la Caixa Postdoctoral Junior Leader Fellowships in Spain and Portugal: Incoming Call 2027

The la Caixa Postdoctoral Junior Leader fellowship funds three-year postdoctoral research positions at institutions in Spain and Portugal. The Incoming modality offers 20 places in the 2027 call, each worth up to €320,100, and is open to researchers of any nationality.

It covers STEM fields: life sciences, experimental sciences, physics, chemistry, engineering, technology and mathematics. Applicants need a PhD awarded between two and seven years before the deadline, and they need to have spent little or no time living in the country where they want to work. The host institution has to hold a recognised accreditation of excellence, which narrows the choice to a defined list of centres.

The whole process runs remotely. Applications are submitted online, and the selection interview takes place by videoconference while the evaluation panel meets in Barcelona.

The 2027 Incoming call is open now and closes on 23 September 2026 at 2 pm Peninsular Spain time.

apply here : Official application portal

What the fellowship actually pays

The headline figure is €320,100 over three years. That number gets quoted a lot without any explanation of what sits underneath it, so here is the breakdown. The Foundation pays out a maximum of €102,500 per year, divided like this:

Labour costs — up to €64,000 gross per year. This is what goes to the host institution to cover employing you. Out of it, the institution has to offer you a minimum gross salary of €47,000 per year. The gap between the two figures covers the employer’s own contributions.
Research costs — €38,500 gross per year. This is money for the project itself: consumables, equipment, hiring people, conference and course registration, research visits, and intellectual property costs.
Family allowance — €1,200 gross per year per dependent child.
Mobility allowance — €5,400 gross, paid at the start, for fellows who need to relocate more than 50 km to join the host institution.

The €38,500 research budget is the part I would pay attention to. A postdoc position that comes with its own running costs is a different thing from a postdoc position where you are dependent on someone else’s grant for every purchase. It changes what you can propose and how independently you can work.

There are 20 fellowships in the Incoming modality. The maximum duration is three years, and the contract is full time.

Who is eligible

Researchers of any nationality can apply. There is no age limit. What matters is where you are in your career and where you have been living.

The PhD window

You need to have been awarded your PhD between two and seven years before the closing date. The date that counts is the date you defended your thesis, not the date the certificate was issued or the degree conferred.

For this call, that works out to a defence between 23 September 2019 and 23 September 2024, inclusive. If you defended more recently than that, you are not eligible this year, but the call runs annually and it is worth noting the date somewhere you will see it again.

The window can be extended in specific situations: maternity or paternity leave, compulsory national service, and long-term sick leave longer than 30 consecutive days, whether for you or for the care of a child, spouse, parent or sibling. Candidates who have gone through the process to obtain refugee status under the Geneva Convention also have different deadlines applied.

The mobility rule

This is the requirement that decides most eligibility questions, and it is the one people get wrong.

For the Incoming modality, you must not have lived or carried out your main activity — work, study, anything substantial — in the destination country for more than 12 months during the three years immediately before the deadline. If you are applying to a Spanish centre, that means Spain. If you are applying to a Portuguese unit, that means Portugal.

Two details are easy to miss. Short stays like holidays do not count towards the total, and a holiday taken outside your usual country of residence is counted as time in your usual country. And remote work is assessed on both ends: the Foundation considers both where you were physically sitting and where the institution you worked for was based. Working remotely from Karachi for a Spanish institute may still be counted as activity linked to Spain.

Compliance is checked at the start of the eligibility phase, and then checked again after the final results are published. It is not something that gets waved through.

If you have been in Spain for longer than the rule allows, you are not out of options. You could apply to the Retaining modality for a Spanish institution, or to the Incoming modality for a Portuguese one.

Where you can hold the fellowship

Incoming fellows cannot pick any institution they like. The host has to be a Spanish centre holding a Severo Ochoa or María de Maeztu accreditation of excellence, a Carlos III Health Research Institute, or a Portuguese R&D unit rated as excellent by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia.

The Foundation publishes the current lists as PDFs, and these are the first documents I would open:

The eligible disciplines are STEM: life sciences, experimental sciences, physics, chemistry, engineering, technology and mathematics.

The letter of intent, and why the deadline is tighter than it looks

You do not need to be formally accepted by a research centre before you apply. What you do need is a letter of intent from the centre you name as your first choice, on institutional letterhead, signed by someone who can speak for the institution and stating that they would be willing to host you.

The letter is not binding. If you win the fellowship and later decide on a different centre, you can change. But without that letter, the application is incomplete, and incomplete applications are set aside without further review.

This is the reason the calendar is tighter than the 23 September date suggests. Asking a research group to read your CV, discuss a project with you, and produce a signed institutional letter is not a two-day process, particularly across August and September. Several centres run their own internal pre-selection before agreeing to support a candidate, and some publish open calls for expressions of interest specifically for this fellowship.

If you are reading this in late August or early September, contacting potential hosts is the thing to do first, before anything else in the application. The writing can happen while you wait for a reply. The letter cannot.

