Funding Digital Projects in Ireland: Grants and Supports for SMEs (2026)

If you last checked Irish grant schemes a couple of years ago, some of what you remember has changed. The Trading Online Voucher has been retired and replaced by the Grow Digital Voucher, and the R&D tax credit rate has gone up. This guide covers what's actually available for Irish SMEs funding a digital project in 2026, sourced directly from the Local Enterprise Office, Enterprise Ireland, and Revenue documentation, so you're not applying against outdated terms.

Grants and supports at a glance (2026)

Local Enterprise Office supports

Your Local Enterprise Office (LEO) is the first stop for most small businesses, and its digital supports now work as a two-step path rather than a single grant.

Digital for Business: the required first step

Digital for Business gives you 3 to 5 days of free, expert digital consultancy, funded entirely by your LEO, to assess your current digital systems and build a roadmap for what to adopt next. You need to have been trading for at least 6 months to qualify. This isn't optional if you want the funding that follows: it's now a prerequisite for the Grow Digital Voucher, so it's worth starting here even if your real goal is the grant itself.

Grow Digital Voucher: What Replaced the Trading Online Voucher?

The Grow Digital Voucher has replaced the old Trading Online Voucher entirely. It co-funds 50% of eligible costs, with a minimum grant of €500 and a maximum of €5,000 per application, up to a combined €5,000 across a maximum of two voucher projects. To apply, you need a Digital for Business report completed within the last two years.

The important catch for anyone planning custom software: this voucher funds off-the-shelf digital tools, things like CRM subscriptions, accounting software, booking systems, and cybersecurity tools, plus the training to implement them. It does not fund custom or bespoke software development. If your project is a purpose-built application rather than a configured off-the-shelf product, this particular voucher isn't the right fit, and the R&D tax credit further down is likely more relevant.

Apply through your local LEO office or the Grow Digital Grant portal, and confirm current terms directly with your LEO before committing to a project, since eligibility and availability are set locally.

Enterprise Ireland supports

For companies that qualify for Enterprise Ireland support, typically those with export potential or 10 or more full-time staff, two grants cover digital transformation at different stages.

Access Advice: Digital Discovery funds up to 80% of the cost of 3 to 7 days of external digital consultancy, to a maximum grant of €5,000, with eligible daily rates capped at €900. It's designed to produce a strategic digital roadmap before you commit to a larger project, similar in spirit to the LEO's Digital for Business support but for Enterprise Ireland's client base.

Digital Process Innovation is the larger implementation grant that typically follows: up to 50% of eligible costs, to a maximum of €150,000, for projects that introduce new digital systems or materially change how the business operates, covering salary costs, consultancy, materials, and defined overheads. Enterprise Ireland generally recommends starting with Digital Discovery before applying directly for this one.

The R&D tax credit for software development

Grants aren't the only route, and for genuine custom software work, the R&D tax credit is often the bigger opportunity. Following Budget 2026, the credit rate rose from 30% to 35% of qualifying R&D expenditure, on top of the standard 12.5% corporation tax deduction, for accounting periods starting on or after 1 January 2026. Loss-making or pre-profit companies can claim it as a cash refund from revenue, paid in installments, with the first-year cash threshold now raised to €87,500.

Software development qualifies when it resolves genuine scientific or technological uncertainty through a systematic, documented process, not simply "we built new software". Revenue's own guidance is specific about this: routine application of existing techniques doesn't qualify, but work where the outcome or method genuinely wasn't known in advance often does, which describes a meaningful share of custom software projects. Qualifying expenditure typically includes staff costs for time spent on the R&D activity, consumables, software licenses and cloud infrastructure supporting the work, and subcontractor costs, provided revenue is notified in writing before a subcontract begins.

Documentation matters enormously here. Revenue audits R&D claims more closely than most other reliefs, so keeping a real record of the technical uncertainty and the approach taken, as the work happens, is what makes a claim defensible. A short paragraph written after the fact saying "we developed new software" is not enough, and reconstructing that evidence months later is far weaker than logging it as you go.

What these grants can and can't fund

Grant funding, broadly, covers off-the-shelf tools, consultancy days, and training. It generally does not cover custom-built software, which is exactly where the R&D tax credit picks up instead. A realistic funding strategy for most SMEs building custom software combines the two: use Digital for Business or Digital Discovery for the free strategic groundwork, and plan your custom development spend around R&D tax credit eligibility from the outset rather than as an afterthought.

One rule to keep in mind if you use both: you cannot claim the R&D tax credit on the same expenditure that a grant already covered. If a Digital Process Innovation grant funds part of a project, that portion is out of scope for the tax credit, so keep grant-funded costs and R&D tax credit costs clearly separated in your project accounting from the start.

How to apply and mistakes that get applications rejected

Applications most often fail for reasons that are easy to avoid: applying before completing the prerequisite step (Digital for Business before Grow Digital, for example), vague project descriptions that don't tie back to a specific business outcome, and missing financial documentation. For the R&D tax credit specifically, the most common problem is inadequate contemporaneous documentation; trying to reconstruct evidence of technical uncertainty after the fact is far weaker than recording it as the work happens.

Because rules, thresholds, and scheme names genuinely do change, and Grow Digital Voucher replacing the Trading Online Voucher is proof of that, confirm current terms with your Local Enterprise Office or Enterprise Ireland contact before finalizing any application.
 

The bottom line

Ireland's digital funding landscape shifted meaningfully in the past year, with the Grow Digital Voucher replacing the old Trading Online Voucher and the R&D tax credit becoming more generous. For a straightforward tooling upgrade, the LEO and Enterprise Ireland paths are worth pursuing. For genuinely custom software, the R&D tax credit is usually the bigger lever, and it rewards planning documentation from day one rather than after the fact.

If you're scoping a custom software project and want to understand how to choose the right development partner or want a straight answer on what your project might cost, talk to our Dublin team about your project.

Frequently asked questions