Fundación MAPFRE Ignacio H. de Larramendi Research Grants 2026: A €265,000 Worldwide Call Paying Up to €30,000 for Health Promotion and €15,000 for Insurance and Social Protection Projects, Closing 22 October 2026 at 14:00 CEST

Fundación MAPFRE Ignacio H. de Larramendi Research Grants 2026: A €265,000 Worldwide Call Paying Up to €30,000 for Health Promotion and €15,000 for Insurance and Social Protection Projects, Closing 22 October 2026 at 14:00 CEST

Fundación MAPFRE runs an annual research grant call named after Ignacio Hernando de Larramendi (1921–2001), the executive who built MAPFRE from a small Spanish insurer into an international group and who became the first president of the Foundation created in 1975. The 2026 edition is open now, and it is one of the more unusual mid-size research awards available: the money is modest by national-agency standards, the administration is light, and the scope is explicitly worldwide, which means a researcher in Bogotá, Lisbon, Nairobi or Manila can apply on the same footing as one in Madrid.

The call is also unusually split. One half funds health promotion research — habit change, emergency response education, bodily harm assessment, clinical safety, longevity. The other half funds insurance and social protection research — risk management, insurtech, pensions, savings, the senior economy. Very few funders sit across those two fields at once, and that combination is the reason this call is worth knowing about even if you have never looked at a corporate foundation’s research programme before.

Key Details

Two numbers deserve emphasis before anything else. First, €265,000 is the maximum total the Foundation has committed for 2026 — the rules explicitly state that the evaluation committees may declare grants vacant and that the Foundation is under no obligation to exhaust the budget if the projects submitted do not reach the required standard. Second, the per-grant figures are gross. Spanish tax law applies to the payment, and Fundación MAPFRE will apply whatever withholdings are due, so the cash that reaches your project is less than the headline number unless the grant is paid to an institution under a tax treaty that changes the position.

What the Two Funding Areas Actually Cover

The rules set out specific thematic lines rather than leaving the fields open. Proposals must sit inside them.

Health Promotion (up to €30,000):

• Strategies and education for habit change: obesity prevention, promotion of physical activity, and emotional wellbeing, including the appropriate use of new technologies.
• Education of the general population in emergency manoeuvres.
• Assessment of bodily harm: evaluating the consequences of a traumatic or accidental event, medical negligence, assault or illness on an individual’s health, and the effect on essential activities of ordinary life and on other specific activities of personal development, including moral damage and loss of quality of life.
• Healthcare management: clinical quality and safety.
• Longevity and the influence of lifestyles.

Insurance and Social Protection (up to €15,000):

• Insurance.
• Risk management, with an emphasis on emerging risks.
• New technologies in the insurance field.
• Social protection: pensions, saving, investment, asset decumulation, and the senior economy (the economics of longevity).

These lists tell you a lot about the reviewer’s mindset. Note how many of them are applied and population-facing: teaching bystanders to respond to emergencies, quantifying the real-life consequences of injury, understanding why people do or do not move more and eat differently, working out how households draw down assets in retirement. This is not a basic-science call. A mechanistic laboratory study with no visible line to a person, a policy or a practice will struggle here regardless of its quality.

Who Should Apply

The grants are aimed at researchers or research teams from the academic and professional spheres, led by one investigator, who want to run a project within the listed thematic lines — either independently or within a university, hospital, company or research centre they are attached to. For the purposes of the application, that lead researcher, the Principal Investigator, must be unique to the project.

The phrase “academic and professional spheres” is doing real work. Unlike most research councils, this call does not require an academic post. A clinical safety lead in a hospital, an actuary in an insurance company, or an independent researcher can be the PI. The trade-off is that if you are affiliated with an institution, you need that institution’s written blessing, which is covered below.

Good fits include:

• Early- and mid-career researchers who need a discrete, self-contained year of funding to generate pilot data or a publication before a larger application.
• Clinical or public-health teams with a defined intervention or measurement study that genuinely costs €20,000–€30,000 rather than €200,000.
• Actuarial, economics and social-policy researchers working on pensions, decumulation and longevity, for whom €15,000 buys meaningful data access, survey fieldwork or research assistance.
• Researchers in Latin America, Portugal and Brazil in particular — the acceptance of Spanish and Portuguese submissions, and the Foundation’s long presence in those markets, makes this call far more accessible than most European foundation programmes.

Poor fits include multi-year programmes, anything requiring major capital equipment, projects hosted at Fundación MAPFRE itself, and predoctoral salary support of the kind covered in Spain by Royal Decree 103/2019, which the rules expressly exclude.

Eligibility and Exclusions in Detail

The exclusions are narrow but firm, and two of them catch people out.

The first is the conflict-of-interest rule. Employees of any MAPFRE entity — not just the Foundation — cannot apply, either as PI or as a team member, and neither can their direct relatives up to the second degree of consanguinity or affinity. This continues after award: if such an employment relationship arises once the research has started, the grant is cancelled and any outstanding payments are terminated.

