How to Write the MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowship Proposal

The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship is scored on three criteria with fixed weights: Excellence at 50 percent, Impact at 30 percent, and Quality and efficiency of the implementation at 20 percent. A proposal has to clear 70 percent overall (and per-criterion thresholds) to be fundable, and with success rates around 14 to 16 percent the real cutoff sits far higher, often above 90 points. What follows is about the writing itself: how each section is judged and where applicants quietly shed the marks that decide the outcome. For the eligibility and process steps, start with the application checklist instead.

Excellence is half the score, so lead with it

Excellence covers the quality and ambition of the science, the soundness of the methodology, and, distinctively for MSCA, the two-way transfer of knowledge between you and the host. Evaluators want to see what you bring to the host and what the host's environment and your supervisor add to you. State the objectives precisely, show command of the state of the art with current citations, and make the research-and-training pairing explicit rather than implied. A brilliant methodology with a thin account of mutual knowledge transfer leaves easy points on the table.

Impact is where applicants lose the most points

Impact is 30 percent of the score and the section most often written badly. It has to cover the pathways to impact, a credible plan for communication, dissemination, and exploitation, and your own career development. Those three terms mean different things, and evaluators notice when an applicant treats them as one.

• •Dissemination: getting results to your scientific peers (papers, preprints, conferences, and datasets).
• •Exploitation: the concrete use of results (further research, policy, a tool, IP, or a follow-on grant).
• •Communication: reaching non-specialist audiences and the public, with named activities.
• •Career development: how the fellowship sets up your next step, an ERC Starting Grant or a faculty post, not just "new skills".

Implementation: make the work plan legible

Implementation is 20 percent and the easiest to score well on, because it rewards clarity over brilliance. Provide a Gantt chart with work packages, deliverables, and milestones (not just task bars), a risk table with mitigations, and a resources section that matches the plan. Evaluators reward a work plan they can follow at a glance. If they have to reconstruct your timeline, you lose marks you did not need to.

The budget is unit costs, so write a use-of-resources narrative

MSCA does not ask for an itemised budget. Funding is paid as fixed monthly unit costs: a living allowance of €6,350 under the 2026-2027 Work Programme (adjusted by a country correction coefficient), a mobility allowance of €710, and, where applicable, a family allowance of €660, plus institutional amounts of €1,000 for research, training, and networking and €650 for management and indirect costs. Because the numbers are fixed, there is nothing to justify line by line. What you can show is that the research, training, and networking budget pays for a real plan: specific courses, secondments, conferences, and open-access fees tied to the work packages.

Write for a reader outside your subfield

Your proposal is scored by evaluators who sit in your broad panel but rarely your exact niche. Define your terms, open each section with the point before the supporting detail, and write an abstract a neighbouring-field scientist can follow. Clarity pays off late in a long reviewing day, when an evaluator tends to score the version of your project they actually understood.