ERC grants: types, eligibility and 2027 call deadlines

An ERC grant is European Union funding from the European Research Council (ERC) for a frontier research project in any field. One researcher, or a small group, leads it at a university or research organisation in an EU member state or an associated country. An associated country is a non-EU country that takes part on similar terms in Horizon Europe, the EU programme the ERC belongs to.

The main grants are worth up to €1.5 million (Starting Grant) to €10 million (Synergy Grant) before any extra funding. Most run for up to five years.

The project’s leader, called the Principal Investigator, applies with the backing of the host institution. You need a PhD to apply for the early-career grants, so PhD students don’t hold these grants themselves. Instead, grant holders use the money to hire their team, and those teams include PhD students and postdocs of any nationality. Researchers based in the UK can apply, because the UK is associated to Horizon Europe.

What is an ERC grant?

European Research Council grants pay for research projects that their Principal Investigators design, on any topic they choose. There are no set priorities: the ERC calls this ‘bottom-up’ funding. The ERC judges proposals on excellence alone, covering both the project and the researcher.

The money is awarded to the host institution, which normally employs the Principal Investigator and hosts their team. The host has to commit to the project in writing when you apply. The funding is also portable. A Principal Investigator can ask to move all or part of it to a new host, under conditions set in the grant agreement.

What this means for you: if you want to lead one of these projects, your first decision is the host. If you want to work on one, your first step is finding a grant holder in your field.

Types of ERC grant and how much each pays

The ERC runs five main grants for research projects, plus the Proof of Concept Grant for people who already hold one. These are the figures in the ERC Work Programme 2027, which sets the rules for the current round of calls.

Grant	Who it’s for	Maximum grant	Extra funding you can request	Maximum length
Starting	PhD defended up to 10 years before 1 January 2027	€1.5 million	up to €1 million	5 years
Consolidator	PhD defended 5 to 15 years before 1 January 2027	€2 million	up to €1 million	5 years
Advanced	Open to all; aimed at established research leaders	€2.5 million	up to €1 million	5 years
ERC Plus	Any career stage, for a project that couldn’t be done with a regular grant	€7 million	none	4 to 7 years
Synergy	Two to four Principal Investigators working together	€10 million	up to €4 million	6 years
Proof of Concept	Current and recent grant holders	€150,000 (lump sum)	none	18 months

Source: ERC Work Programme 2027, Tables 2 and 3 and section 2.1.

Common mistake: reading the headline figure as a salary. It’s the budget for the whole project, and the team’s salaries are paid from it along with the other research costs.

The extra funding covers further costs the project needs, such as major equipment, and must be justified in the proposal. If you’re applying for a Starting, Consolidator or Advanced Grant and moving to Europe from elsewhere, you can request up to €2 million instead. To qualify, you must be based outside the EU and associated countries at the call deadline.

Starting, Consolidator and Synergy Grants reimburse the costs you actually spend: 100% of direct costs plus a flat 25% towards indirect costs. Advanced, ERC Plus and Proof of Concept Grants are awarded as a single lump sum instead.

ERC Plus is very selective. Only about 30 are awarded each year, across all fields and career stages. That compares with about 1,000 Starting, Consolidator and Advanced Grants.

Who is eligible for an ERC grant?

You can apply whatever your age or nationality, and wherever in the world you live at the time. What matters is where you’d do the research: at a host institution in an EU member state or an associated country. The exceptions are a few restrictions set out in the Work Programme, such as those linked to EU sanctions.

Check the host country carefully if it’s outside Europe. Canada, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand are associated only for Horizon Europe’s ‘Global Challenges and European Industrial Competitiveness’ part. That part is separate from the ERC. The European Commission’s list of participating countries shows each country’s terms.

