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

The Trading Online Voucher offered up to €2,500, matched fifty-fifty, towards a website, e-commerce, online booking or payments. It was for businesses with ten or fewer employees and turnover under €2 million.

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.

The Grow Digital Voucher is the one that is open. It pays 50% of eligible costs, with a minimum grant 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, with no more than €5,000 in total across both. A second one depends on showing that the business 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 comes first. 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 recommends what to change in a report. The eligibility rules are similar: trading at least six months, between one and fifty paid employees, not an Enterprise Ireland or IDA client. The published pages do not state a fee, so confirm the cost with your Office.

The voucher then pays to put that report's recommendations in place. The order matters: the assessment first, the money second, and the money is only for the things the assessment identified.

The first move is a phone call to your Local Enterprise Office. There are thirty-one of them.

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. Your Local Enterprise Office decides whether a given piece of work qualifies, judged against your own Digital for Business report, so ask them before you commit to a quote.

If you are eligible, a consultant appointed by your Local Enterprise Office looks at your systems and recommends what is worth changing.

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.