Last updated: February 11, 2026
This article follows our ERC Plus introductory article and provides a more detailed analysis of the open questions surrounding the ERC Plus scheme.
The introduction of ERC Plus raises important questions for applicants, evaluators, and research support offices. These questions go to the heart of how ERC Plus reshapes the ERC funding logic. This follow-up article addresses some of the most pressing issues: how ERC Plus differs from individual ERC grants, who it is really for, its relevance to Social Sciences and Humanities (SH), its positioning relative to ERC Synergy Grants and strategic choices between deadlines
What distinguishes ERC Plus from individual ERC grants?
This is arguably the most pressing question raised by the introduction of ERC Plus.
At first glance, ERC Plus may seem like a standard, single-PI, ERC grant with a larger budget and longer duration. But is that really the case?
From ERC communications, we know that ERC Plus is framed as a vehicle for transformative impact, described as “going beyond regular ERC grants” by supporting projects that aim to revolutionize their field. What remains unclear is how this claim translates into practice, given that transformative ambition is already a defining feature of all ERC schemes.
ERC Plus seems distinguished from individual ERC grants by its intention to specifically accommodate a complex, long-term, scientific visions: while regular ERC grants are optimized for pursuing ambitious, original, and significant research questions, ERC Plus appears designed to support ambitious visions whose realization may require staged or adaptive trajectories, substantial enabling work or parallel lines of high-risk inquiry —visions that might otherwise be divided across multiple funding schemes.
Importantly, this distinction should not be misunderstood as increased tolerance for multiple loosely connected research lines. ERC Plus is unlikely intended to justify an arbitrary aggregation of subprojects. Fragmentation is already observed in regular ERC proposals, and the risk could increase in the context of this larger grant. Applicants may be tempted to equate scope with vision, or breadth with ambition, assembling a portfolio of activities rather than a scientifically necessary trajectory. While the scheme may seem permissive, the increased budget and duration function primarily as enabling conditions for pursuing a single coherent scientific vision, to be held only once by a researcher – rather than merely as a safe harbor for oversized or fragmented proposals.
In this sense, ERC Plus likely raises the bar for coherence: the more complex and extended the proposal, the stronger the expectation that this complexity is scientifically unavoidable and anchored in a single long-term vision.
Applicants should ask early whether their ambition is genuinely vision-driven and irreducibly complex, or whether it can be expressed as a bounded project within a standard ERC grant.
Is ERC Plus only for senior researchers?
ERC Plus is open to researchers of any age and career stage. Recent ERC communications explicitly state that the scheme neither excludes early-career researchers nor imposes seniority-based eligibility criteria.
At the same time, the scheme raises a subtle but important tension for applicants.
First, ERC Plus places strong emphasis on demonstrated scientific leadership and the ability to lead a long-term, high-risk scientific vision. Second, in Step 1 of the evaluation, proposals are evaluated by panels aligned with ERC Advanced Grant panels, whose members may – implicitly or explicitly – hold expectations about how leadership manifests. Taken together, these two factors raise a legitimate open question: does ERC plus effectively favour more established researchers?
Many conventional indicators of leadership, such as shaping a field, founding new approaches, owning transformative ideas, or redirecting research agendas, tend to accumulate over time and thus more often coincide with later career stages. Senior researchers may therefore find it easier to evidence the type of leadership ERC Plus seeks.
That said, the ERC has consistently distinguished excellence from seniority, and there is no indication that ERC Plus departs from this principle.
Leadership is not assessed through chronological career stage or proxy indicators such as publication volume, but through visibility, originality, and depth of scientific footprint. Applicants whose previous work has already sparked or reshaped a line of inquiry are more plausibly positioned to argue that they can sustain a coherent long-term scientific vision.
An early-career applicant who can convincingly demonstrate intellectual ownership, field-level visibility, and the capacity to articulate and sustain a long-term scientific vision may be well positioned to apply. For such candidates, ERC Plus should not be seen as out of reach. On the contrary, it may offer a rare opportunity for emerging scientific leaders to articulate a field-shaping vision earlier than would otherwise be possible.
Applicants should assess not their seniority, but whether they can credibly demonstrate scientific leadership appropriate to a long-term, vision-driven programme.
Does ERC Plus fit Social Sciences and Humanities (SH)?
ERC Plus is explicitly bottom-up and open to all disciplines, including the Social Sciences and Humanities. There is no thematic prioritisation and no implicit STEM or technology bias: transformative scientific visions are sought wherever they arise.
