The money the UK sent to the EU was a controversial theme in the 2016 referendum, particularly the Leave campaign’s claim the UK sent £350m every week to Brussels.
The UK’s gross public sector contribution to the EU Budget in 2019-20, the final financial year before Brexit, was £18.3bn, equivalent to around £352m per week, according to the Treasury, external.
The UK continued paying into the EU Budget during the transition period but since 31 December 2020 it has not made these contributions.
However, those EU Budgets contributions were always partially recycled to the UK via payments to British farmers under the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and “structural funding” – development grants to support skills, employment and training in certain economically disadvantaged regions of the nation. These added up to £5bn in 2019-20.
Since the end of the transition period UK governments have replaced the CAP payments directly with taxpayer funds, external.
Ministers have also replaced the EU structural funding grants, with the previous government rebranding them as “a UK Shared Prosperity” fund, external.
The UK was also receiving a negotiated “rebate” on its EU Budget contributions of around £4bn a year, external – money which never actually left the country,
So the net fiscal benefit to the UK from not paying into the EU Budget is closer to to £9bn per year, although this figure is inherently uncertain because we don’t know what the UK’s contribution to the EU Budget would otherwise have been.
The UK has also still been paying the EU as part of the official Brexit Withdrawal Agreement and its financial settlement. The Treasury says the UK paid a net amount of £14.9bn between 2021 and 2023, external, and estimated that from 2024 onwards it will have to pay another £6.4bn, although spread over many years.
Future payments under the withdrawal settlement are also uncertain in part because of fluctuating exchange rates.
However, there are other ways the UK’s finances remained connected with the EU, separate from the EU Budget and the Withdrawal Agreement.
After Brexit took effect, the UK also initially stopped paying into the Horizon scheme, which funds pan-European scientific research.
However, Britain rejoined Horizon in 2023, external and is projected by the EU to pay in around €2.4bn (£2bn) per year on average to the EU budget for its participation, although historically the UK has been a net financial beneficiary from the scheme because of the large share of grants won by UK-based scientists.
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