Irish digital grants in 2026: the one that closed, and the one that did not

For years the Trading Online Voucher was the answer to "is there a grant for this". Up to €2,500, matched fifty-fifty, for businesses with ten or fewer employees and turnover under €2 million, towards a website, e-commerce, online booking or payments.

It is closed. The scheme's own page on localenterprise.ie carries the line: this scheme will close for applications on the 13th December 2024 at 5pm.

It is still being advertised. In August 2026 we found two Irish firms selling against it, one pricing a fixed-fee package to sit inside the voucher and another offering help with the application. Neither is being dishonest; the scheme was central to how digital work was sold in Ireland for half a decade and pages do not update themselves. But if you are reading an offer built around the Trading Online Voucher, you are reading something written before December 2024.

The Grow Digital Voucher is the live one. Grant aid of 50% of eligible costs, a minimum of €500 and a maximum of €5,000 per application, towards software and training or IT configuration.

It is open to small enterprises with between 1 and 50 paid employees, which is a much wider door than the Trading Online Voucher's ten. You must be trading for at least six months, registered and operating in your Local Enterprise Office's area, solvent on your financial statements, tax cleared, and not already a client of Enterprise Ireland or the IDA.

A business can be approved for a maximum of two Grow Digital Voucher projects, to a cumulative grant of €5,000. A second one depends on demonstrating that the business actually progressed the way the earlier report said it would.

The Grow Digital Voucher is not something you apply for cold. It is open only to businesses that have completed a Digital for Business project within the previous two years.

Digital for Business is the free part. Your Local Enterprise Office puts you with a digital consultant who looks at the systems you already run, finds the gaps between what they do and what the business needs, and writes a report recommending what to change. The eligibility is the same shape: trading at least six months, between one and fifty people, not an Enterprise Ireland or IDA client.

That report is what the voucher then pays to implement. Which means the order matters: the assessment first, the money second, and the money is only for the things the assessment identified.

It also means the sensible first move is a phone call to your Local Enterprise Office rather than to an agency. There are thirty-one of them and the assessment costs nothing.

The scheme describes eligible spend as software and training or IT configuration, and gives examples: online booking, stock control, AI, customer insights, payroll software, cyber security.

Notice what that list is and is not. It is software and the work of configuring it. It is not obviously a brochure website, and it is not marketing spend. Whether a given piece of work qualifies is decided against your own Digital for Business report and by your own Local Enterprise Office, not by whoever is quoting you.

So the honest answer to "will the grant cover this quote" is that nobody selling you the work can tell you. Your LEO can, and asking them before you commit is free.

If you are eligible, the sequence is worth more than the grant. A free consultant looking at your systems produces a written list of what is worth changing, and that list is useful whether or not you ever claim a euro against it. It is also the same artefact a good supplier would charge you for.

If you are not eligible, because you are an Enterprise Ireland client or you have been trading under six months, the assessment is still the thing to buy. What it produces is a costed list of what to fix and, just as usefully, what to leave alone.

Either way, the thing to be sceptical of is a quote that arrives before anybody has looked at what you already run.