For the Starting and Consolidator Grants, your eligibility depends on when you successfully defended your first PhD. For the 2027 calls, the windows are:

Starting Grant: PhD defended between 1 January 2017 and 31 December 2026
Consolidator Grant: PhD defended between 1 January 2012 and 31 December 2021

If you’ve seen narrower windows quoted elsewhere, they’re out of date: the ERC Scientific Council broadened them for 2027. The date that counts is your certified defence (viva) date, not the date your degree was awarded. If your university held no defence, the date it approved your PhD counts instead, confirmed in writing.

You can hold each of the Starting and Consolidator Grants only once in your career. If you’re applying for a Starting Grant, you should already show the potential to work independently. For example, you might have at least one important publication as main author, or one without your PhD supervisor.

The windows can be extended for documented career breaks. Apart from leave for children, the break must fall between your PhD defence and the call deadline:

Maternity leave: 18 months per child, or the actual leave taken if longer, for children born before or after your PhD defence
Paternity or parental leave: the documented leave, for children born before or after your defence
Long-term illness: the documented leave, for illness of over 90 days (yours or a close family member’s)
Clinical training: the documented time, up to four years
Other circumstances: national service, disability, major disasters, seeking asylum, and being a victim of violence

Who can’t apply in 2027

The Work Programme limits how often you can apply:

You can submit only one eligible proposal to the main grant calls under the 2027 Work Programme. So if you submitted an eligible ERC Starting Grant 2027 proposal, you can’t also apply for the Consolidator Grant 2027.
If a Starting or Consolidator Grant 2026 proposal of yours scored B or C at the first evaluation step, you can’t apply to any 2027 main grant call. The same applies to a C score in the 2025 Starting, Consolidator or Advanced Grant calls.
You can have only one main grant proposal under evaluation at a time.
If your proposal was selected in a 2025 or 2026 main grant call and you’re still preparing the grant agreement, you can’t apply to a 2027 main grant call.
You can hold only one main grant at a time. If you already hold one, you can apply again only if your current project ends less than two years after the call deadline.

Further restrictions apply to some Advanced, ERC Plus and Synergy Grant applicants and to evaluation panel members. The ERC can also change the rules in later Work Programmes, so check the current one before you plan a resubmission.

If you’re based in the UK

You can apply. The UK’s association was agreed on 7 September 2023. Since then, UK-based researchers have been able to apply knowing the UK takes part until Horizon Europe ends in 2027. In the 2026 Starting Grant round, 47 of the 421 grants went to researchers at UK institutions.

The UK is associated to Horizon Europe for funding from the 2024 budget onwards. Check the UK’s status for the next programme before planning a later application.

If you’re outside Europe

You can apply from anywhere, but you must carry out the project at a host in the EU or an associated country. The higher extra-funding limit of €2 million is meant for exactly this move. In the 2026 Starting Grant round, 21 winners were based outside Europe when they applied, 20 of them in the United States.

Deadlines for the 2027 calls

The 2027 calls open and close between July 2026 and September 2027. Dates for calls that haven’t opened yet are provisional. A call can open up to a month earlier or later, and a deadline can be delayed by up to two months.

Call	Opens	Deadline
Starting Grant 2027	22 July 2026	14 October 2026 (closed)
Consolidator Grant 2027	24 September 2026 (open)	12 January 2027
Proof of Concept 2027	12 November 2026	10 March 2027 and 16 September 2027
Synergy Grant 2027	17 February 2027	11 May 2027
Advanced Grant 2027	27 May 2027	26 August 2027
ERC Plus Grant 2027	1 June 2027	1 September 2027

Source: ERC Work Programme 2027, Tables 1 and 7; ERC Consolidator Grant page.

The call year isn’t the calendar year, so don’t be misled by the name: the ERC Starting Grant 2027 call closed in October 2026. Results from it are planned for summer 2027.

If you’ve missed this Starting Grant call, don’t assume the next one will follow this year’s pattern. The 2027 Work Programme is the last under the current Horizon Europe framework, so the next Starting Grant call will come under a later one. Check the ERC’s own pages for its dates.

How hard is it to get an ERC grant?

