Scottish households could be up to £210 a year worse off with independence, Chief Secretary of the Treasury Danny Alexander has warned.
The MP for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey said if Scotland split from the UK it would lose between £1.9billion and £3.8bilion from the European Union.
It would no longer be entitled to a share of Britain’s £3billion EU rebate – and would even have to pay towards it.
Scotland would also receive less in EU structural funds, he said.
The situation regarding Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) payments was more complex, with Scotland losing more than £1billion or gaining an extra £850million.
But Mr Alexander claimed that, even under the best case scenario, Scotland would lose out in EU funding.
“What this means for Scottish families is that, over the next seven years, continuing as part of the United Kingdom will save them at lease £750 per household, possibly climbing to £1,470.
Mr Alexander made the claims at the launch of the UK Government’s latest analysis paper on the impact of independence – on the EU and international issues.
Foreign Secretary William Hague, who was at yesterday’s launch of the analysis paper in Glasgow, said there would be no “seamless transition” to EU membership.
Negotiations could take years with no guarantee of the membership terms and every likelihood Scotland would have to accept the euro and Schengen agreement on freedom of movement.
“It is unlikely to be as easy as the Scottish Government makes out,” said Mr Hague.
The foreign secretary also said Scots would lose access to the UK consular network – which last year handled 1million queries – if they got into trouble abroad.
Scottish businesses currently gets help from the UK Trade and Investment (UKTI), a network of 169 offices, in over 100 markets, representing 98% of global GDP. Mr Hague said: “Even if an independent Scotland were eventually to offer trade support in each of the 70 to 90 diplomatic offices it plans, the network would still only be a fraction of the size of that offered by UKTI right now.”