What is a PIF in Erasmus+?

An invented scenario, but a familiar one. Ana has just started as project officer at a small adult education centre. On her third day an email arrives from a school in another country: "Great to have you on board for our KA210. Could you send your PIF by Friday?" She searches for PIF and finds PIC, OID, ORS, an Identification Form and something called an Accession form. By Thursday she has sent the wrong document, and the coordinator still has to ask her for the centre's legal name, OID and the names of the staff who will work on the project.

PIF stands for Partner Identification Form. It is a short document in which an organisation presents itself to potential partners: who it is, its codes and contacts, what it does, who works there and what projects it has done. Some coordinators call it a Partner Information Form; the German National Agency for school education quotes an email that uses that name with the same abbreviation (PAD, KA210 information event, 12 January 2026, slide 14).

The National Erasmus+ Office in Ukraine describes the PIF as a short form for presenting an organisation when looking for partners for international projects, and contrasts it with a Project Concept Note: the concept note presents a project idea, while the PIF focuses on the capacity, experience and profile of the organisation that wants to join a consortium (National Erasmus+ Office in Ukraine, "Робота з PIF", 2026, slide 2, our summary of the Ukrainian text).

Do not confuse PIF with PIC. The PIC is the Participant Identification Code, a 9-digit identifier that organisations receive when they register in the Funding & Tenders Portal for actions managed by the Executive Agency (Programme Guide 2026, pp. 413–414). The PIF is a document; the PIC is one of the codes you write in it.

No. The Erasmus+ Programme Guide 2026 does not use the terms PIF or Partner Identification Form, and there is no EU template for one. We searched the full text of the Guide, version 1 of 12 November 2025, which was still the current version on the Commission's Programme Guide page when we checked on 11 November 2026. No 2027 Guide had been published then.

What the Guide does require is different. To apply to a National Agency, an organisation registers in the Organisation Registration system and receives an Organisation ID, or OID; for actions managed by the Executive Agency it registers in the Funding & Tenders Portal and receives a PIC (Programme Guide 2026, p. 413). The PIC is mandatory information in the application form (Programme Guide 2026, p. 413, footnote 456). Applicants also submit a Declaration on Honour, and in National Agency actions the partners sign an Accession and Declaration on Honour Form (Programme Guide 2026, pp. 421, 433).

Usually the coordinator: the organisation that will submit the application and asks each partner for its details. But the PIF travels both ways. Organisations looking for a project also send their PIF to coordinators who publish partner requests, or hand it out at contact seminars, which the Programme Guide calls "an efficient way to find partners for newcomers" (Programme Guide 2026, p. 20).

The same note says a PIF can be used both to select partners, if you launch a call for partners, and to collect information from partners you have already chosen. It advises asking for administrative information, such as the PIC, the OID for Erasmus+ and the legal representative's contact, straight away, even before selecting partners, to avoid last-minute problems with registration and missing information (EU Strategy for the Danube Region, hints and tips, points 1 and 4).

1. Partner search. You attach your PIF to a reply to a partner request, post it with your profile on a partner-finding platform, or share it at a contact seminar. Common practice, described by the National Erasmus+ Office in Ukraine ("Робота з PIF", 2026, slide 4).
2. Partnership agreed. The coordinator asks every partner for a PIF, often on their own template, to collect the facts the application form needs.
3. Writing the application. The coordinator enters your OID in the form, which fills in the data you gave at registration (Programme Guide 2026, p. 414), and uses your description, staff and experience in the text.
4. Submission. In National Agency actions, each partner signs the official Accession and Declaration on Honour Form, provided with the application or by a deadline the National Agency sets (Programme Guide 2026, p. 433).

A coordinator uses your PIF for two jobs: deciding whether to invite you, and writing the parts of the application that are about you. Both follow from what the Programme Guide asks of applicants to National Agencies, who show their operational capacity through the information in the application form, such as a general presentation of the organisations, the profiles (qualifications and experience) of the staff who will manage and carry out the project, and a description of the consortium (Programme Guide 2026, p. 424).

• Previous projects and publications. Where the call provisions make it relevant, applicants should also include previous projects and activities and publications (Programme Guide 2026, p. 424). For grants over EUR 60,000, applicants are recommended to send a list of the participating organisations' publications, if any, and an exhaustive list of previous and ongoing projects connected to the field or the action over the past four years (Programme Guide 2026, p. 424).
• The partnership questions. The 2026 KA220-HED application form asks how the partnership was formed, how the mix of organisations complements each other, and how the task allocation reflects the commitment and active contribution of all participating organisations (KA220-HED application form template, call 2026, section "Partnership and cooperation arrangements").
• Checks beyond the form. In case of doubt, a National Agency may also use other sources, such as the organisation's website or social media profiles, to assess operational capacity (Programme Guide 2026, p. 424).

