Trondheim: Research offices across the Union and its associated countries are in the part of the cycle that nobody enjoys. The Horizon Europe work programme for 2026 and 2027 carries 14 billion euros, most of the single-stage calls that opened in the first months of this year fall due in September or October, and the proposals are being finished now under the usual conditions of too little time and too many partners.
Two deadlines this month show what the programme is buying. A topic on research and innovation for decarbonising energy-intensive industries closed on 15 September with an indicative budget of 125 million euros. The Restore our Ocean and Waters mission runs five topics worth more than 115 million euros to 23 September. Both sit inside a work programme that commits at least 35 percent of its funding to climate objectives.
The structural novelty is a horizontal call worth 540 million euros in support of the Clean Industrial Deal, split between clean technologies for climate action and the decarbonisation of energy-intensive sectors. Horizontal means it cuts across the programme’s thematic clusters rather than living inside one. That design choice reflects a recognition that steel, cement and chemicals do not decarbonise through any single discipline, and it also concentrates a substantial sum behind a political priority in a way that clusters rarely manage.
The work programme names three overarching directions: the twin green and digital transition, European industrial competitiveness, and stronger frameworks for research careers. The third is the one researchers themselves raise most often. Postdoctoral precarity, fragmented pension rights across borders and the difficulty of returning to a national system after years abroad do more to push European scientists elsewhere than grant volumes do, and money alone has never fixed it.
Success rates remain the programme’s structural problem. Competitive calls routinely attract proposals worth many multiples of the available budget, which means that a large majority of the effort invested in writing them produces nothing. Universities employ grant-writing teams to absorb that overhead. Smaller institutions and companies in member states with thinner research infrastructure cannot, and the participation gap between north-western Europe and the rest of the Union has proved stubborn across three framework programmes.
Association arrangements complicate the picture further and improve it. Norway, Iceland, the United Kingdom and a growing list of third countries pay into the programme and compete for its money. Associated partners strengthen consortia and raise the competitive bar simultaneously, which delights coordinators and frustrates applicants who now lose to teams from outside the Union.
Everything in this work programme also runs against a political clock. It is the last full programme of Horizon Europe, and the successor framework is being negotiated now inside the wider argument about the post-2027 budget. Researchers have heard a headline figure and no allocation. Whether the next programme keeps its own budget line or dissolves into a competitiveness fund alongside industrial policy instruments will determine far more than any call deadline this month.
Evaluation results for the September calls will reach applicants around February. Grant agreements follow months later. A doctoral researcher hired on one of these projects will start work in a Europe whose research funding architecture has by then been decided without much reference to the science.