Nevertheless, justifying the scale and duration inherent to ERC Plus may pose a particular challenge for SH researchers. In many SH fields, such as sociology, history, or literature, research is primarily conceptual, archival, or theoretical. As already observed in standard ERC grants, the resources required may be inherently less tangible than in experimental or equipment-intensive research. While budget size and project length are intended as enabling conditions rather than defining criteria, difficulty in justifying resources can signal that a proposal may not align with the level of ambition and long-term vision the scheme is designed to support. This raises an open question: if vision is implicitly associated with scale, can SH applicants meet these expectations on their own terms?
This challenge may interact with a tendency toward fragmentation. In order to justify resources, SH proposals may be tempted to present loosely tied lines of inquiry, increasing the risk of perceived incoherence.
At the same time, ERC Plus may represent a unique opportunity for SH research. If, on the one hand, the challenge lies in demonstrating that SH projects genuinely require the scale and duration associated with ERC Plus, on the other hand the scheme’s orientation toward long-term scientific vision, staged trajectories, and enabling work may actually make such scale more intelligible. Many foundational or paradigm-shifting contributions in SH do not take the form of discrete breakthroughs, but emerge through extended conceptual development, cumulative argumentation, or exploratory reframing over time. By foregrounding vision rather than discrete outputs, ERC Plus may in principle offer a framework in which the scope of impactful SH research can be articulated, and justified, more convincingly than in standard ERC formats.
SH applicants considering ERC Plus must therefore make the vision, not the activities, the centre of gravity of the proposal, and demonstrate why sustained time, resources, and intellectual continuity are indispensable to its realization.
What is the difference between ERC Plus and ERC Synergy (SyG)?
The distinction is formal: ERC Plus is an individual grant, while ERC Synergy Grants are built around multiple principal investigators. This structural difference is not merely administrative; it encodes a fundamentally different model of intellectual leadership.
Yet, a natural comparison arises because both instruments offer large-scale funding, long durations, and represent the most selective instruments of the ERC portfolio. It raises an apparent paradox. If a scientific vision requires extended duration, significant resources, and complex or staged development (the conditions implicitly associated with ERC Plus) why would it not also require genuine co-leadership, thereby pointing toward Synergy?
This tension highlights a genuine ambiguity in the positioning of ERC Plus. The scheme approaches the scale and complexity often associated with Synergy-level projects, yet deliberately retains a single-PI leadership model.
In practice, there is no sharp boundary between the two instruments. The decisive criterion is whether the project’s ambition depends on shared intellectual ownership, where multiple investigators jointly define and steer the vision, or whether it is driven by the depth and scope of a vision that remains conceptually unified under one scientific leader, even if its realisation requires substantial collaboration or complementary expertise.
Choosing between ERC Plus and ERC Synergy requires careful, case-specific judgment about whether the ambition of the project arises from collective intellectual co-ownership, or from the depth and scope of a vision centred on one scientific leader.
Which deadline should an applicant apply to?
Choosing whether and when to apply to ERC Plus cannot be separated from the broader structure and timing of ERC calls. The strategic nature of this decision arises from two features of the ERC system: the proximity of deadlines across schemes and the fact that, at most career stages, applicants have more than one eligible option within the same Work Programme year.
Across a typical ERC cycle, calls are distributed over an extended but tightly linked timeline. Starting Grants and Synergy Grants usually close in the autumn of the preceding
year (typically October–November), followed by Consolidator Grants in January of the Work Programme year. Advanced Grants then close later in the cycle, usually in late August, with ERC Plus positioned immediately afterwards, around early September. While exact dates vary by Work Programme, this sequencing is relatively stable.
Because ERC rules allow only one eligible ERC proposal to be evaluated per Work Programme year, this clustering of deadlines turns timing into a substantive strategic choice. Early-career researchers may simultaneously be eligible for Starting and Consolidator Grants (particularly starting from 2027 Work Programme where eligibility windows are to be extended – publication pending); more established researchers may face a choice between Consolidator and Advanced Grants; and across stages, ERC Plus and ERC Synergy add further high-end options for particularly ambitious projects. Committing to one call, especially earlier in the cycle, can therefore foreclose the possibility of applying to another later in the same year.
Applicants must weigh the nature of their ambition, the structure of leadership, the scale and duration required, and the opportunity cost of bypassing alternative ERC instruments within the same annual cycle.
Concluding perspective
ERC Plus is not simply “more ERC”. It represents a qualitative extension of the ERC logic toward vision-driven, long-term, single-PI leadership. With that extension come new opportunities, but also new ambiguities and risks for applicants.
As the first call approaches, clarity will emerge through practice as much as through formal documentation. Until then, applicants are required to navigate unresolved questions about vision vs. research question, single- vs. co-leadership, scale vs. coherence, and timing vs opportunity cost.
As ERC Plus takes shape, thoughtful, case-specific interpretation will remain essential. If you are considering applying, early discussion can help navigate the uncertainties, and we are happy to support you in evaluating how ERC Plus fits your research vision.