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

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

One call, one main page. This record and MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2026 describe the same European Commission call, so we maintain that page as the single reference version and keep this one as a secondary record for people arriving from older links. If you want the full breakdown — the per-month allowance rates, the arithmetic on what a 24-month or 36-month fellowship is actually worth, the submission form contents, and the panel scoring detail — go there. What follows covers the same call from the decision-making side: whether to apply this cycle, and what has to be true before you commit six weeks to it.

The 2026 round of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowships (MSCA-PF) is open. The European Commission launched it on 9 April 2026 and proposals are due 9 September 2026. The indicative budget is EUR 399.05 million, divided into EUR 339.19 million for European Postdoctoral Fellowships and EUR 59.86 million for Global Postdoctoral Fellowships. The topic code on the EU Funding & Tenders Portal is HORIZON-MSCA-2026-PF-01-01. The MSCA site still prints “(TBC)” beside the 2026 dates and the budget figure, so treat the Portal topic page as binding and check it again before you submit.

If you are working from notes on the 2025 round, which closed on 10 September 2025, three things have moved: the resubmission bar, the secondment allowance, and the unit cost rates. The first one can disqualify you outright.

At a glance

The two official timelines disagree slightly on the post-evaluation dates. The MSCA call page gives February 2027 for notification, April 2027 for grant agreement signature and May 2027 for project starts; REA’s programme page gives 9 February 2027 and 9 May 2027 for the first two. Either way, plan your employment situation around a gap of roughly seven to nine months between submitting and being paid.

This is a joint application, not a personal one

The single most common misreading of this scheme is that it funds an individual. It funds a host organisation to employ an individual. You and a beneficiary institution submit together, the institution signs the grant agreement, and it employs you for the duration. Evaluators score the pairing: your research, your career development plan, and the host’s demonstrated capacity to deliver both.

That has a practical consequence. A strong idea attached to a host you emailed three weeks ago will lose to a competent idea attached to a host that helped write the work plan. If you do not have a host who has agreed to co-develop the proposal, the honest answer for 9 September 2026 is that you are late, and the better move is to spend the autumn building that relationship for the next call.

The two tracks

European Postdoctoral Fellowships. Open to researchers of any nationality. You move into Europe from anywhere in the world, or between European countries. The fellowship runs 1 to 2 years at a single beneficiary established in an EU Member State or a Horizon Europe Associated Country. This track holds the large majority of the budget.

Global Postdoctoral Fellowships. Restricted to nationals or long-term residents of an EU Member State or Associated Country. Total duration is 2 to 3 years: an outgoing phase of 1 to 2 years in a non-associated third country, then a mandatory 1-year return phase in Europe. You need a letter of commitment from the third-country host, and that letter is the single most frequently missing document in the whole scheme. Request it the day you decide on this track.

Both tracks permit an optional non-academic placement of up to six months at the very end of the fellowship, in the non-academic sector in an EU Member State or Associated Country. It sits on top of the standard duration rather than inside it, and it has to be described and justified in the proposal — you cannot add one after the award.

Pick the track first. It determines who is eligible, where the work happens, how long the project runs, and which documents you need. Applicants who switch tracks in August end up rewriting the work plan, the budget table and the mobility argument at the same time.

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 eight years of research experience, counted from the date the PhD was awarded. Career breaks, periods working outside research, and research carried out outside Europe by researchers reintegrating into Europe can be excluded from that count. If your PhD is older than eight years, you complete an extensions table in Part A and your CV has to corroborate it line for line.
• Mobility rule: you must not have resided or carried out your main activity — work, study, or anything comparable — in the country of the beneficiary for more than 12 months in the 36 months immediately before the call deadline. For a Global Fellowship the same test applies to the third-country host.
• All scientific fields are eligible, including Euratom research, which carries its own nationality and host conditions.
• The scheme explicitly welcomes researchers reintegrating into Europe and researchers displaced by conflict.

Treat these as pass/fail gates and settle them before you write a word of science. REA publishes a self-assessment tool for the eight-year window; use it rather than reasoning from first principles. An eligibility failure is checked administratively and is not appealable on the merits, so a misjudged calculation throws away the entire effort with no partial credit.

The practical method that catches most problems: build a month-by-month table of where you lived, worked and studied over the 36 months before 9 September 2026, alongside a dated list of every research and non-research period since your PhD award. Two tables, an hour of work, and every eligibility question on the form answers itself.

New for 2026: the 80 percent resubmission bar

This is the change most likely to catch 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 less than 80 percent must not be resubmitted in the 2026 call. For Global Fellowships the rule also covers the associated partner hosting the outgoing phase. REA checks every submission against this and declares breaches ineligible.

