MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2026: EUR 399.05 Million, About 1,600 Fellowships, Deadline 9 September 2026

MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2026: EUR 399.05 Million, About 1,600 Fellowships, Deadline 9 September 2026

The 2026 round of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowships (MSCA-PF) is open. The European Commission launched the call on 9 April 2026 and the deadline for submitting proposals is 9 September 2026. The indicative budget is EUR 399.05 million, split into EUR 339.19 million for European Postdoctoral Fellowships and EUR 59.86 million for Global Postdoctoral Fellowships, and the Commission expects to fund close to 1,600 fellowships. The topic code you will see on the EU Funding & Tenders Portal is HORIZON-MSCA-2026-PF-01-01.

If you looked at this scheme in a previous year, read the rest of this page rather than relying on your notes. Three things changed for 2026: the allowance rates went up, secondments got substantially longer, and there is now a hard resubmission bar tied to your 2025 score. Any one of those can decide whether your application is worth writing.

This is not a grant you write alone in a weekend. You apply jointly with a host organisation that will employ you, and the proposal is assessed as a package: your research, your career plan, and the host’s capacity to deliver both. A brilliant idea attached to a vague host arrangement loses to a good idea attached to a specific one.

At a glance

Note on status: the MSCA site still carries a “(TBC)” marker next to the 2026 dates and budget on its funding page, while the REA programme page and the Portal topic page publish them as firm. Treat the Portal topic page as the binding source and re-check it before you submit.

Two tracks, and how to pick one

European Postdoctoral Fellowships. Open to researchers of any nationality. You either come into Europe from anywhere in the world or move between European countries. The fellowship runs 12 to 24 months at a single beneficiary established in an EU Member State or a Horizon Europe Associated Country.

Global Postdoctoral Fellowships. Restricted to nationals or long-term residents of an EU Member State or Associated Country. The structure is 24 to 36 months total: an outgoing phase of 12 to 24 months in a non-associated third country, followed by a mandatory 12-month return phase in Europe. You need a letter of commitment from the outgoing host in the third country, and that letter is one of the most commonly missing documents in the whole scheme.

Both tracks allow an optional non-academic placement of up to six months at the very end, in the non-academic sector in an EU Member State or Associated Country. This sits on top of the standard duration rather than inside it, but it must be described in the proposal and it gets evaluated like everything else. You cannot bolt one on later.

There are also separate eligibility conditions for fellowships supported by the Euratom Research and Training Programme 2026-2027: the host must be a legal entity in an EU Member State or a Euratom Associated Country, and the researcher must be a national or long-term resident of one. Roughly 40 ERA Fellowships are additionally available to strong proposals hosted in widening countries and outermost regions that miss out on the main list.

What the money actually is

MSCA funding is paid as unit costs per person-month to the host institution, which then employs you. It is not a cheque you administer. For 2026 the rates are:

• Living allowance: EUR 6,350 per person-month, adjusted by a country correction coefficient so the real amount depends on where you are hosted
• Mobility allowance: EUR 710 per month, not country-corrected
• Family allowance: EUR 660 per month where applicable, not country-corrected
• Research, training and networking contribution: EUR 1,000 per month to the institution
• Management and indirect contribution: EUR 650 per month to the institution
• Long-term leave and special needs allowances exist on top, where applicable

Do the arithmetic before you decide whether the effort pays. At a country coefficient of 1.0 and no family allowance, a 24-month European fellowship carries roughly EUR 209,000 in total EU contribution, of which about EUR 169,000 relates to you and about EUR 39,600 goes to institutional costs. A 36-month Global fellowship approaches EUR 313,000 on the same assumptions. The living allowance is a gross employer cost, so what lands in your bank account is materially lower after employer contributions, income tax, and social charges in the host country. Ask your prospective host for a net estimate for their specific country early. Candidates are routinely surprised at this stage, and it is a bad surprise to have in August.

Eligibility, stated precisely

• You must hold a PhD at the call deadline, or have had a successful unconditional viva before it.
• You must have no more than 8 years of research experience counted from the date the PhD was awarded. Extensions exist for career breaks, time working outside research, and for reintegrating researchers who did research outside Europe. If your PhD is more than 8 years old you complete an extensions table in Part A, and your CV has to corroborate it exactly.
• Mobility rule: you must not have resided or had your main activity, including work or study, in the country of the beneficiary for more than 12 months in the 36 months immediately before the deadline. For a Global Fellowship the same test applies to the third-country host.
• Any scientific field is eligible, including Euratom research.
• The scheme explicitly welcomes researchers reintegrating into Europe and those displaced by conflict.

