Leuven: Every research office in Europe spent the first week of September doing the same thing, and on 9 September 2026 it stopped. That was the closing date for this year’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowships call, the largest single competition for individual researcher mobility that the Union runs, with a budget of €399.05 million. The applications are now in the evaluation pipeline. The question the scheme exists to answer is not.
The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions turn thirty this year, with €6.6 billion allocated across 2021-2027 and more than 150,000 participating researchers since 1996, twenty-three of whom have gone on to Nobel prizes — including all three of the 2025 laureates in physics, chemistry and economic sciences that the programme claims as alumni. In 2026 the actions are distributing over €1.25 billion across four instruments, and the shape of that distribution says something about what the Union thinks it is buying.
Doctoral Networks take the largest share at €593.03 million, with a call that closes on 24 November. Postdoctoral Fellowships follow at €399.05 million. COFUND, which co-finances institutions’ own doctoral and postdoctoral programmes on condition that they top up the Union’s contribution from their own resources, had €105.46 million and closed on 8 April. Staff Exchanges, which fund movement between academia, industry and public administration rather than the recruitment of individuals, had €97.92 million and closed on 16 April. Read together, roughly four-fifths of the money goes to training people and one-fifth to moving people who are already trained between sectors.
The more interesting entry in this year’s programme is the smallest. Choose Europe for Science, piloted in 2025 and returning in 2026 with a reinforced budget of €51.25 million, attempts something the rest of the portfolio does not. Ordinary fellowships fund a project for a fixed term and then end; the researcher’s next position is somebody else’s problem, and the resulting sequence of two-year contracts is the precarity that European research careers are known for. Choose Europe for Science selects host organisations partly on the strength of the longer-term professional prospects they are prepared to offer a recruit beyond the funded period.
That is a small intervention in a large structural problem, and it is worth being precise about the size. €51.25 million is roughly four per cent of the year’s MSCA spending, and the commitments it buys are contractual promises from institutions whose own funding runs on cycles no more secure than the fellowships themselves. The scheme’s design nevertheless concedes something the sector has argued for years: that mobility funding which does not address what happens afterwards can make a career less stable rather than more, by adding one more high-prestige, fixed-term stop to a sequence that leads nowhere in particular.
The second Choose Europe for Science call opens on 8 December 2026 and closes on 6 April 2027, which places it awkwardly. It will run its evaluation while the negotiation over the framework programme for 2028-2034 is still unresolved, and while the Council’s partial negotiating position — agreed on 26 June 2026, with the budget figures still bracketed — waits for a number to be written into it. An instrument built on promises of long-term employment prospects is being launched by a programme that cannot yet say what it will be able to fund three years out.
None of which diminishes what closed on 9 September. Several thousand researchers spent the summer assembling proposals for a competition with a success rate that will disappoint most of them, and the evaluation that follows is among the more respected exercises in European science administration. The scheme is good at what it does. Whether what it does is enough is the question that thirty years of it has made impossible to avoid.
