What the aid covers
SME Packages – AI is a State aid scheme for small and medium-sized companies registered in Luxembourg. It co-funds one concrete AI project — a build with a defined scope, not a subscription and not an ongoing service — and it pays out after the work has been delivered and invoiced.
| Item | What the scheme provides |
|---|---|
| Co-funding rate | 70% of eligible costs |
| Maximum aid | €17,500 per project |
| Eligible project size | €3,000 to €25,000, excluding VAT |
| How it is paid | As a reimbursement, after you have paid the invoices |
| Who applies | Your company — the aid is granted to you, not to your supplier |
| Where the file starts | A free pre-analysis at the House of Entrepreneurship or eHandwierk |
Is your company eligible?
Five conditions carry most of the decision, and an adviser checks them before anything else in the file is looked at:
- A registered office in Luxembourg.
- A valid business permit from the Ministry of the Economy.
- A genuine economic activity as your main line of business.
- Not a company in financial difficulty.
- SME status on the usual criteria — headcount, turnover and balance-sheet total.
A short list of sectors is excluded: large retail above 400 m², transport, traditional finance and certain liberal professions among them. Sector exclusions are worth confirming in the first conversation rather than the fourth — they are the one condition that no amount of project design can work around. The full conditions are published on the scheme's page at guichet.public.lu, and our funding page restates them in short form with the current figures.
How the application works, in five steps
Scope the project and get a quote
Define one concrete AI project with a deliverable you could describe to your accountant, size it inside the €3,000–€25,000 range excluding VAT, and have your supplier issue a detailed quote. That quote is the document the whole application is built on, so it is worth getting right before anything else moves.
Book the free pre-analysis
The House of Entrepreneurship (Chamber of Commerce) or eHandwierk (Chamber of Skilled Trades and Crafts, for craft companies) run a free pre-analysis. An adviser confirms eligibility and helps you complete the application form. It costs nothing, and it is where most avoidable problems get caught.
File before any work starts
Your company submits the application before the project begins. Costs committed before approval cannot be reimbursed, and nothing done afterwards repairs that. This is the only step in the sequence with no second attempt.
Run the project
Once the aid is approved, the work is delivered and invoiced against the scope in the quote. If the scope needs to change, discuss it with your adviser before it changes, not after the invoice is written.
Claim the reimbursement
You pay the invoices, then claim up to 70% of eligible costs back — a maximum of €17,500 — from the scheme.
What the timeline actually looks like
The scheme does not publish a guaranteed decision time, and no consultancy can honestly promise one. What is fixed is the order of the steps — and the order, not the waiting, is what usually costs a company the money.
Three things sit inside your control: how long it takes to define the project, how quickly the quote is issued, and whether the pre-analysis appointment happens this month or next. On a small project those three account for most of the elapsed time, because they depend on your availability rather than on an administration's. Everything after filing is outside your control, which is the practical argument for filing early rather than filing perfectly.
The one boundary that is genuinely rigid is the line between filing and starting. Treat it as a hard gate: nothing signed, nothing kicked off, no deposit paid until the application is in. A supplier pushing you to begin before that is optimising for their delivery calendar, not for your grant.
Five mistakes that cost SMEs the grant
- Starting before filing. The most expensive mistake in the scheme and the only genuinely irreversible one: costs committed before approval are simply not eligible.
- Sizing the project outside the range. The eligible project size is €3,000 to €25,000 excluding VAT, and that is a band, not a target with a ceiling: a project quoted below the floor or above the top does not fit the scheme at all. An over-range project is not partly funded — it has to be rescoped to fit, or taken to a programme built for other project sizes, such as Fit 4 AI, Fit 4 Digital or SME Packages – Digital.
- Budgeting as though the aid arrives first. It arrives last. Plan the cash flow around paying the invoices in full, and treat the reimbursement as a later, separate event.
- Describing an ambition instead of a deliverable. “Introduce AI in the company” is not a project. “An assistant that drafts quotes from our supplier catalogue and our site notes” is one, and it is the version an adviser can assess.
- Assuming your supplier can apply for you. They cannot. The aid is granted to your company; the supplier's job is to scope the project and issue the quote your file rests on.
What a fundable AI project looks like
The scheme funds builds, not opinions, and four shapes come up repeatedly among Luxembourg SMEs: a task-specific AI agent that handles research, drafting and back-office work end to end; a customer-facing assistant such as an AI receptionist that answers every call; a document, quoting or communication workflow rebuilt to remove the manual steps; and a forecasting or decision-support model built on the company's own data. Our services pages describe how each of those is delivered, and the funding page lists the same four project types against the aid.
The common factor is not the technology. It is that each one can be written down as a scope, priced excluding VAT, and measured against a defined outcome — which is exactly what the application form asks for and what an adviser can assess in a pre-analysis meeting. A project that cannot be described that way is not blocked by the scheme; it is simply not ready for it yet.
Funding is one half of the question. The other half is what the rules ask of a company once the system is running, which is covered in AI implementation in Luxembourg: what SMEs actually need to know.
If you would rather have the scoping and the quote handled as one step, book a 30-minute call. That conversation is usually enough to tell whether a project fits the eligible range, and what it would have to contain to be worth funding.