AbstractAchieving a precise description of multi‐parton final states is crucial for the interpretation of the LHC data. Recent years have seen a huge effort in developing methods for an efficient and fully automated computation of cross sections at the one‐loop level enlarging the wealth of predictions accessible at the next‐to‐leading order (NLO). In this proceedings contribution we briefly review the main features of the HELAC‐NLO method and show, as an illustratory example, some results of a complete NLO study of Higgs signal versus irreducible QCD background in production at the LHC.