ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowships

ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowships

Supports early-career social scientists in the United Kingdom with postdoctoral fellowships for publication and professional development.

⚠ This may reflect a past cycle — verify the current call on the funder's site.

ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowships support recently completed PhD social scientists in consolidating and disseminating their doctoral research through publication development, professional networking, skill-building, and career development activities. Fellowships last up to nine months full-time or 18 months part-time, with the 2026 cycle targeting a start date of 1 October 2026. New research activities cannot be funded — at least 50% of fellowship activities must fall within the social sciences, and all work must be grounded in the applicant's existing PhD research. Activities may include research visits, collaborations, training programmes, and conference participation.

Applications for the 2026 cycle were submitted directly to one of ESRC's 15 Doctoral Training Partnerships, not to ESRC or UKRI centrally. Each DTP runs its own competitive assessment, sets its own deadlines within the programme window, and makes final funding decisions — award amounts are determined by the host DTP and not published centrally by ESRC. The 2026 cycle opened 24 March 2026 and closed 1 June 2026. The next cycle is expected to open around March 2027.

Eligibility is tightly defined: applicants must have completed their PhD — or have submitted and passed viva with minor corrections outstanding — at a UK research organisation that is part of ESRC's doctoral training network. Crucially, applicants must have accumulated fewer than 15 months of active postdoctoral experience (calculated on a full-time equivalent basis from viva date to the DTP closing date). Host institutions must be a member of a participating DTP. Candidates who completed their PhD outside the ESRC DTP network are not eligible. Given the distributed delivery model across 15 DTPs, prospective applicants should identify their target DTP early, as internal deadlines and assessment formats vary significantly between partnerships.