(Science|Business) Inflation up, budget static: how ERC grants lost part of their power

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Inflation may not have cost the European Research Council (ERC) its popularity, but it has certainly taken a toll on the purchasing power of its grants, leaving some grantees with no other choice but to temper their ambitions.

For a period of five years, the ERC finances its Starting grants with up to €1.5 million, Consolidator grants up to €2 million and Advanced grants up to €2.5 million, while its Synergy grants are worth up to €10 million over six years. But since its creation in 2007, the ERC has never adjusted its funding caps to account for inflation, which has progressively raised the cost of running laboratories, buying equipment and, above all, hiring staff.

“The problem is that salaries have been increasing, especially in Germany,” said Gary Lewin, a winner of multiple ERC grants for his research on touch and pain perception at the Max Delbrück Center in Berlin. “When I first got an ERC grant, I could go out and hire two or three new people and do something very new. Nowadays, because we’re all fighting for resources, getting an ERC grant is almost just about keeping my lab afloat.”

Lewin has won three ERC Advanced grants, starting in 2011. The first, focused on the genetic factors enabling the African naked mole-rat to be insensitive to certain kinds of pain, allowed him to establish laboratory colonies of the mammal, making him one of the pioneers in its use as an experimental model for studying extreme physiology.

“That grant not only enabled me to start a new project, but also to start a whole new research field,” he said. 

The third Advanced grant, which he won in 2024 to investigate how nerves in the skin transduce mechanical stimuli and trigger pain, will not support similar ambitions. “In 2011, I had a full-time technician, two students and two postdocs, and now I have half a technician and two postdocs,” Lewin told Science|Business. “The research programme that I wrote is not going to be fulfilled, because there’s not enough money to do what we really wanted to do.”

Personnel support

Lewin is not the only researcher in Germany to have reduced his team. The country, which has consistently hosted the most ERC grantees, has experienced some of the sharpest squeezes on salaries in western Europe.

Fedor Jelezko, the director of the Institute of Quantum Optics at Ulm University, was awarded two ERC Synergy grants rooted in solid-state quantum technology. In just ten years, he observed salaries rise by about 35%. “For my team, the post-doc salary increased from around €65,000 a year in 2015 to around €88,000 a year in 2025,” he said.

Staff costs also rose for Jonathan Harrington, who leads the Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing at the University of Munich. After winning his first Advanced grant in 2011, hiring a postdoc cost €77,170 per year and a PhD student €38,779. For his third Advanced grant, won in 2021, these costs had risen to €99,828 and €73,727 respectively. 

As a result, he went from having two postdocs for five years and five PhD students spending 65% of their time on the work for three years to three postdocs, of whom only one stayed five years, and four PhD students at 75% for three years. 

“There is less money left over for other costs like equipment, travel and buying out teaching time if you want to keep the person power of docs and postdocs constant, which in my view is essential both in order to conduct ambitious projects of this kind and, of equal importance, give opportunities to as many junior scientists as possible,” he said.

Yohanns Bellaïche, who won Advanced grants in 2013 and 2021 for his research on tissue morphogenesis at the Curie Institute in Paris, confirmed the importance of supporting young researchers. In this context, higher salaries are not entirely unfavourable. 

“My laboratory is in Paris, and living in Paris on a postdoc salary is extremely difficult so, in a way, increasing salaries are a good thing,” he told Science|Business. “We really need to give junior researchers a leg up to rekindle some of the magic in the profession.”

Across the Channel, Roberto Maiolino also wishes that he could be more supportive of his recruits. “For postdocs [. . .] it is important to offer a salary that is competitive and allows them and their families to cope with the increasing cost of living,” he said. A professor of experimental astrophysics at the University of Cambridge, Maiolino received two Advanced grants for investigating galaxies. 

“For students, these increasing costs have been compounded by the effects of Brexit, which have resulted in extremely high overseas tuition fees,” he went on. “This has inevitably required us to scale back the scope and ambition of some research projects compared with what would have been possible when the purchasing power of the grants was greater.”

Investment choices

Against this backdrop, some grantees have had to ask themselves what to sacrifice to see their projects through.

