MSCA Doctoral Networks 2026 (HORIZON-MSCA-2026-DN-01): €593 Million for More Than 130 Consortia to Train Over 1,900 Doctoral Candidates, Closing 24 November 2026

MSCA Doctoral Networks 2026 (HORIZON-MSCA-2026-DN-01): €593 Million for More Than 130 Consortia to Train Over 1,900 Doctoral Candidates, Closing 24 November 2026

Doctoral Networks are the largest single action inside the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, and the 2026 call is the biggest doctoral training competition in Europe this year. The European Commission opened HORIZON-MSCA-2026-DN-01 on 28 May 2026 with an indicative budget of €593.034 million, and expects to fund more than 130 networks that will recruit and train over 1,900 doctoral candidates across every scientific field. Proposals are due at 17:00 Brussels time on 24 November 2026.

The action funds a training programme, not a research project in the usual sense. A group of universities, research institutes, companies, hospitals, museums, agencies and NGOs from different countries agree a shared scientific problem, design a joint doctoral curriculum around it, and hire a cohort of doctoral candidates who move between the partners as they work. The Commission pays for the candidates and for the network that trains them. What reviewers are buying is the quality of that training system, and applicants who treat the proposal as a research grant with some students attached usually score badly.

This guide sets out what the 2026 call funds, the three modes you can apply under, the rules that decide who can be in the consortium and who can be recruited, how the money is calculated, what the proposal has to contain, and where applications realistically go wrong.

Key details at a glance

Dates in the official call calendar carry a “to be confirmed” marker until the grant agreement stage, so treat everything after the November deadline as planning guidance rather than a commitment.

What a Doctoral Network actually is

A Doctoral Network is a cohort. Instead of a single professor supervising a single student on a single campus, the network agrees a research theme broad enough to support ten to fifteen linked doctoral projects, and then builds one training programme that every candidate in the cohort passes through. Candidates are enrolled in a doctoral degree at one of the partners, but they attend common schools and workshops with the whole cohort, and they spend part of their time on secondment at another partner — often in a different country and often in a different sector.

That secondment structure is the part reviewers care most about, because it is what separates an MSCA network from a well-funded departmental PhD programme. If your proposal has secondments that look decorative — a two-week visit with no defined output — the training section will be marked down. Secondments should be tied to a specific skill, dataset, instrument, patient cohort, archive or production process that the home institution genuinely does not have.

The training programme is also expected to be explicit about transferable skills: research integrity, open science and data management, science communication, entrepreneurship, intellectual property, supervision and career planning. The Commission’s stated purpose for the action is to produce researchers who are employable inside and outside academia, and it expects the proposal to describe how that happens week by week, not to assert it.

The three modes: standard, Industrial Doctorates, Joint Doctorates

All three modes are funded from the same call and compete in ranked lists, and you choose one when you submit.

Standard Doctoral Networks are the default. A consortium of academic and non-academic partners trains a cohort, with candidates enrolled at individual partners and moving between them for training and secondments. Most funded networks are of this type.

Industrial Doctorates are for candidates who intend to build careers outside academia. The defining rule is that the candidate must spend at least half of the recruitment period in the non-academic sector, with joint supervision from an academic and a non-academic supervisor. This mode suits consortia where a company, hospital, regulator or cultural institution has a genuine research problem and can host a doctoral candidate for months at a time, with real supervisory capacity rather than a nominal mentor.

Joint Doctorates are the most demanding to set up. The partners deliver a jointly governed programme leading to a joint doctoral degree or to multiple doctoral degrees, which means the participating universities must have compatible or negotiated regulations on admission, supervision, examination and degree award. Joint Doctorates can run for up to 60 months and can recruit candidates for up to 48 months, which reflects how long that legal groundwork takes. Do not choose this mode late in the drafting process; if your registrars and doctoral schools have not already agreed the framework, you will not have a credible implementation section by November.

Who can be in the consortium

The eligibility floor is three independent legal entities established in three different EU Member States or Horizon Europe Associated Countries, with at least one of them in a Member State. That is the minimum, not the target. Competitive networks are usually substantially larger, because the training programme needs enough hosts to give the cohort meaningful mobility and enough sectoral variety to make the secondments worthwhile.

