Slow erosion: Why ERC grants aren’t what they were

Intense demand and limited budgets have made European Research Council grants fall behind inflation

In 2020, the European Research Council did something unprecedented and, so far, unrepeated. For the first time since launching in 2007, the EU’s premier funding body for frontier research raised the maximum amount of money that researchers could apply for in two of its three main grant schemes.

The ERC budget has slowly grown over the years. But instead of the value of its grants also growing over time, the agency’s leaders have almost always erred on the side of awarding a greater number of grants to keep up with intense demand.