Wilhelm Huck, professor of physical organic chemistry at Radboud University Nijmegen, in the Netherlands, and three-time ERC grantee, saw personnel costs “go through the roof” from 2010 to 2026. “When I received the first ERC Advanced grant, I was able to hire five PhD students and two postdocs. For my third ERC Advanced grant, I can only hire three PhD students and two postdocs, and I squeezed the consumables budget and totally gave up on equipment,” he said. 

Before scientists can buy a single piece of equipment, a large share of the award is swallowed by salaries, institutional overheads and other university indirect costs, which had historically been capped at 20% of direct eligible costs before a flat rate of 25% became the ERC’s standard under Horizon 2020.

“Approximately half the money is not spent on research but goes to the university,” Huck said. “I know from colleagues applying for ERC Starting grants that they can only hire two PhD students, and then have to decide between more consumables and some equipment or a one-year postdoc.”

In Sweden, Andrew Ewing, senior researcher in the department of chemistry and molecular biology at the University of Gothenburg, also had some tough decisions to make when he started researching how organelles communicate with each other under his third Advanced grant, awarded in 2025. “I can flat-out state that for the current grant, I can hire about half as many personnel and keep the project supplies and equipment stable,” he said.

But beyond personnel, he finds the way that equipment is handled “very counterproductive.”

“If one needs a [stimulated emission depletion] super-resolution microscope that costs €1 million, which is then used for 50% time on the ERC [research], one is not allowed to use the other 50% time on any other project,” he said. 

The ERC does not state outright that the equipment cannot be used on other projects, but its rules on pro-rata cost eligibility mean that, if used for other purposes, additional funding must be found to cover the remaining purchase price. “ERC funds would have a much larger reach if they loosened this requirement,” Ewing said.

“There is a kind of disconnect between the strict rules imposed by the ERC and scientific reality,” Bellaïche added. “We’re here to share resources, so the rule is completely unsuitable for the scientific use of equipment,” he went on. “We’ll find a solution, but it forces us into a convoluted process that doesn’t simplify things.”

In addition, Ewing would like to see the ERC invest in an infrastructure programme to help scientists buy equipment items worth between €1 million and €5 million, “and not in the regular grant, but on top of it.”

Setting aside equipment, scientists must also account for the cost of their experiments, which Bellaïche has seen skyrocket. Single-cell sequencing, for example, can cost up to €10,000 per sample. “Now, we do things that are very genome-wide, and it’s almost a necessity to remain competitive,” he said.

Lower impact?

The ERC set out to fund transformative research, its offer of generous grants and the freedom to choose topics quickly generates stiff competition among researchers. The prestige garnered by ERC grant winners has only served to increase the pressure on its budget. In 2025, for example, the Advanced grant call recorded success rates of just 9.6%, down from 11% in 2024.

But the effect of inflation is chipping away at the practical impact of being an ERC winner. For Bellaïche, there is now an “ambiguity” in getting an ERC grant. Compared to French government grants, which generally hover between €300,000 and €400,000, the amount is exceptional. Yet, he still needs to restrict his project ambitions, “not because it’s not scientifically feasible, but because funding is not following.”

For Lewin, the grants have not lost their attractiveness, but their value has now gone down to that of “a normal grant” to some extent. 

“A normal grant might give you a small project that you can keep going for one year or so, but the original idea of ERC grants is that you can start something transformatively new,” he said. “And as the value of the grant goes down, the transformative nature of the grant may be lower, because you don’t have the jump in funding that allows you to do something that is radically new.”

The European Commission has proposed doubling the ERC’s budget in the next Horizon Europe, to €31.5 billion. If approved by MEPs and national governments, this would give the ERC Scientific Council the opportunity to revise both the size and number of grants it awards.

Lewin would like to see both happen, with the size of the ERC grants increased by 20% or 30% and, at the same time, more worthy proposals selected for funding. 

A more radical proposal comes from Francesco Lippi, a two-time Advanced grant winner who is now professor of economics at Luiss University in Rome. “The ERC grants are very generous, probably too generous for most fields,” he told Science|Business. “If you are a physicist and run experiments, you need a lab, you need machinery, and that’s going to cost €2 million. But the rest of us using computers and travelling from time to time, we don’t really do very expensive things.” 

While he acknowledged that this would go “against [his] own interest,” he wonders why ERC funding is not more differentiated. “I have seen so many good projects be rejected just because there is no budget,” he said. “And then, others are getting the budget, and they almost don’t know what to do with it.”