REA publishes a self-assessment tool and written guidance on calculating the 8-year window. Use it rather than reasoning from first principles, because the counting rules are less intuitive than they look and an eligibility failure is not appealable on the merits.

New for 2026: the resubmission bar

This is the change most likely to disqualify someone who assumes nothing has moved. A proposal involving the same recruiting organisation and the same individual researcher that was submitted to the 2025 MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships call and scored below 80 percent must not be resubmitted in 2026. For Global Fellowships the rule also covers the associated partner hosting the outgoing phase. REA checks submissions against this and declares breaches ineligible.

If that is your situation you have two legitimate routes: change the recruiting organisation, or wait for the next call. Rewriting the same proposal for the same host is not one of them.

Secondments got longer

Secondments can be taken anywhere in the world, in any sector, for up to half the total duration for a European Fellowship, or up to half the outgoing phase for a Global Fellowship. No secondments are permitted during the return phase of a Global Fellowship. That is a real expansion of what you can plan, and it makes cross-sector or cross-continent collaboration much easier to build into a two-year project than it used to be.

Do not confuse secondments with the non-academic placement. They are different instruments with different rules, and mixing them up is on REA’s published list of common errors.

What you submit

Part A, the structured application forms, asks for the acronym and title, the best-fit scientific area from eight, up to five MSCA descriptors in descending order of relevance with the first three mandatory, a 2,000-character abstract, participant identification codes for the beneficiary and any outgoing or placement host, your PhD award date plus any extensions table, five years of residence history, supervisor details, the budget table, Gender Equality Plan information, and the ethics and security self-assessment.

Your first two descriptors determine which panel sees the proposal and influence which experts get assigned. Choose them deliberately.

Part B1 is the technical description: a strict 10-page limit, minimum 11-point font with at least single line spacing, including text inside tables. Pages beyond the limit are simply not shown to evaluators. Use the Part B template from the 2026 call page, not last year’s.

Part B2 has no formal page limit but follows the template: your CV at roughly five pages, the capacity of each participating organisation at a maximum of one page each, and the letter of commitment from the third-country host for Global Fellowships.

How it is scored

Evaluation is single-stage. Each proposal goes to one of eight scientific panels: CHE, ECO, ENG, ENV, LIF, MAT, PHY, SOC. A minimum of three and up to five experts write individual evaluation reports, then meet to reach consensus and produce a single summary report.

The three award criteria are weighted Excellence 50 percent, Impact 30 percent, and Quality and efficiency of the implementation 20 percent. Excellence covers the ambition of your objectives against the state of the art, the soundness of your methodology including interdisciplinarity and open science practices, the quality of supervision and the two-way transfer of knowledge between you and the host, and the fit of your own experience and skills. Impact covers the credibility of the measures that will improve your career prospects and employability, your dissemination, exploitation and communication plan, and the project’s contribution to scientific, societal and economic impact. Implementation covers the work plan, risk assessment, effort allocated across work packages, and the host’s capacity and hosting arrangements.

Read that weighting as instruction. Half the score is in the science and the supervision relationship. Nearly a third sits in career development and impact, which is the section applicants most often treat as filler. Vague training language costs real points here.

Each panel produces two separate ranked lists, European and Global, funded strictly in rank order until the allocated budget for that panel runs out. Funding per panel is distributed in proportion to the number of eligible proposals received. Proposals scoring 85 percent or higher that miss out purely because the budget ran dry receive a Seal of Excellence, which several national and regional funders use as a shortlist signal. The evaluation review procedure covers procedural errors only. It is not a rebuttal mechanism and disagreeing with an expert’s opinion is not grounds for review.

Errors REA sees every year

• Missing the deadline outright
• Submitting under the wrong type of action
• Mixing up the host organisation, the third-country host, and the current employer
• Failing eligibility on the PhD or the 8-year window
• Exceeding the Part B1 page limit
• Omitting the letter of commitment for a Global Fellowship
• Confusing secondments with non-academic placements
• Requesting a secondment or placement that is not eligible
• Using a font smaller than allowed

Every item on that list is a formatting or process failure, not a scientific one. They are avoidable at zero intellectual cost, and each one throws away months of work.

