August 29, 2026

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August 29, 2026

Newsletter

The European Post

Policy • Diplomacy • strategic insight

LATEST
Thailand Trade Talks Enter Their Final Nine Chapters in EuropeWhy Europe’s Agri-Food Surplus Grew While Exports Kept FallingWhat Europe Needs From the GCC Summit Riyadh Will Host in AutumnHolding Limits Still Block a Digital Euro Deal Before DecemberData Rules Agreed With Seoul Now Wait on Parliament’s ConsentChina Listed Fourteen European Firms and November Ends the TruceWhy Australia’s Finished Trade Deal Still Has No Signature DateLate Application Leaves Tokyo Outside the Defence Loan QueueCyber Resilience Rules Give Makers 24 Hours From SeptemberWinter Stocks Test Europe’s New Gas Storage Flexibility RulesInnovation Theory Meets Merger Control in a New Commission StudyMercosur Tariffs Fell in May and the Court Has Not Ruled YetBilaterals III Now Turns on Which Referendum Switzerland PicksDark Patterns Face the EU Digital Fairness ActFifteen Chapters Stand Between Montenegro and 2028Who Blinks First in the FP10 Research Budget FightCustoms Reform Landed in March and Its Data Hub Opens in 2028Victims Rights Gain an EU Helpline and Capitals Have Two YearsIreland Must Move the EU Budget Box Before the October SummitFertiliser Prices Sit 71 Percent Above Their 2024 Average LevelThailand Trade Talks Enter Their Final Nine Chapters in EuropeWhy Europe’s Agri-Food Surplus Grew While Exports Kept FallingWhat Europe Needs From the GCC Summit Riyadh Will Host in AutumnHolding Limits Still Block a Digital Euro Deal Before DecemberData Rules Agreed With Seoul Now Wait on Parliament’s ConsentChina Listed Fourteen European Firms and November Ends the TruceWhy Australia’s Finished Trade Deal Still Has No Signature DateLate Application Leaves Tokyo Outside the Defence Loan QueueCyber Resilience Rules Give Makers 24 Hours From SeptemberWinter Stocks Test Europe’s New Gas Storage Flexibility RulesInnovation Theory Meets Merger Control in a New Commission StudyMercosur Tariffs Fell in May and the Court Has Not Ruled YetBilaterals III Now Turns on Which Referendum Switzerland PicksDark Patterns Face the EU Digital Fairness ActFifteen Chapters Stand Between Montenegro and 2028Who Blinks First in the FP10 Research Budget FightCustoms Reform Landed in March and Its Data Hub Opens in 2028Victims Rights Gain an EU Helpline and Capitals Have Two YearsIreland Must Move the EU Budget Box Before the October SummitFertiliser Prices Sit 71 Percent Above Their 2024 Average Level

Nine in Ten Applicants Walk Away Empty as ERC Success Rate Sinks

Kristofer Harr
Legislative Analyst, Economic and Monetary Policy

Leuven: Early-career researchers across Europe are waiting on an email that, for roughly nine in ten of them, will say no. The European Research Council’s 2026 Starting Grant results are due at the end of this month, and the arithmetic behind them has quietly become the most important number in European science funding.

The call drew 4,807 applications. Physical sciences and engineering supplied 1,980 of them, social sciences and humanities 1,568, and life sciences 1,257. Against that pile sits an indicative budget of about 705 million euros funding roughly 450 grants. That works out to a success rate near 9 percent, down from about 12.2 percent a year earlier.

A falling success rate is not automatically a sign of failure. It can mean the scheme has become more attractive, and the ERC has spent two decades building exactly that reputation. But there is a threshold past which selectivity stops signalling quality and starts signalling waste. Panels still have to read every proposal. Applicants still spend weeks writing them, and Starting Grant applicants who fail are barred from reapplying for one or two years depending on their score band, which turns a single rejection into a career-planning problem rather than a setback.

Universities absorb the cost invisibly. Research offices estimate that a competitive Starting Grant proposal consumes six to ten weeks of a principal investigator’s time, plus institutional support for budgeting and ethics. Multiply that across 4,807 submissions and Europe spent something close to 500 researcher-years producing documents that will mostly be filed. At a 25 percent success rate that is an investment; at 9 percent it is closer to a tax on ambition.

The ERC’s own defenders make a reasonable counterargument. Frontier research is supposed to be hard to fund, and diluting grant sizes to raise the hit rate would defeat the purpose of a scheme built to back genuinely risky ideas with enough money to test them. Cutting the average grant from 1.5 million euros to 1 million would lift the success rate on paper and lower the ambition of what gets funded.

The real pressure sits upstream in the framework programme budget. Horizon Europe’s successor is being negotiated inside a multiannual financial framework where defence, enlargement and debt service all have louder advocates than curiosity-driven science. Commission officials have floated a substantially larger research envelope, but a Commission number is a proposal, not an appropriation, and member states have spent the summer signalling where they intend to trim.

What happens to the near-misses matters as much as what happens to the winners. Several national agencies in Germany, the Netherlands and the Nordics operate fallback schemes for proposals that clear the ERC quality bar but miss the funding line, effectively letting the ERC do the peer review and the national budget do the paying. That arrangement works well for countries that can afford it and quietly widens the gap for those that cannot.

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