Beyond the minimum, beneficiaries and associated partners can come from anywhere in the world. Non-academic participation is strongly encouraged in all three modes and is mandatory in substance for Industrial Doctorates. Partners from outside the EU and Associated Countries can host secondments and contribute to training, which is how many networks bring in specialist infrastructure or field sites.

Two practical points. First, there is a difference between beneficiaries — which sign the grant agreement, recruit candidates and receive funding — and associated partners, which host secondments and contribute training without recruiting. Get this allocation right early, because it determines your budget table and your commitment letters. Second, every partner needs a letter of commitment that says something specific. Generic letters of support are one of the clearest signals to an evaluator that a partner was added to the list late and is not really engaged.

Who can be recruited

The candidate rules are strict and are checked at recruitment, not at proposal stage.

A recruited doctoral candidate must not already hold a doctoral degree on the date of recruitment. Nationality is irrelevant — candidates may come from anywhere in the world. The binding constraint is mobility: the candidate must not have resided or carried out their main activity, meaning work or study, in the country of the recruiting organisation for more than 12 months in the 36 months immediately before recruitment. Short stays such as holidays and compulsory national service do not count towards that 12 months.

Recruitment happens after the grant starts, through open, transparent and merit-based competitions that follow European principles on researcher recruitment. You do not name your candidates in the proposal, and you should not design the network around people you have already informally promised positions to. What you do describe is the recruitment strategy: where you will advertise, how you will assess, and how you will make sure the cohort is not drawn from a narrow demographic or a single set of feeder institutions.

Recruitments run for 3 to 36 months under standard networks and Industrial Doctorates, and up to 48 months under Joint Doctorates. Most networks build around full-length recruitments so that candidates can realistically complete a doctorate.

What the funding covers

MSCA does not reimburse actual costs. Everything is paid as fixed unit contributions per researcher-month, which makes the budget arithmetic simple but also means you cannot recover an overspend.

The contributions fall into two groups. The researcher receives a living allowance, multiplied by a country correction coefficient for the country of the recruiting beneficiary, plus a mobility allowance, plus a family allowance where the candidate has recognised family obligations, plus long-term leave and special needs allowances where applicable. For the 2026 work programme the published living allowance is €4,010 per month before the country coefficient, with a mobility allowance of €710 per month and a family allowance of €660 per month. The institution receives a research, training and networking contribution — covering conferences, publications, training courses, consumables, visa fees and secondment travel — plus a management and indirect costs contribution.

Confirm the exact figures and the country coefficient table in the annex of the MSCA Work Programme that applies to this call before you build your budget. The coefficients matter more than people expect: the same living allowance unit produces very different take-home pay in Copenhagen and in Kraków, and the Commission adjusts for that.

An indicative €593 million across more than 130 networks works out at roughly €4.5 million per network, which in practice usually corresponds to a cohort in the region of ten to fifteen candidates. Use that as a sanity check on your ambition rather than as a rule.

How to apply, and what goes in the proposal

Submission is single-stage through the EU Funding & Tenders Portal. There is no expression of interest and no invited second round: the proposal you submit on 24 November is the whole application.

The coordinator creates the proposal in the portal, adds each beneficiary by Participant Identification Code, and completes the administrative forms, which generate the budget from your declared researcher-months. The scientific case is uploaded as the Part B document, following the mandatory template. Part B is subject to a page limit — check the template packaged with this call, since MSCA templates are revised between work programmes — and text beyond the limit is simply not shown to evaluators.

Practical requirements that cause avoidable failures: every participant must have a validated PIC well before the deadline, letters of commitment from associated partners must be uploaded as annexes, and the portal is under heavy load in the final hours of an MSCA deadline. Submit a complete version several days early. The system lets you overwrite it as many times as you like until the deadline passes, and it lets you do nothing at all afterwards.

How proposals are scored

Evaluation follows the standard MSCA structure: three criteria, scored out of five with one decimal, weighted so that Excellence counts for 50 percent, Impact for 30 percent and Implementation for 20 percent. The overall threshold is 70 percent. Verify the weightings and thresholds in the call documents for this specific topic, since MSCA occasionally adjusts them between work programmes.

