Consolidator Grant

ERC Consolidator Grant Call supports excellent Principal Investigators at the career stage at which they may still be consolidating their own independent research team or programme. Principal Investigators must demonstrate the ground-breaking nature, ambition, and feasibility of their research proposal.

A competitive Consolidator Grant Principal Investigator must have already shown research independence and evidence of maturity, for example by having produced several important publications as main author or without the participation of their PhD supervisor.

Applicants are expected to have defended their first PhD at least 7 and up to 12 years prior to 1 January of the call year.

The effective elapsed time since the PhD defence date can be reduced in certain properly documented circumstances like: maternity, paternity leave, long-term illness, disability, national service, clinical training, major disasters or seeking asylum. For example, a maternity extension of 18 months will be granted for each child born before or after the date of the successful defence of their first PhD degree.

Consolidator Grants may be awarded up to a maximum of 2 Million Euros for a period of 5 years. However, this budget may go up to a maximum of 3 Million Euros to cover the purchase of major equipment and/or access to large facilities and/or other major experimental and field work costs including personnel costs. Principal Investigators moving to the EU or an Associated Country like Türkiye from elsewhere as a consequence of receiving the ERC grant can request up to 2 Million Euros additional budget for eligible "start-up" costs (e.g., for setting up a lab, recruiting a team, purchasing equipment), resulting in the total budget to be 4 Million Euros.

Contact:

For your questions regarding the call, to receive support in preparing your proposal and to discuss the relevance of your project idea please contact us, the ERC National Contact Points at TÜBİTAK, via ncperc@tubitak.gov.tr.

Information Regarding the Upcoming ERC-2026-CoG Call:

The ERC-2026-CoG call is expected to open in September 2025 and close in January 2026. Researchers who wish to apply for this call are encouraged to start their preparations using the existing guides and application forms from the previous call available on this page, without waiting for the new call to open.

Important Notes:

Note 1: The reference date of the ERC-2026-CoG call is 1 January 2026, and researchers who have made their first successful doctoral defence between 1 January 2014 and 31 December 2018 can apply to this call.

Note 2: As of 2023 calls the ERC changed the methodology of the calculation of PhD reference date for the eligibility period. According to the new rule the date of the successful PhD defence will be used. Whenever the PhD certificate does not show the PhD defence date, applicants should provide a written confirmation from the awarding institution stating the defence date together with the PhD certificate. When planning your application preparations, it is recommended to consider that this approval process may take some time.

Note 3: For the preparation of your ERC-2026-CoG application, you can apply to the ERC Principal Investigator Development Program (EBAG) developed by TÜBİTAK to receive support from experts or institutions during your project preparation process.

Projects applying to the EBAG program are expected to be mature enough to meet the ERC first-stage evaluation criteria (a draft B1 form will be required at the application stage). If your application is supported, you may:
(1) Participate in proposal writing and submission training,
(2) Receive pre-evaluation support (for consultancy companies or experts including ERC Mentoring Initiative),
(3) Receive interview training if you are invited to the second-stage evaluation

After the approval of your general application, a separate sub-application is required for each service procurement in accordance with TÜBİTAK's criteria. The EBAG program is accepting applications for the ERC-2026-CoG call. Applications will be accepted until 45 days before the call deadline. Evaluations are conducted on a rolling basis, so you do not need to wait for the final deadline to apply. It is advised to consider that the experts or consultant companies providing these services may be busy or have a high workload as the call closing dates approach.

Note 4: You can review the projects funded in previous Consolidator Grant calls, along with their principal investigators and the panels that funded them, via the ERC Dashboard. By clicking on the project acronyms, you will be directed to the CORDIS page, where you can access interim/final reports, open-access data and publications, as well as related news.

Note 5: You can write to ncperc@tubitak.gov.tr to access the video recordings and presentations of the previously organized information days and training sessions.

Information Regarding the Closed ERC-2025-CoG Call:

The ERC-2025-CoG call was launched on 26 September 2024 and closed on 14 January 2025.

Indicative evaluation timeframe for this call is available in this link.
You can access the initial statistics regarding the applications here. This call received a total of 3,121 applications, reflecting a 35% increase compared to the previous call. As stated in the ERC 2025 Work Programme, approximately 354 projects are planned to be funded with €719 million.