The success of river restoration is often poorly quantified due to poor design, absence of proper monitoring or incomplete documentation. This study is an attempt to overcome this ex-post using the aggregating nature of the ecosystem services approach. In 8 pairs of restored reaches and their adjacent floodplains of middle-sized European rivers, we quantified as many provisioning, regulating and cultural services as possible that were of final value to humans as annual biogeochemical or –physical fluxes, or densities per year, and summed these to annual economic value normalised per area.