Main changes in ERC Advanced Grants 2025 compared to previous years

The European Research Council (ERC) has, in 2024 and 2025, adopted several changes to the ERC Advanced Grants (ERC AdG). The most important changes are summarised below. See also:
Faculty information about the ERC AdG call 2025 including key information and links
Faculty information about the ERC AdG call 2025 including key information and links – in Czech

Changes in 2025 and changes still in force since 2024

• Curriculum Vitae and Track Record are joint into a single section up to 4 pages in length.
• Principal Investigator (PI) should present in the CV and Track record section a list of up to 10 selected research outputs. (e.g.: publications, articles deposited in a publicly available preprint server, books, book chapters, conference proceedings, data sets, software, patents, licenses, standards, start-up businesses…) with an emphasis on recent achievements. (Formerly, it was up to 10 selected publications from the last 10 years.)
• The “Funding ID” section (overview of grants the PI is currently holding or applying for) in newly part of the “Scientific Proposal” (Part B2), and therefore, will be visible for the evaluators only in the Step 2 of the evaluation.
• There have been slight changes to the evaluation elements, e.g.:
  • The Research Project needs to address “important scientific challenges” (previously, it was “important challenges”).
  • The “leadership in the training and advancement of young scientists” is no longer explicitly addressed in the evaluation of the PI.
• If the PI is re-locating to the EU or an Horizon Europe associated country from elsewhere to take up their ERC grant, the “additional funding” can be up to EUR 2 million.
• The call is implemented under the lump sum funding model: The budget must be justified in slightly more detail at the proposal stage, but then no actual costs need to be reported at the implementation stage (only project activities).
  
  • Information about depreciation of equipment to be purchased within the project must be included as an excel table – a template is provided. (If no equipment purchase is planned, an empty table must be uploaded.)
  • In the “Section 3 – Budget” (Part A filled online), average personnel costs per person-month are filled for each type of position (PI, Senior staff, etc.).
  • In the “Section 3 – Budget”, the budget justification is divided into several text boxes for respective types of costs.
• A maximum of 44 proposals per ERC evaluation panel will be retained for the Step 2 of the evaluation. It will be possible for a proposal to be evaluated as category A in Step 1 of the evaluation and not be retained for Step 2 – in this case, the PI will be able to apply again for an ERC grant already in the following year.

If you have any questions regarding ERC, please, don’t hesitate to contact the Project Management Department (Ludmila Součková, ludmila.souckova@natur.cuni.cz).

Information published by Ludmila Součková on 22. 5. 2025.

Not the information you sought? Found a mistake? Please, let us know.