Last updated: April 3, 2025
Fossil fuel subsidies dashboard
Fossil fuel subsidies in the European Union
The following charts are based on the dataset part of the 2024 edition of Study on energy subsidies and other government interventions in the European Union. The dataset is currently not available on European Union’s websites. Our campaign sent a successful document access request to make the data public.
Note: While we use this source to provide insights into fossil fuel subsidies in the EU, the Stop Fossil Subsidies campaign does not endorse the completeness, methodology, or conclusions of the data. The figures presented should be interpreted with caution.
Methodological note
The study employs a bottom-up inventory approach, drawing on data from national budget documents and reports.
The inventory approach used by the authors relies on the baseline tax rates in each country to assess the fiscal impact of tax measures. As a result, a country with higher fossil fuel taxes and multiple exemptions or differentiated rates will appear to have significantly higher fossil fuel subsidies than another country with lower tax rates and fewer exemptions. This makes the approach more suitable for analyzing subsidies and policies within a single country rather than for cross-country comparisons. Additionally, regular adjustments to tax codes mean that year-to-year comparisons, even within the same country, should be interpreted with caution.
Note: In the dataset, the column “TBC” (To Be Confirmed) likely indicates that the 2023 values are still pending confirmation. Where “TBC = yes,” the corresponding 2023 values were initially set to zero. To provide a more representative estimate, these cells have been temporarily filled with the 2022 values using statistical imputation. This adjustment brings the total for 2023 to approximately €111 billion.
Fossil fuel subsidies datasets
Several organisations provide datasets on fossil fuel subsidies. Methodologies and covered countries differ.
The International Monetary Fund uses the price paid by consumers for energy derived from fossil fuels as the criterion for the existence of explicit fossil fuel subsidies. Implicit fossil subsidies occur when the retail price of fossil fuel fails to take into account the external costs of fossil fuel consumption (e.g. environmental damages).
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development employs a bottom-up approach to assess the fiscal impact of government support for fossil fuels by identifying and measuring specific policy measures. The OECD definition follows the subsidy definition in the Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures under the World Trade Organization.
The International Energy Agency estimates subsidies for fossil fuels used either directly by end consumers or as inputs for electricity generation.
The European Union (DG ENER) commissions every year a study on energy subsidies with an inventory approach. The dataset is, however, not available on European Union’s websites.
The Fossil Fuel Subsidy Tracker relies on data from the IMF, OECD, and IEA.
A note on methodologies
There is no single methodology to estimate the amount of fossil fuel subsidies in a country. Fossil fuel subsidy estimates for the same country may be vastly different. Click on the button to download a research note on the topic.
For example, the estimates for the Netherlands vary significantly according to the methodology used.
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