters. The Budget Simulator was built to make that complexity legible by all.
The tool lets the user on one hand observe in fixed scenarios, the impact of an unamended CAP regulation’s proposal, and on the other hand in a user driven scenario, set the macro parameters of the future CAP, the ring-fenced CAP envelope, the Member State co-financing commitment, as well as possible future parameters such as the potential flexibility available for frontloading, and the rural development target, and then watch these choices cascade to all 27 Member States according to the allocation keys and Member States’ individual priorities.
From there, the user can drill into any Member State to re-allocate EU funds across the different NRP interventions of the new Single CAP Fund Regulation, adjust national co-financing rates, and observe the effect at Member state level and on both EU and Total Public Expenditure, while keeping in consideration indicators such as environmental spending floors and minimum co-financing thresholds.
Every projection is compared against the 2021–2027 CAP Strategic Plan baseline, so the variation induced by each scenario is immediately visible as we at Farm Europe have considered said baselines to project the allocations each Member State’s CAP Strategic Plan would consist of.
Beyond the budgetary tables, the simulator translates figures into real-world effects: a farm-level impact view estimates income effects by country, farm type and economic size; a choropleth map of Europe compares the variation across Member States; and an intervention-mapping table traces how each current CAP measure maps onto the new framework. Two ready-made scenarios – the Commission’s July 2025 proposal, an amended Commission scenario (based partially on the letter of EC Commission president U. Von der Leyen) – and a fully manual mode provide immediate reference points for the negotiation as well as a wide range of possibilities.
The simulator is grounded entirely in official sources: the 2021–2027 CAP Strategic Plans Regulation, the Commission’s July 2025 legislative proposals for the Single CAP Fund and the NRP Fund, the Performance Framework Regulation and its environmental tracking coefficients, and Member States’ approved CSP financial tables. Farm Europe developed this tool in the conviction that a transparent, evidence-based analysis is the best guarantee of a strong, autonomous and properly funded Common Agricultural Policy.
Link to the Budget Simulator:
https://www.farm-europe.eu/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/CAP_simulator_PUBLIC_final.html