Working backward from 9 September 2026

There is a little over six weeks left as of late July 2026, which is tight but workable if a host is already in place. A realistic sequence:

• Now. Confirm eligibility against the 8-year calculation guidance and the mobility rule. Confirm your host is willing and identify who in their research office handles submission. If you are pursuing a Global Fellowship, request the outgoing host’s letter of commitment today; it is the item most likely to arrive late.
• Early August. Complete a full Part B1 draft at 10 pages, structured to the template so the mapping to the three criteria is obvious to an evaluator who is skimming.
• Mid August. Circulate to two readers: one deep specialist, one who works in research administration. You need both scientific credibility and procedural compliance, and they catch different failures.
• Late August. Finalise the budget table, the descriptors, the ethics self-assessment, and Part B2. Verify the font size and page count in the exported PDF, not in the source document.
• 1 to 3 September. Full dry run in the Portal, uploading real PDFs into the correct slots.
• 5 to 7 September. Submit. The Portal allows resubmission until the cutoff, so an early submission is a safety net rather than a commitment. Leave the last 48 hours as buffer for signature and system problems, not as working time.

Who should apply, and who should wait

Apply this cycle if you hold the PhD, have a host that has already agreed to co-develop the proposal, and can articulate why that specific host changes what you are able to do. Also apply if you are reintegrating into Europe after research abroad, or if you need access to a facility or team that does not exist where you are now.

Wait for the next call if you are still looking for a host, if your 2025 proposal with the same host scored below 80 percent, or if your project genuinely cannot be scoped to 12 to 24 months. A rushed host arrangement reads as a rushed host arrangement, and the Implementation criterion is where that shows up.

Questions people actually ask

Is the 2026 call open right now? Yes. It opened 9 April 2026 and closes 9 September 2026. The previous round closed on 10 September 2025.

My PhD is nine years old but I took parental leave. Extensions to the 8-year window exist for career breaks, work outside research, and research conducted outside Europe by reintegrating researchers. Complete the extensions table in Part A, mirror it in your CV, and check the specific case against REA’s 8-year calculation guidance before you commit.

Can a non-EU citizen apply for a Global Fellowship? No. Global Fellowships are limited to nationals or long-term residents of an EU Member State or Associated Country. Non-EU nationals apply for European Fellowships, which have no nationality restriction and hold the large majority of the budget.

Do I need a formal Career Development Plan in the proposal? The proposal must set out concrete training and career development measures, and those measures are scored under Impact. The formal Career Development Plan is an obligation that follows once the grant starts.

When would I actually start? Results are indicated for February 2027, with the earliest projects starting in March or April 2027 and start dates possible up to September 2028. Plan your employment situation around a gap of at least seven months between submission and any salary.

Does it have to be academic? No. Universities, research institutions and facilities, companies including SMEs, and other organisations can all host, and the non-academic placement and expanded secondment rules are designed for cross-sector work.

Official resources

• 2026 call page: https://marie-sklodowska-curie-actions.ec.europa.eu/funding/msca-postdoctoral-fellowships-2026
• REA programme page with the official timeline: https://rea.ec.europa.eu/funding-and-grants/horizon-europe-marie-sklodowska-curie-actions/msca-postdoctoral-fellowships_en
• Funding & Tenders Portal topic page: https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/portal/screen/opportunities/topic-details/HORIZON-MSCA-2026-PF-01-01
• Scheme overview, allowances and mobility rules: https://marie-sklodowska-curie-actions.ec.europa.eu/actions/postdoctoral-fellowships
• How to apply: https://marie-sklodowska-curie-actions.ec.europa.eu/actions/how-to-apply

REA also publishes a guide for applicants, a “Common mistakes in MSCA-PF proposal submissions” guide, the 8-year self-assessment tool, proposal templates, and the evaluation guidelines given to experts. The evaluation guidelines are the most underused document in the set: they tell you what the person scoring your proposal has been told to look for.

The scheme rewards precision more than ambition. Get the eligibility arithmetic right, get the host commitment specific, write the career development section as though it will be scored, and keep 48 hours of slack before 9 September 2026.