The paper leverages variation over time in and across individual EU member states’ bilateral aid per recipient category (least developed countries, lower-middle and upper-middle income recipients) to test for a systematic influence of diverse predictors on aid to gross national income (GNI) ratios during the contemporary period (2000–2017). We quantitatively investigate the explanatory power of main domestic variables (government ideology, prevalence of socialdemocratic culture, political elites' intrinsic commitment to aid) and international factors (political and economic interests, emulation, EU pressure), which represents an effort to analyse development aid in a comprehensive conceptual framework. We draw on the existing theoretical and empirical research but also innovate. Different categories of recipient countries are possibly subject to dissimilar influences, which remains unaccounted for in empirical studies predominantly using aggregate levels of development assistance. This may compromise empirically-based recipes for reducing aid volatility and increasing aid effectiveness, in particular in the least developed countries. Our analysis, which takes into consideration methodologically-sensitive aspects of the data structure, yields results pointing to relatively different but also some similar effects between the three recipient categories.