One useful detail: the online form only lets you name one research centre, but the Foundation actively recommends having alternatives in mind, and you can mention those other options inside your personal statement.

What goes into the application

Everything is submitted in English, through the online platform. Documents cannot be sent by email, and nothing can be added after the deadline no “I will send the reference letter next week” arrangements.

The 2027 call uses a new application platform. If you applied in a previous year, your old data will not carry across automatically, so a returning applicant is starting a fresh submission. Applying before and not winning does not count against you; the Foundation states it is not a factor in the evaluation.

You can only submit one application in the call, and you have to choose either Incoming or Retaining. Applying to both is not possible.

The CV section is written as a narrative CV rather than a list of outputs. That format asks you to explain not only what you did but how you did it, and how each piece contributed to your development as a researcher. It also gives room to account for career breaks or a non-linear path, which is a genuinely useful feature if your timeline has gaps in it.

The personal statement is built on a template supplied inside the platform, and it needs to present the research project you are proposing for the three years. Exact page limits and section requirements sit in the rules for participation document for the Incoming call, which is worth downloading from the official call page before you start writing anything.

One firm rule on evidence: you can only include achievements you are able to document. If you win the fellowship and then cannot produce proof of something you claimed, the fellowship is withdrawn.

How the selection works

There are three phases.

Phase 1 Eligibility. Applications are checked against the requirements. Nothing scientific happens here; it is a screen.

Phase 2 Preselection. Applications are scored on three criteria:

Excellence of the CV — 50%. The quality, relevance and influence of your contributions, and your specific role in them. Career progression, coherence, mobility, and signs of independence, creativity and leadership are all assessed, with the discipline and career stage taken into account.
Quality and potential of the research project — 30%. Scientific excellence, originality and ambition, plus how clear and coherent the objectives and methodology are. Feasibility and risk handling matter here, as does how well the host environment fits both the project and your training needs.
Impact — 20%. The project’s contribution to knowledge, methodological innovation, and broader societal or economic benefit where that applies. Long-term or indirect impact is recognised for basic sciences.

Half the preselection score sits on the CV. That is a real constraint, and it is worth being honest with yourself about where you stand before spending weeks on a proposal.

Phase 3 — Selection interviews. The weighting shifts:

Academic and professional career 50%
Candidate’s potential 30%, which covers reasoning and communication, the ability to explain complex ideas clearly and answer critically, and evidence of creativity, leadership and collaborative work
Motivation and impact of the project — 20%, including how well the project, the host institution and your own career goals line up

The interview format

Candidates connect by videoconference. The panel of evaluators gathers at the Foundation’s headquarters in Barcelona, but you do not travel.

Each interview lasts 30 minutes: a 10-minute presentation from you, followed by 20 minutes of discussion led by the evaluators. No additional documents can be submitted during the interview under any circumstances.

Ten minutes is short. A prepared, timed, spoken presentation is a different skill from writing a good proposal, and it is the part most people underprepare for. You will have from 12 January to mid-February to work on it, which is enough time if you use it.

Separately from all this, research centres are allowed to interview candidates themselves as part of deciding whether to host them. That is their own process, and it has no bearing on the Foundation’s evaluation.

The dates

Application deadline: 23 September 2026, 2 pm Peninsular Spain time
Preselection results and call for interviews: 12 January 2027
Selection interviews: 16 and 17 February 2027
Publication of results: 10 March 2027

The fellowship has to be activated by December 2027. After that date it can no longer be taken up.

If your application is rejected, there is a redress procedure, but the window is very short: three calendar days from the date the rejection notification is sent, by email, with an explanation and any supporting documents. A committee resolves it within ten calendar days. The scientific judgement of the evaluators is not open to challenge — redress covers process, not opinion.

A few practical notes

You do not need to be a CaixaBank customer. Holding a previous la Caixa fellowship does not disqualify you from this one, although previous Junior Leader fellows cannot apply again.

Fellows also take part in a compulsory training programme in multidisciplinary skills, with the Foundation covering the costs, accommodation and travel for those sessions. After recruitment, each fellow puts together a personal Career Development Plan.

For questions about relocating, the EURAXESS Spain and EURAXESS Portugal portals cover the administrative side for researchers and their families, including the parts about visas and residence that the fellowship documentation does not go into.

Whether this one is for you

The honest position is that this is a competitive call with 20 places, and half the preselection score rests on a publication and contribution record you either have or do not have at this point. Nothing you write in the next four weeks changes that half.

What you can change is the other half. A project that is genuinely well matched to a specific group at a specific accredited centre, with a clear method and a realistic work plan, is the part of the application still fully in your hands. So is finding a host who will write you a real letter rather than a polite one.

If the dates do not work for you this year, the call opens annually. Knowing the mobility rule now is more useful than discovering it in three years, because it is the kind of requirement you can accidentally fail just by taking a job in the wrong country at the wrong time.

The full official details, including the rules for participation and the selection process guidelines, are on the Postdoctoral Junior Leader Incoming call page. The FAQ page answers a surprising number of the edge cases, particularly around the mobility rule, and it is worth reading before emailing anyone.