The threshold used to be 70 percent under earlier MSCA-PF calls, so a proposal that was safely resubmittable last year may not be now. Find your 2025 evaluation summary report and read the total score before you do anything else. If you are below 80 percent with the same host, your two legitimate options are to change the recruiting organisation or to wait for the next call. Polishing 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 of a European Fellowship — or up to half the outgoing phase of a Global Fellowship. No secondments are allowed during the return phase of a Global Fellowship.

That is a real expansion, and it changes what is plannable. A two-year fellowship can now carry up to a year of structured time elsewhere, which makes cross-sector placements and international collaborations something you design into the project rather than bolt on. Do not confuse secondments with the non-academic placement: they are separate instruments with separate rules, and mixing them up appears on REA’s published list of common submission errors.

What the funding covers

MSCA support is paid as unit costs per person-month to the host institution, which then employs you. It is not money you administer. The components are a living allowance corrected by a country coefficient, a mobility allowance, a family allowance where applicable, long-term leave and special needs allowances where applicable, plus institutional contributions for research, training and networking and for management and indirect costs. The 2026 rates sit in the Horizon Europe Work Programme 2026-2027; the current per-month figures and worked totals for 24-month and 36-month fellowships are on the main MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2026 page.

One thing worth knowing before you invest the effort: the living allowance is a gross employer cost. What reaches your bank account after employer contributions, income tax and social charges in the host country is materially lower, and it varies a lot by country. Ask your prospective host’s HR or research office for a net estimate for their specific case now, not in August.

Working backward from 9 September 2026

As of late July 2026 there are a little over six weeks left. That is tight but workable if the host is already in place.

• This week. Confirm eligibility against the eight-year guidance and the mobility rule. Check your 2025 score against the 80 percent bar if you applied last year. Identify the person in the host’s research office who actually handles Portal submission. If you are going for a Global Fellowship, request the outgoing host’s letter of commitment today.
• Early August. A complete Part B1 draft at the full 10 pages, structured so an evaluator skimming it can map each section to Excellence, Impact, and Implementation without hunting.
• Mid August. Two readers: one deep specialist for the science, one research administrator for compliance. They catch different failures and you need both.
• Late August. Finalise the budget table, the panel descriptors, the ethics and security self-assessment, and Part B2. Verify page count and font size in the exported PDF, not in the source document.
• 1 to 3 September. Full dry run in the Portal with real PDFs in the correct slots.
• 5 to 7 September. Submit. The Portal accepts revised versions until the cutoff, so submitting early is a safety net rather than a commitment. Keep the final 48 hours as buffer for signatures and system problems, not as writing time.

Where applications fail

Almost every avoidable failure is procedural rather than scientific: missing the deadline, submitting under the wrong type of action, confusing the beneficiary with the third-country host or the current employer, failing the PhD or eight-year check, exceeding the 10-page Part B1 limit, using a font below the minimum, omitting the Global Fellowship letter of commitment, or requesting a secondment or placement that is not eligible. Each of those costs months of work and none of them requires a single additional idea to prevent.

The most common scoring failure is different: a career development section written as filler. Impact carries substantial weight and much of it turns on whether your training and career measures are specific to you. “The fellow will attend relevant conferences and training” scores as boilerplate. Naming the skill you lack, the person or facility that teaches it, when in the work plan it happens, and what it lets you do afterwards scores as a plan.

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 more than eight years old. Extensions exist for career breaks, work outside research, and research done outside Europe by reintegrating researchers. Complete the extensions table in Part A, mirror it exactly in your CV, and check your specific case against REA’s guidance before committing.

Can a non-EU citizen apply? For a European Fellowship, yes — there is no nationality restriction, and that track holds most of the budget. Global Fellowships are limited to nationals or long-term residents of an EU Member State or Associated Country.

Does the host have to be a university? No. Universities, research institutions and infrastructures, companies including SMEs, hospitals, museums, public bodies and NGOs can all act as beneficiaries. The expanded secondment rules and the non-academic placement are built for cross-sector work.

Do I need a signed employment contract before applying? No, but you need a host that has committed to the proposal in substance — supervision named, facilities identified, research office engaged. Expressed interest without that detail reads as exactly what it is in the Implementation criterion.

Who can help with an eligibility interpretation? Your national MSCA National Contact Point, and REA’s published guidance. Both are free and both answer faster than a rejection does.

Official resources

• 2026 call page: https://marie-sklodowska-curie-actions.ec.europa.eu/funding/msca-postdoctoral-fellowships-2026
• Funding & Tenders Portal topic page: https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/portal/screen/opportunities/topic-details/HORIZON-MSCA-2026-PF-01-01
• 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
• Scheme overview, durations, 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 guide for MSCA-PF submissions, the eight-year self-assessment tool, the proposal templates, and the evaluation guidelines issued to experts. That last document is the most underused of the set: it states plainly what the people scoring your proposal have been instructed to look for.

For the full 2026 funding rates, submission form contents and panel scoring detail, use the main page for this call.