There is no official list, so what follows is common practice, taken from public PIF templates: the template published by the National Erasmus+ Office in Ukraine and the Erasmus+ Partner Identification Form of Learnkey, an organisation based in Malta. Both ask for the same core facts. Their background questions are close to the "Background and experience" questions that Erasmus+ application form templates ask about every participating organisation, such as "Please briefly present your organisation." and "What are the organisation's activities in the field of this application?" (KA210-YOU application form template, call 2024, applicant and partner organisation details).

The National Erasmus+ Office in Ukraine also lists mission and field of activity, target groups and main services, material and staff resources, the role you could take in a project, your motivation for joining, and links to your website and publications as usual contents ("Робота з PIF", 2026, slide 3).

Start from a clean structure, with a filled-in example from an invented organisation. Get the free PIF template (Word and PDF)

Then check it before you send it. The 18 checks before you send a PIF

The names are close, and they are often mixed up. Only the PIF is informal; everything else in this table is defined by the Programme Guide.

In a consortium, the Identification Form should be provided by all members, but banking details only by the coordinator (Programme Guide 2026, p. 415). The Commission's page for these forms now offers "business partner" forms for a natural person, private companies and a public law body, dated 10 April 2025, which replace the earlier legal entity and bank account forms (European Commission, "Business partners – legal entities and bank accounts").

Accession forms are not required for partner organisations in other countries in mobility projects for higher education, VET, school education and adult education staff, but members of national consortia in those fields must provide one (Programme Guide 2026, p. 436).

Which code goes where, and how to check yours: OID and PIC: which code goes where

Everything else a partner may be asked to sign or send: Erasmus+ partner documents

Not quite. Otlas is the partner-finding tool developed and hosted by the SALTO-Youth Resource Centres for organisations in the youth field (Programme Guide 2026, p. 25). Your Otlas profile is how other organisations find you; your PIF is what you send once a conversation starts.

When we checked on 11 November 2026, the Otlas start page counted 15,259 organisations and informal groups and 11,418 international projects (SALTO-Youth, Otlas start page). Many organisations attach their PIF as a file to their Otlas entries: a web search for PIF templates returns many PIF files hosted on Otlas. Open Otlas on SALTO-Youth

Otlas is one of several official partner-finding tools. Our guide covers the rest. How to find Erasmus+ partners

Most requests are genuine, but be careful. Your PIF holds your OID and the names and contacts of your legal representative and staff. In a January 2026 information event for KA210 newcomers, the German National Agency for school education warned that dubious offers from questionable actors sometimes appear in Key Action 2, and asked organisations to check such offers carefully. Its example was an email offering "We write, you coordinate" (PAD, KA210 information event, 12 January 2026, slide 14, our translation of the German warning).

• The Programme Guide strongly advises applicants against relying on external entities or individuals to draft the application (Programme Guide 2026, p. 428).
• No other organisations or external individuals can be paid or otherwise compensated for drafting the application or later reports, because these are core tasks which cannot be subcontracted (Programme Guide 2026, p. 428).
• All applications must contain original content authored by the applicant or partner organisations, and proposals are automatically screened for double funding and plagiarism (Programme Guide 2026, p. 428).
• Applicants must have explicit consent to use another organisation's OID in an application form, and may be disqualified if they cannot show it in case of disagreement (Programme Guide 2026, p. 414).

Back to Ana. Her real problem was never the acronym. It was that the facts about her centre lived in old attachments, in a former colleague's inbox and in a Word file nobody had opened for two years. Every coordinator who receives a copy of your PIF keeps it, forwards it and opens it again weeks later, on the night they fill in the application form. Every copy of an old file is a copy that can be wrong.

The facts in your PIF end up in someone else's application. Entering an OID fills in the registration data in the form automatically (Programme Guide 2026, p. 414), and an invalid OID is one of the grounds for non-admissibility (Programme Guide 2026, p. 416). A National Agency may also look at your website or social media when it doubts an organisation's operational capacity (Programme Guide 2026, p. 424), so your PIF should say what your public pages say.

That is the part MyPIF will do. It will keep your organisation's PIF behind one permanent link that always opens the latest version, with version history, an AI Quality Score (a quality check, not a prediction of funding), PDF and Word export when a coordinator needs a file, and copy for any field. It will not write your applications; it keeps your facts right. MyPIF opens soon: join the waiting list before 1 December 2026 and get 2 months of Pro free, no card needed. Join the waiting list: 2 months of Pro free