A few people have asked me the same thing recently, where do you actually look for master’s and MPhil funding, and which of those sites are worth trusting.
There’s no single site that carries all of it. Funding sits in a lot of different places, and each one advertises separately.
So here’s the list I usually end up sending, counting down from ten, with what I actually think of each one. Some I like a great deal. A couple I suggest in spite of their flaws. All of them are live, and none of them charge anything to apply.
Worth knowing as you read: numbers 10 to 8 are aggregators, collecting what other people are offering. Numbers 6 to 2 are the funders themselves. That difference matters more than the ranking does.
I must say I have mixed feelings about opening the list here, because this isn’t really a search tool. It’s a daily feed scholarships sitting alongside fellowships, conferences, competitions and grants, with round-ups of whatever is closing that month.
10. Opportunity Desk
What I like is the discovery. You come across things you’d never have thought to search for, and that is genuinely how a lot of people find the award they end up winning.
What I don’t like is that there’s no way to filter for your own profile, and the write-ups are summaries rather than full conditions. So I treat it as a nudge, never as a source of truth.
9. Scholars4Dev
This one I like more than I expected to. It’s built around students from developing countries, it has been running long enough to have earned some trust, and listings are sorted by country, level and eligibility.
The thing I’d give it real credit for is separating fully funded awards from tuition-waiver-only ones. Plenty of sites blur that line, and it’s exactly how someone ends up with an offer that covers fees and leaves living costs untouched.
My one complaint is that deadlines occasionally lag behind the official ones, so a quick cross-check is worth the two minutes.
8. IEFA
I like the format and theme of this site, very clean and easy to search. you can find plenty of scholarships here. but you have to be very active and updated not to loose any oppertunity.
7. ProFellow
Honestly, this is the one I’m most surprised people haven’t heard of. A free account opens up close to 3,000 fellowships, fully funded graduate programmes and accelerators, filterable by “Masters Fellowships” or “Doctoral Fellowships” and then narrowed by discipline, location and citizenship.
What I like about it is that it’s organised around how postgraduate money is actually labelled. At this level it’s hardly ever called a scholarship it’s a fellowship, a studentship, an assistantship, a bursary, a grant. Anyone searching only the word “scholarship” is quietly filtering out most of what’s open to them.
It does lean towards US-linked opportunities, which is the main thing keeping it out of a higher spot.
6. The national “Study in…” portals
campusfrance.org · studyinsweden.se · studyinnl.org · and their equivalents
I must say this is the group I wish more people started with, because between them these portals hold funding that never reaches an aggregator at all.
Every serious study destination runs one, usually government-backed. Campus Bourses, run by Campus France, lists aid from French and foreign states, regional authorities, companies, foundations and institutions, filterable by nationality, field and level. The Netherlands runs Study in NL through Nuffic. Japan has MEXT, China has CSC, Türkiye has Türkiye Bursları, Korea has GKS.
What I like is the specificity. Sweden’s portal spells out that Swedish Institute awards go to students from particular countries applying for autumn-start master’s programmes, and that there’s no funding at all for spring starts or bachelor’s degrees. That’s precisely the kind of clause aggregators leave out, and it’s usually the difference between a wasted application and a realistic one.
The drawback is obvious enough you need to have picked a country before any of these are useful.
5. Chevening
There isn’t much to criticise about the award itself. UK government funding, one year, taught master’s, and fully funded here really does mean fully funded: tuition, a monthly stipend, return economy airfare, an arrival allowance, one visa application, and a travel grant for Chevening events.
The current round opened on 4 August 2026 and closes on 6 October 2026 at 11:00 UTC, for study starting in 2027. Applicants choose three eligible UK courses, need an unconditional offer from at least one by the stated date, and commit to returning home for two years afterwards.
What I’d flag is fit rather than quality. This funds taught master’s degrees. Anyone heading towards an MPhil or another research degree is looking in the wrong place.
4. Commonwealth Scholarship Commission
I like this one for a reason that has little to do with the award size. It’s the least crowded serious option on the list, and I don’t think nearly enough people know it exists.
Also UK government, also funded by the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, with around 800 awards a year across its schemes. There are three master’s routes: Master’s Scholarships for candidates from eligible lower and middle-income Commonwealth countries, Shared Scholarships aimed at least developed and lower-middle-income countries, and Distance Learning Scholarships, which fund a UK master’s studied from your own country.
That last one is the part I’d underline. Hardly anyone mentions it, and it’s correspondingly less competitive.
The awkward part is that some streams run through national nominating agencies rather than direct application, so the way in changes depending on where you’re applying from.
