In the late 1990s, the EU adopted common fiscal rules to keep national public finances on a sustainable path and allow centralised monetary policy to effectively implement its mandate. After the global financial crisis, when public investment posted a particularly sharp decline, the same fiscal rules were seen as culprits. This paper takes a fresh look at the interplay between public investment and EU fiscal rules. Using a new database covering all EU countries from 1998-2023, our analysis shows that compliance with the commonly agreed fiscal rules is not the problem. On the contrary, governments who follow the rules have the space to spend on investment. Policy makers tend to sacrifice public investment expenditure when they face trade-offs within the more general constraints on public finances.