The second is the continuity rule. The grant is automatically cancelled if the Principal Investigator ceases to be affiliated with the institution where the research is being carried out, and equally if the PI is replaced at the head of the project for any reason, including their own withdrawal. If you are mid-way through a move between institutions, or on a contract that expires inside the grant year, factor that in before you apply — the award does not travel with you.

There is no stated age limit, no nationality restriction, and no requirement to hold a doctorate. Participants must be over eighteen.

What You Have to Submit

Applications go through the online form at the Foundation’s grants page. The required documentation is specified precisely, and the rules state twice that incomplete applications will be discarded, so treat the list as a checklist:

1. Professional CV of the Principal Investigator and, where applicable, of the other members of the research team. Maximum five pages per member, all collected into a single document.
2. Explanatory memoir of the research project, original and unpublished, written using the template available on the grants page and inside the form. Length 8 to 12 pages, Arial 12 point. It must contain: a project summary/abstract of 10 lines; objectives and justification; research methodology; experience and suitability of the PI and team; and a detailed budget and timetable. The budget must include all applicable costs and expenses, expressly including any overhead, levy or fee that the PI’s institution may charge.
3. A letter of presentation from the head of the university, hospital, company or research centre, if the work will be carried out within one, including express authorisation to conduct the research on its premises or on those of a third party. It must state the full name of the institution, its registered tax address, the person representing it and their position.
4. An acceptance document signed by the head of a third-party entity, if the work will be done there, expressly stating that the centre acknowledges and accepts the research on its premises — in addition to item 3.
5. An express declaration by the receiving institution, if the PI has asked in the form for the grant to be paid to their institution rather than to them personally, accepting the candidacy as its own, assuming responsibility for it, and committing that the funds go entirely to the selected project, excluding only any fee recorded in the detailed budget.
6. Details of any other grant or funding the applicant holds for research related to the submitted project: the awarding institution, the object, and the amount.
7. Ethics certification for clinical research projects, or where the nature of the research requires it — either a certificate from the ethics committee of the centre where the research will take place, or documentation showing that one is not needed. For animal experimentation, a certificate from the centre’s animal experimentation committee is required.

Documents may be submitted in Spanish, English or Portuguese. Unsuccessful applications and their documentation are deleted one month after the decision is made public.

A mechanical but important point about the form: pressing “Save” (Guardar) creates a draft you can return to. The application is only considered submitted when you press “Save and send” (Guardar y enviar), at which point no further modifications are possible. Do not confuse a saved draft with a submitted application on 22 October.

How Proposals Are Evaluated

Evaluation is carried out by a Valuation Committee appointed by Fundación MAPFRE for each of the two areas, advised by specialists in the individual thematic lines. Four factors are listed:

• Experience of the applicant and/or research team in the topic.
• Innovation.
• Scientific-technical quality of the work’s methodology.
• Feasibility, applicability and potential social impact of the proposed solutions.

Note that “feasibility, applicability and potential social impact” is a single combined criterion, and it is the one most closely aligned with the Foundation’s own mission of improving quality of life and social progress. A proposal that is methodologically immaculate but ends at “further research is needed” is weaker here than one that identifies who will use the finding and how. Say explicitly what changes if the project succeeds — which clinical protocol, which training curriculum, which pension product design, which regulatory question.

The committees’ decisions are final and cannot be appealed. The Foundation does not maintain correspondence with unsuccessful applicants and will not release disaggregated information about individual applications or committee deliberations, so there is no feedback loop to plan around. The decision (el fallo) will be made public in December 2026 on the Foundation’s website and through media it considers appropriate.

Money, Payment Schedule and Reporting

The grant is awarded to the Principal Investigator, though at their request — stated expressly at the point of application — it can be paid to the institution they are attached to or where the research is being conducted. In both cases the funds must be used exclusively for the requested project.

The duration is one calendar year from the date of acceptance and formalisation of the acceptance protocol. Payment is staged:

• 20% on signing the acceptance protocol.
• 30% at the fourth month after that signature.
• 30% at the eighth month.
• 20% on delivery of the final report, the financial report, and a two-to-four page summary of the work.

All payments except the first require a favourable report from a tutor. Fundación MAPFRE designates a tutor to supervise each funded project, and the PI commits to periodic contact with that tutor and to submitting progress reports — in Spanish, English or Portuguese — before each scheduled payment. Failure to deliver progress reports or other documents on time triggers the consequences set out in the acceptance protocol.

At the end of the project, the PI must submit a report of the results, a two-to-four page summary, and a financial report breaking down the project’s costs. Any expense arising from the work is covered by the grant amount; there is no supplementary budget.

The Foundation reserves worldwide rights to edit, publish and disseminate the work — in book or electronic form on its website, in any language, for the maximum term of copyright protection — as part of its charitable purposes. If it decides not to publish, the beneficiary or other researchers may publish at their own expense. All publications arising from the grant must carry prominent acknowledgement that they are the result of “Research financed by Fundación MAPFRE.” If the work forms part of a doctoral thesis, the Foundation will respect the submission and defence timetable before publishing, provided the beneficiary notifies it sufficiently in advance.

