MSCA 2025 call to co-fund doctoral and postdoctoral programmes receives 136 proposals
COFUND gives organisations a unique opportunity to attract research and innovation talent through their own doctoral and postdoctoral fellowship programmes.
The fifth call under Horizon Europe of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions-funded COFUND scheme closed on 24 June 2025. Through the 2025 call, the European Union will fund around 30 projects with an indicative budget of €105.6 million.
The European Research Executive Agency (REA) received 136 proposals.
In comparison, 81 proposals were submitted in 2024 and 27 were eventually selected for funding, comprising 12 doctoral training programmes and 15 postdoctoral fellowship programmes.
This year’s submitted proposals are distributed as follows.
A chart illustrating the type of project proposals received. The Commission has received 136 project proposals, of which 70 are for doctoral programmes, whilst 66 are for postdoctoral programmes.
Under this round, organisations based in 27 countries submitted proposals.
A bar chart showing the type of project proposals received by country of the coordinating organisation. The top countries are France with 26 proposals, Spain with 14, Germany and Finland with 12 each, and Austria, Italy and the Netherlands with 9 each.
Selected projects can include several partners from the EU and worldwide, which will recruit, employ and train researchers.
Funding for excellent doctoral training and postdoctoral fellowship programmes
Under this call, the European Commission will fund doctoral training and postdoctoral fellowship programmes.
- COFUND Doctoral Programmes offer doctoral candidates research training activities to develop and broaden their skills and competences, allowing them to obtain a doctoral degree.
- COFUND Postdoctoral Programmes fund individual advanced research training and career development fellowships for postdoctoral researchers.
COFUND allows organisations to attract international talent, increase their research and innovation capacity and contribute to their local, regional and/or national socio-economic ecosystem by training talented researchers.
The EU co-funds a significant part of the programme cost, which organisations need to top up with their own resources.
These schemes spread MSCA best practice by promoting high standards for selection and recruitment as well as excellent working and employment conditions.
They promote sustainable research training and international, interdisciplinary and inter-sectoral mobility to
- engage researchers and innovators in academia and beyond
- provide them with new knowledge, skills, career development perspectives and increase their employability
- allow them to enlarge their networks and carry out cutting-edge, collaborative research
- boost their creativity and entrepreneurship
Seal of Excellence
The European Commission will also award Seal of Excellence certificates to applicants who applied to the MSCA COFUND call in 2025 but whose proposals cannot be funded due to budgetary constraints.
This label recognises the value of these high-quality proposals and helps organisations secure funding from other sources.
Indicative timeline
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June 2025 to November 2025
Evaluation coordinated by REA and undertaken by external independent expert evaluators
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end of November 2025
Notification of call results to applicants
- applicants will be able to access the results of the evaluation on their personal space of the Funding and Tenders Opportunities Portal
- an overview of the evaluation results, cut-off scores and statistics will be published on the page of the COFUND 2025 call
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February 2026
Expected signature of the grant agreement for successful projects with the European Commission
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April 2026
First EU-funded projects start
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