Methodology

Everything on this site comes from a single source: what each university reports to the European Commission. Here we explain how data is harvested, what gets discarded, the thresholds applied before publishing any figure, and —above all— the catalogue's known gaps. A number whose source cannot be verified is worthless.

Methodology: 19 August 2026
Harvested census
6,622
With published deadlines
1,755
27% of census
With contact info
1,815
Published cities
715
out of 1,250 in the census

How a data point gets from the European Commission to the university page

6
  1. Harvesting
    An automated process crawls the public Erasmus+ App API and downloads the full institutional census, including deadlines, contacts, and services. It is saved in raw format with the harvest timestamp.
  2. Normalisation
    The API schema is mapped to the website schema: four distinct deadlines, one mobility contact, and a service list. Nothing is filled in or guessed; empty fields remain empty.
  3. Publishing filter
    A page is published only if the institution reports at least one deadline. That is what determines whether a page exists or not.
  4. Date resolution
    The reported day and month are projected onto the current calendar to determine the next upcoming date. Recalculated daily on every page.
  5. Cost of living
    A city's figure is only used if three or more student responses exist. Below that threshold, the page states how many responses were collected and does not publish an estimate.
  6. Photos
    Destination images are sourced from Wikimedia Commons with their author and licence tracked in a manifest. Without a manifest entry, the photo is not displayed: a card without a photo is just a blank space; a photo without credit is an infringement.

What this catalogue cannot tell you

Which universities you can actually attend. That is determined by the bilateral agreements signed by your home university, and those agreements are not in any public database.

How much grant money you will receive. Grant amounts are set by each national agency and vary according to country of origin, destination, and any supplementary allowances you qualify for.

Whether a deadline changed this year. We publish what the institution reported. A university may update its calendar and delay updating its database entry, which is why each page includes the mobility office email so you can confirm.

Anything about the 4,867 institutions without reported dates. They appear in the catalogue search, but without dedicated pages, because there is no verifiable information to display.

Spotted an error?

Drop us a line at sxlanes@gmail.com with the link to the page and details of the error. If the error is at the source, we flag it on the page; if it is in our normalisation, we fix it and log the change. We never tweak dates silently: the value of this catalogue is matching what was reported to the Commission, and an invisible manual change would undermine that.

About how the catalogue is built

Where exactly do the deadlines come from?

From the European Commission's public Erasmus+ App API, where each institution reports its own calendar. The entire census —6,622 institutions— is harvested and normalised without altering any dates. What you see on a page is what that university reported, not our interpretation.

Why are only 1,755 universities published if the census contains 6,622?

Because only 1,755 (27%) report any deadline. A page without a deadline would have nothing to say, so it is not published: we prefer a smaller catalogue where every entry is useful, rather than a bloated one full of blank pages. Just because a university isn't listed doesn't mean it doesn't host Erasmus students.

How does "15/05" turn into an actual date?

Institutions report day and month without a year, because deadlines repeat each academic cycle. The site calculates the next upcoming occurrence of that combination from today, and recalculates daily. That is why a countdown is never off by more than a day, and why our exports provide both fields separately: the raw reported day/month, and the calculated upcoming date.

Why do some cities lack living cost data?

Because the figure comes from student responses in the Erasmus+ App, and is only published once at least three responses exist. The catalogue median is 1 per city: with a single response, the "average" would just be one person's budget presented as an entire city's cost. Of 1,250 census cities, 242 meet the threshold. For the rest, the site clearly states that data is unavailable, rather than guessing.

What is the deal with universities where all four dates are identical?

There are 51 institutions where all four procedures fall on the exact same date. It might look like a form error, but it isn't: upon inspection, most are music conservatories and art academies with a single annual audition or call. The page detects this and explains it rather than repeating four identical rows.

Has any data been corrected manually?

Only geographical coordinates: 5 records came with coordinates placing them on another continent and were corrected, with each change tracked in code. Not a single date, email address, or amount has ever been altered by hand.

Do you use AI to generate the page content?

Not to produce data. Deadlines, contacts, and figures come directly from the harvested catalogue, and each page's text is composed from those values. The project rule is that a model can structure existing text, but never search for or invent data: tests showed that asking it to search catalogues produced plausible-sounding fake courses, and an invented course name sent to a coordinator can cost a student their place.

Deadlines, contacts, and living costs are sourced from the European Commission's Erasmus+ App, harvested on 19 August 2026 and reused under the CC BY 4.0 licence (Decision 2011/833/EU). Full methodology at /metodologia. go-erasmus is not affiliated with the European Commission or the Erasmus+ programme.