3. FindAMasters, and FindAPhD alongside it
findamasters.com · findaphd.com
This is the one I send anyone asking specifically about an MPhil, and I like it for a simple reason, it handles research degrees properly, which is rarer than it sounds. Taught and research programmes are indexed together: MA, MSc, MRes, MPhil, MLitt, MBA. A scholarship search has been added fairly recently, showing eligibility, process, award value and deadlines, linked to the courses those awards attach to. The UK Parliament’s own research briefing on postgraduate funding names it alongside the Scholarship Hub and Postgraduate Search.
For MPhil in particular I’d start on FindAPhD instead. Research funding usually gets advertised as a studentship attached to a project and a supervisor, not as a scholarship you apply to separately. Search the wrong word and an entire category of money stays invisible.
It is UK-heavy. That’s the trade-off, and it’s a fair one if the UK is where you’re headed.
2. The Erasmus Mundus Catalogue
I would like to say I have a soft spot for this one. Over 100 active joint master’s programmes across more or less every discipline, each delivered by a consortium of at least three universities in three countries. You study in two or more of them and graduate with a joint or multiple degree, and full scholarships go to the best-ranked applicants worldwide, tuition, travel and a monthly living allowance.
Two things about it get misunderstood constantly. There’s no central application portal, so every programme runs its own, which means applying to several is normal rather than greedy. And the scholarship quotas vary enormously: some programmes fund two or three international students per intake, others fifteen or twenty.
That second point is my one real criticism. Nothing tells you the quota upfront, so checking it before sinking weeks into an application is left entirely to you. Applications generally run from October to January for the following academic year.
1. Mastersportal
I keep coming back to this one, and it takes the top spot for coverage as much as anything else. The European Commission’s own Study in Europe pages send students here, describing it as a database of over a thousand scholarships across Europe and beyond.
What I like most is that programmes and funding are searchable side by side. Most European funding doesn’t exist on its own, it’s attached to a specific course at a specific institution. Searching for scholarships in isolation is how people end up with a list of awards they can’t actually hold.
I’d still treat it as a starting point rather than a destination. Once something looks promising, the university’s own page is where the real conditions live.
One warning worth carrying: scholarshipportal.com is not the same thing as scholarshipsportal.eu. The second is a separate European portal covering domestic scholarships for students staying in their own country, and it excludes international students entirely.
The source that never makes these lists
The university’s own funding page.
Departmental awards, faculty bursaries, international excellence waivers, supervisor-held research funds, a lot of this never reaches any database, because nobody at the university has much reason to submit it to one. It sits on a departmental page that gets almost no traffic.
A search along the lines of site:universityname.edu scholarship masters international will often surface more in ten minutes than an afternoon of aggregators. For research degrees especially, emailing the department directly to ask what funding exists for international MPhil applicants is a step I’d hate to see anyone skip.
How I’d tell a real one from a fake
The old rule still holds: real scholarships give money, they don’t take it. Any request for an application fee, a processing charge or an advance payment is enough on its own to walk away, even when the amount looks small enough to be harmless.
The newer pattern is sharper and worth recognising. Scammers now copy real logos, use real programme names, Chevening, Fulbright, MEXT, Erasmus Mundus and time their messages to land in the exact week genuine results come out. The message says your decision is ready and asks for a small fee to view it. No legitimate scholarship anywhere charges to release a result.
Other things I’d slow down for: guaranteed awards, no eligibility criteria at all, unsolicited notifications about something you never applied to, requests for bank details, and any pressure to act immediately.
Keep this thing in mind: Always apply on those scholarships that leads you directly to universities portal for application procedure and there should be an email for queries from coordinator or university management.
One last thing about timing
Postgraduate deadlines usually fall eight to twelve months before the intake they fund. Anyone reading this in August is already inside the window for next year’s entry, not the year after.
That gap catches people out, mostly because it’s natural to assume the scholarship application comes after the university offer. Often it runs alongside it. Sometimes it runs first.
The reassuring part is that the work doesn’t multiply the way it looks like it will. A CV, a statement of purpose, a research proposal, references it’s largely the same set of documents adapted rather than rewritten each time. Which is why I’d start assembling them well before you’ve settled on where you’re applying.
If your question was something narrower than “where do I look” a particular country, a specific field, or an MPhil rather than a taught master’s that’s worth sending my way. The answer changes quite a bit depending on which of those you’re working with.
So, Good luck students. I hope next year you will be in your dream country with your dream scholarship.
Need your documents reviewed, or some guidance on scholarships and applications? Send me a message for 1-1 session and let’s make it stronger.
Magificent & Useful Websites for Students Planning to Study Abroad.
Thankyou Robia, I hope It would be helpful. 🙂
Hi Kinza, thankyou for these websites info, can you post specific scholarships for environmental engineering for Masters? It would be helpful.
Sure Ankita. I have just uploaded one in Masters Scholarships page. you can find it here https://wherescholarsbegin.com/eesic-a-new-fully-funded-erasmus-mundus-masters-in-environmental-engineering/