You do not apply to a Doctoral Network
You get recruited by one.
That is the most useful fact about MSCA Doctoral Networks, and it changes what a student should be doing between now and the end of the year. The 2026 call opened on 28 May 2026 and closes on 24 November 2026 at 17:00 Brussels time. The proposal that goes in is written by universities, research organisations and companies. The doctoral candidates are hired later, out of the networks that win.
So the deadline on your side of the table is not the one on the portal. The thing on your side is being findable when the vacancy notices go up.
What the money looks like before it reaches you
Doctoral Networks pay in fixed unit contributions per person-month rather than by reimbursing receipts, and the unit table is published.
For the 2026 call the living allowance is EUR 4,250 per person-month before the country coefficient is applied, halved for a fixed-amount fellowship. The mobility allowance is EUR 710. The family allowance is EUR 660. Research, training and networking is EUR 1,600. Management and indirect costs are EUR 1,200. Add a country coefficient to the living allowance and a thirty-six month fellowship at a mid-coefficient rate is roughly EUR 300,000 of EU contribution for one person, before the family allowance and before the network's own training budget.
A full network is capped at 540 person-months. Put fifteen candidates at mostly thirty-six months under that cap and the award lands near EUR 4.3 million. The 2025 average, dividing EUR 617.18 million by 141 funded networks, was about EUR 4.4 million each.
Those numbers are not trivia. They are the reason the advert for a place under one of these networks has to state the gross salary.
The rule that is on your side
The selection procedure for doctoral candidates must be open, transparent and merit-based, in line with the Code of Conduct for the Recruitment of Researchers. The vacancy notice must be widely advertised internationally, including on the EURAXESS portal, and it must state the gross salary offered, not including employer social contributions.
Read the last clause twice. Gross salary, in the advert, by rule. You should never have to guess what a funded doctoral position pays, and you should never accept a vague answer about it.
It is also the fastest way to compare two offers that look the same on paper, and the fastest way to notice one quietly paying half the rate because the country coefficient is doing the work.
What you would be joining
The floor is three independent legal entities in three different EU Member States or associated countries, at least one of them in a Member State. The ceiling is 540 person-months. A network runs for up to 48 months, or 60 for a Joint Doctorate. A fellowship runs from 3 to 36 months.
The three modes are genuinely different doors. A standard network places you with one recruiting organisation and moves you through secondments of up to half the recruitment period. An Industrial Doctorate requires at least half of the fellowship to be spent in the non-academic sector, with joint supervision from both sectors. A Joint Doctorate awards a joint, double or multiple degree, and the consortium has to file pre-agreement letters proving the awarding bodies agreed before the proposal went in.
What you are joining is not a supervisor with a spare desk. It is a consortium with a training programme, an evaluation and a signed agreement about who awards your degree.
The score is a design decision
Proposals are scored on Excellence at 50 per cent, Impact at 30 and Implementation at 20. Each criterion needs at least three out of five, and the total needs at least seventy per cent.
Two things follow from that arithmetic. A network cannot be saved by administration: an excellent training programme is worth more than a tidy management section. And the recruitment adverts, the secondments and the training modules inherit the design that was already scored. If the network's application said its candidates would spend time in industry, the advert will say so.
Competition is the other number. The 2025 call drew 1,616 proposals, funded 141 and awarded EUR 617.18 million to about 2,115 doctoral candidates. The 2024 call drew 1,417 proposals, funded 149 and awarded EUR 609 million to over 1,800. The 2026 call carries an indicative EUR 593.03 million, expects to fund over 130 networks and about 1,950 doctoral candidates, with results in April 2027, grant agreements in July 2027 and the first projects starting in August 2027.
The 2026 rules also add a minimum score on every criterion, longer secondments, and a pilot of about EUR 30 million for AI-related doctoral training.
The file you keep ready
I have built companies across twelve countries and hired into teams in most of them, including a EUR 75 million industrial group, 210 energy systems, 200 wood-gasification machines and a listing in Frankfurt. Sixteen years of field work sits behind that. The people who were in the room when a window opened were not the ones with the longest list of adjectives. They had a folder, a link and a date.
There are two levers in any ranked system. Make the countable thing bigger, or make it cheaper for someone to take a chance on you. The countable thing is a repository with your name on it, a dataset with a date, an analysis of something real. The cost is the imagining a reviewer has to do. Every artefact with a link and a date lowers it.
The probability that a well-prepared candidate is passed over by a network that fills its places in a week is not zero. The probability that a candidate with no file, no link and nothing published gets picked because the interview went well is close to zero, and most applicants are pricing it as though it were much higher.
The Summit runs 18 to 20 November 2026, online, in Las Palmas and in Bali. The Doctoral Networks deadline is six days later. If you want a conversation about what a network looks for, or about advisory, board seats, or media appearances, write to media@exventure.co.