Under Excellence, evaluators assess the research quality of the joint programme and, crucially, the quality and credibility of the training. A common failure is a proposal where each partner has written its own workpackage and the training programme is stapled on top. Reviewers can see that immediately, because the individual doctoral projects do not need each other.

Under Impact, evaluators look at the career development effect on the candidates, the contribution to European doctoral training capacity, and the plans for communication, dissemination and exploitation. Concrete career outcomes — what these candidates will be able to do that they could not before, and who will hire them — score better than statements about strengthening the European Research Area.

Under Implementation, evaluators assess the work plan, the consortium composition, the management structures, the supervision arrangements and the risk plan. This is where thin partner engagement and vague supervision ratios get punished.

Success rates in MSCA Doctoral Networks have run in the region of one in ten in recent calls, so a score in the low nineties is often not enough to be funded. Plan on the assumption that a good proposal may need to be resubmitted the following year with the evaluation summary report used as a repair list.

Common mistakes

The recurring problems are structural rather than scientific:

• Choosing the mode late. Industrial Doctorates and Joint Doctorates have requirements — 50 percent non-academic time, or agreed joint degree regulations — that have to shape the design from the start.
• Decorative secondments. If a secondment has no stated purpose, no host supervisor and no output, it weakens the proposal rather than strengthening it.
• A cohort that is really a set of unrelated PhDs. The doctoral projects must be interdependent enough that the network is the reason the science works.
• Ignoring supervision capacity. Listing a senior professor as supervisor for four candidates while they already supervise eight raises an obvious question the reviewer will ask.
• Leaving PIC validation to November. Validation of a new participant can take weeks.
• Treating recruitment as settled. Naming or implying pre-selected candidates conflicts with the open recruitment requirement.
• Building a budget on the wrong coefficients. Country correction coefficients change between work programmes.

Frequently asked questions

Can I apply as an individual PhD candidate? No. Doctoral Networks are awarded to consortia of organisations. Candidates apply later, to advertised positions, once a network is funded. If you are looking for an individual award, the MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships call is the individual-level action and requires a completed doctorate.

Where will the vacancies be advertised? Funded networks are required to advertise openly, and positions are typically posted on EURAXESS along with the network’s own site. Networks funded from this call will start recruiting from roughly late 2027 onward, given the August 2027 indicative project start.

Does a UK, Swiss, Norwegian or Israeli organisation count towards the minimum three? Association status determines this and it changes over time. Check the current list of Horizon Europe Associated Countries published with the call before you count a partner towards the eligibility minimum.

Can a non-European company be a beneficiary? Organisations from outside the EU and Associated Countries can participate, most commonly as associated partners hosting secondments. Whether they can be funded beneficiaries depends on the participation rules in force for this call; confirm this in the call conditions rather than assuming.

Is there a second cut-off in 2026? No. Doctoral Networks runs one annual deadline. Missing 24 November 2026 means waiting for the 2027 call.

Are the amounts taxable? The allowances are unit contributions paid to the beneficiary, which then employs the candidate under national law. Net pay depends on the employment contract, national tax and social security, and the country coefficient.

Official links and next steps

The MSCA call page for this competition is at marie-sklodowska-curie-actions.ec.europa.eu/funding/msca-doctoral-networks-2026, and the action overview maintained by the European Research Executive Agency is at rea.ec.europa.eu. Proposals are submitted only through the topic page for HORIZON-MSCA-2026-DN-01-01 on the EU Funding & Tenders Portal, which also carries the call conditions, the Part B template and the applicable work programme.

If you intend to coordinate, the useful order of work between now and November is: fix the scientific theme and confirm it needs a cohort rather than a single project; lock the beneficiary list and start PIC validation; design the training programme and the secondment map before writing any research text; collect specific letters of commitment; then write Part B against the template. Your national contact point for MSCA can review a draft and flag eligibility problems, and that review is free — use it well before the final fortnight, when contact points across Europe are saturated.

If you are a prospective doctoral candidate rather than an institution, the practical action now is to watch which consortia in your field announce that they are preparing a 2026 Doctoral Network, and to set up EURAXESS alerts for MSCA doctoral positions in your discipline. Also check the mobility rule against your own history: if you are about to move to the country where you hope to be recruited, twelve months of residence there can make you ineligible.