Hamburg Digital Check refunds half your consulting costs

The Hamburg Digital Check is one of the few digitalisation grants in Germany that pays back half of what you spend on the work, up to €7,500. Most coverage of it stops at that number. The part that decides whether a Hamburg SME gets the money is what the grant counts as eligible, and that is narrower than the headline suggests.

IFB Hamburg reimburses consulting costs. It does not reimburse the software, the licences, or the engineer-days that follow. So the way you scope the engagement, and the order you do things in, decides whether the funding lands.

What the grant reimburses, and what it does not

The Hamburg Digital Check funds external consulting in two areas: information security and digitalisation (Informationssicherheit and Digitaler Wandel). A consultant assesses where your setup is exposed and where moving manual work onto your systems pays back, and writes that up. IFB Hamburg reimburses 50 percent of that consulting fee, capped at €7,500.

What it does not fund is the implementation. New Microsoft 365 licences, an Azure landing zone build, a Power BI rollout, the developer time to automate a process: none of that is eligible under the Digital Check. That work has its own Hamburg funding route, the Hamburg-Kredit Digital loan programme, which is a loan, not a reimbursement.

This split is the single most useful thing to understand before you apply. The Digital Check pays for the plan. The build is financed separately. Scope the consulting engagement so its deliverable is a concrete implementation concept, the Realisierungskonzept the programme requires, and you have something the grant pays for and the loan programme can act on.

The Realisierungskonzept has to be concrete

The required deliverable is a Realisierungskonzept, an implementation concept. The word matters. A strategy deck that says "improve your security posture" and "consider automation" is not a Realisierungskonzept, and an assessor can decline it.

What the grant expects is the named measures, the sequence to do them in, and enough costing to act on or to commission each one. For information security that means the specific gaps in your Entra ID identity and access setup, your Microsoft 365 and Azure exposure, and your backup and recovery position, ranked by risk. For digitalisation it means the manual processes worth moving onto your Microsoft setup, each scored on the work it removes against what it costs to build. Specific enough that you, or any implementation partner, can pick it up and start.

Three rules that disqualify otherwise-eligible firms

Three application mechanics trip up Hamburg SMEs that would otherwise qualify.

Apply before the work starts. The Digital Check is approved before the engagement begins, not claimed afterwards. If you have already started the consulting, you have lost the funding for it. The sequence is fixed: your consultant scopes and quotes, you submit through the IFB Hamburg eAntragsportal in your own name, and the work begins only once the grant is approved.

Check your de-minimis headroom. The Digital Check is de-minimis state aid under Regulation (EU) 2023/2831. Any single undertaking can receive up to €300,000 of de-minimis aid across three fiscal years. If your firm has taken other de-minimis grants recently, COVID-era support, energy-cost relief, earlier digitalisation aid, you need room left under that ceiling, and the application asks you to declare it. Most SMEs have plenty of headroom. The ones that do not tend to find out at the application, not before.

Match the eligibility profile exactly. The grant is for legally independent SMEs, skilled-trades businesses, and liberal professions with an operational base in Hamburg, under 250 employees and inside the EU SME turnover or balance-sheet limits. A Hamburg branch of a larger group, or a firm that clears the SME thresholds, does not qualify regardless of how good the project is.

How the funding shapes the engagement

Because the grant pays for consulting and the loan pays for the build, the clean way to run this is to treat the assessment as a self-contained, fixed-fee piece of work with a fundable deliverable, then decide on implementation once you can see the ranked list and the costs against it. The Hamburg Digital Check assessment is built to that shape: two weeks, the two funded areas, ending in the Realisierungskonzept the application cites, with the scope and cost breakdown structured for the eAntrag.

The funding window runs into late 2026, subject to available funds, and the budget can be exhausted before the window closes. The eligibility rules and the de-minimis declaration are worth checking against your own numbers before you get in touch, which is what the guide below is for.