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. This guide is about the writing itself: how the three sections are judged and where applicants quietly lose the marks that decide it. If you need the eligibility and process steps first, start with the application checklist.

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. The three terms are not synonyms, and conflating them is a visible tell.

• •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 €5,990 (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, do not justify line items. Instead show that the research, training, and networking budget is spent on 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 are in your broad panel but rarely your exact niche. Define terms, lead each section with the point before the detail, and make the abstract readable by an adjacent-field scientist. The clearest proposal in a panel has a real advantage, because a tired evaluator scores what they understood, not what you meant.