Before the grant is awarded, the beneficiary must supply anti-money-laundering documentation under Spanish Law 10/2010 — identity documents, powers of representation, proof of legal existence for entities, bank account ownership certification, and a certificate of tax residence for withholding and double-taxation purposes. International applicants should start gathering these early; a tax residence certificate can take weeks to obtain in some jurisdictions and it is a condition of payment, not a formality.

Preparation Strategy and Common Mistakes

Build the budget to the ceiling, not past it. The rules state that applications whose project budget exceeds the maximum grant value, and which do not identify additional funding, will be discarded. This is an administrative rejection, not a scoring penalty. If your project genuinely costs €45,000, either scope it down to a €30,000 piece of work that stands alone, or name the co-funder and show the split clearly.

Account for institutional overhead inside the budget. The rules specifically require the budget to include any canon or fee your institution charges. Many research offices apply an indirect-cost rate automatically. If yours takes 15% off the top and you budgeted as though you receive the full €30,000, you will be delivering the project on €25,500. Get the number from your research office before you write the budget table.

Respect the format limits. Eight to twelve pages, Arial 12, five CV pages per team member, a ten-line abstract, a two-to-four page final summary. These are stated in the rules, which means they are checkable, and a call that discards applications for missing documents is not one to test with a fourteen-page memoir.

Get institutional letters moving now. Item 3 requires a letter from the head of your institution with express authorisation and full registered details including the tax address. If a third-party site is involved, item 4 requires a second signed acceptance. If you want the money paid to your institution, item 5 requires the institution to formally adopt the candidacy as its own and assume responsibility for it — that is a legal commitment, and legal departments do not move fast in October. Signature chains are the single most common reason otherwise-strong applications miss a 14:00 deadline.

Handle ethics honestly. For clinical work, you need either the ethics committee certificate or documentation showing one is not required. “Ethics approval will be sought” is not one of the two options offered.

Write to the social-impact criterion. The Foundation’s four evaluation factors give equal billing to innovation and to applicability. Reviewers advised by thematic specialists will recognise a genuine methodological advance, but the criterion that separates comparable proposals is whether the results are usable. Name the audience.

Do not treat the deadline as end-of-day. It is 14:00 Spanish peninsular time on 22 October 2026 — that is UTC+2, so 08:00 in New York, 05:00 on the US West Coast, 09:00 in Bogotá, 13:00 in Lisbon and 21:00 in Manila. For applicants in the Americas, the effective deadline is the morning of 22 October, and the day before is safer.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need to be based in Spain? No. The rules state that the scope of the call is worldwide (el ámbito de la convocatoria es mundial), and documentation may be submitted in Spanish, English or Portuguese.

Can I apply without a university position? Yes. The grants are open to researchers from the academic and professional spheres, working independently or within a university, hospital, company or research centre. If you work independently, items 3 and 4 of the documentation do not apply to you.

How many grants will be awarded? The 2026 rules do not state a fixed number. They cap the total at €265,000 and cap individual awards at €30,000 (health promotion) and €15,000 (insurance and social protection), and allow the committees to leave grants unawarded. For reference, Fundación MAPFRE reports awarding 13 grants in its 2025 edition; that is context, not a commitment for 2026.

Can a team apply? Yes, but there must be a single named Principal Investigator per project, and CVs are required for all team members, capped at five pages each in one combined document.

Can I hold other funding for the same work? You must declare it. Item 6 requires you to state the awarding institution, the object and the amount of any other grant or financial support for research related to the submitted project.

Is the money paid to me or to my institution? Either, but you must choose at the moment of application. If you want it paid to your institution, that institution has to provide an express declaration accepting the candidacy as its own and assuming responsibility, committing the full amount to the project except any fee shown in the budget.

When will I hear? The decision will be made public in December 2026. The Foundation does not contact unsuccessful applicants individually or provide feedback.

Who do I contact with questions? [email protected]. The rules note that no response is guaranteed to enquiries about the research grants sent to any other email address.

Timeline and Next Steps

The submission window for the 2026 call opened in June 2026 and closes at 14:00 (UTC+2) on 22 October 2026. The decision follows in December 2026, and successful applicants then sign the acceptance protocol — failure to sign within three months of the Foundation sending it may be treated as a renunciation of the grant. The one-year clock starts at that signature, not at the announcement, so a project awarded in December 2026 will typically run into early 2028.

If you are considering applying, the practical order of work is: confirm your topic maps onto one of the named thematic lines; get your institution’s overhead rate and build a budget that lands under the ceiling; request the institutional letter and, if relevant, the third-party acceptance and the payment declaration; check whether you need ethics certification or documentation of exemption; then write the 8–12 page memoir against the four evaluation criteria, with the applicability argument made explicitly rather than left implied.

Download the full rules and the acceptance protocol templates from the official programme page before you start drafting — the memoir template is published there and inside the form, and using it removes one avoidable reason for rejection.

Official links:

• Programme page (English): https://www.fundacionmapfre.org/en/awards-aids/ignacio-larramendi-research-grants/
• Programme page (Spanish): https://www.fundacionmapfre.org/premios-ayudas/investigacion-ignacio-larramendi/
• Application portal referenced in the rules: https://www.fundacionmapfre.org/ayudas2026
• Enquiries: [email protected]