Very hard. In the 2026 Starting Grant round, a record 4,807 proposals came in and the success rate was 8.8%, fewer than one in ten. Preliminary figures show the Starting Grant 2027 call drew 7,710 applications, 60.4% more than the previous call.

The ERC points out that it had widened the eligibility windows for this call, letting more researchers apply. It has set aside €594 million for an estimated 373 Starting Grants in this round.

For a Starting Grant, your proposal goes to one of 28 peer review panels in three domains: physical sciences and engineering, life sciences, and social sciences and humanities. Panels rank the proposals that pass a quality threshold. Grants then go down the ranking until the call’s budget runs out.

Before you apply: you get only one eligible proposal to the main calls under this Work Programme. A weak score can also bar you from the next year’s calls. So the ERC advises you to make sure your idea is mature before you submit. Its Starting Grant page also suggests contacting the National Contact Point in your country for support.

If applying is a stretch right now, UK-based researchers have other early-career routes. Our guide to research fellowships in the UK compares the main schemes.

Can an ERC grant fund your PhD?

Not directly: the early-career grants require a PhD, and the others expect a track record of research achievements of your own. But an ERC grant can pay for your PhD if you join a grant holder’s team. The ERC says more than 75,000 postdocs, PhD students and other staff currently work in the teams it funds. It estimates that the 2026 Starting Grants alone are likely to create more than 2,700 jobs.

Teams are small. One ERC page puts the average at 4 to 5 members and another at 7, so expect a handful of people around the Principal Investigator.

Team members can be of any nationality, and some can even be based outside Europe. So your nationality alone won’t rule you out of these posts.

How to find ERC PhD positions

The ERC’s advice on jobs in ERC teams suggests three things:

Search EURAXESS, the European researcher jobs portal, using its European Research Council (ERC) filter.
Look beyond that filter. The ERC says jobs on its projects may be advertised without the ERC tag, on other websites and in journals.
Apply to the Principal Investigator at the host institution, using the contact details in the advert. Our guide on how to email a potential supervisor covers what to put in that first message.

You can also work from the other direction. The ERC publishes the list of researchers selected in each Starting Grant round, so you can look for newly funded researchers in your field. They’re the people about to build a team.

What an ERC PhD pays

There’s no single rate. The ERC’s pages set no salary or stipend for team members, so the advert decides. Pay, and whether you’d be a salaried employee, depend on the post and the country it’s in. Our guide to fully funded PhDs in Europe explains which countries employ PhD candidates and which pay a stipend.

Joining a grant holder’s team means applying for one advertised project in one research group, whenever it’s advertised. If you’d rather join a funded programme with its own training network, compare it with a Marie Curie PhD fellowship in an MSCA Doctoral Network. If you’re applying in the UK, learn how a tax-free PhD stipend differs from a salaried post. Then read the advert’s terms closely.

The same team-member route applies after your PhD, because these teams include postdocs. A postdoc on an ERC project can be a good step before you apply for a Starting Grant yourself. Our guide to postdoc positions covers what to expect.

After you win: portability and Proof of Concept

Once you hold a main grant, two further options open up. You can move it to a new host, as described above. And you can apply for a Proof of Concept Grant to explore the commercial or social innovation potential of your ERC research.

For the 2027 call, you can apply if your main grant is still running or ended on or after 1 January 2026. Your idea must also draw substantially on that project.

Next steps

What you do next depends on where you are. If you’re early in your career and inside the Starting Grant window, you’ve missed the 2027 call. Use the time to find a host and develop your idea.

If you defended your PhD between 1 January 2012 and 31 December 2021 (plus any extensions), the ERC Consolidator Grant deadline is 12 January 2027. It’s open to you only if you didn’t submit an eligible Starting Grant 2027 proposal and none of the other restrictions above applies.

If you’re looking for a funded PhD, an ERC grant is a route in rather than something you apply for yourself. Search the job adverts on ERC projects, check newly funded researchers in your field, and browse funded PhD opportunities on DiscoverPhDs alongside them.

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