| Degree Level | Field | Host Institution | Target Audience | Fee | Deadline |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PhD (Doctorat), 3 years | All disciplines | French public universities, CNRS, INRAE, CEA, INRIA, INSERM, grandes écoles | International students worldwide, including Pakistan, India, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Kenya and Ghana | €398 per year + €105 CVEC | Rolling. Main funded round opens roughly January to May, with selection in June and July |
A fully funded PhD in France for international students is not a scholarship in the way most people imagine it. It is a job. You sign an employment contract, you receive a monthly salary, you pay into the French social security system, and you accrue pension rights and paid leave like any other employee. Once you understand that single difference, the whole French system starts to make sense, and you stop looking for the wrong things.
Official links you will need
PhD in France (official Campus France subject portal) — https://doctorat.campusfrance.org/en/phd/offers
ADUM (doctoral school platform and position listings) — https://adum.fr
ABG (research jobs and PhD offers) — https://www.abg.asso.fr
EURAXESS France (European research mobility portal) — https://euraxess.ec.europa.eu
Campus France (funding and visa procedures) — https://www.campusfrance.org/en
ANRT (CIFRE industry PhD contracts) — https://www.anrt.asso.fr
What a fully funded PhD in France for international students actually covers
Here is what you receive, and just as importantly, what you do not.
- Salary. The legal minimum for a doctoral contract is €2,300 gross per month from 1 January 2026. After social contributions of roughly 20 to 22 per cent, that lands at approximately €1,840 to €1,880 net per month. This is a floor, not a ceiling. Some labs and schemes pay more.
- Tuition. You pay €398 for the 2026/2027 year, plus the €105 CVEC student life contribution. That is the total. Many supervisors cover it from their grant, but even if you pay it yourself, it is a small number.
- The non-EU fee exemption. This is the part almost nobody tells you. France charges non-EU students differentiated tuition at bachelor’s and master’s level (€2,902 and €3,950 respectively for 2026/2027). Doctoral students are excluded from these differentiated fees. A student from Lahore, Lagos or Dhaka pays the same €398 as a student from Lyon.
- Health cover. Your doctoral contract enrols you in the French general social security scheme. Medical costs are reimbursed. You also get sick leave, maternity and paternity leave, and 25 days of paid holiday a year.
- Meals. Since 4 May 2026, every student in France, doctoral candidates included, pays €1 for a full meal at a CROUS university restaurant. This used to be limited to scholarship holders. It is now universal.
- Accommodation. Not included, and I want to be honest about that. What you do get is access to CROUS student residences at subsidised rents, and eligibility for APL housing benefit from the CAF, which reduces your rent further. Budget for housing separately, especially in Paris.
- Unemployment rights. When your three-year contract ends, you are entitled to French unemployment benefit. Very few countries offer PhD graduates this.
Two things follow from the numbers above. First, France is genuinely affordable at doctoral level in a way it is not at master’s level. Second, the money you receive is a wage, so it is taxed and it counts as employment history.
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How the French PhD system is structured
A French doctorate runs for three years. You are attached to two bodies at once, and confusing them is the most common mistake international applicants make.
Your research laboratory is where you actually work. Your supervisor is there. The funding usually comes from there. This is who you need to convince.
Your doctoral school (école doctorale) is the administrative body that registers you, validates your training, and formally awards the degree. They approve the arrangement once the lab has chosen you.
The practical consequence is that you almost never apply to a French PhD the way you apply to a British or American one. There is rarely a single central application form with a single deadline. You find a project or a supervisor first, and the paperwork follows.
Where to find funded PhD positions in France
Funded positions are advertised, but they are scattered across several platforms and no single one has everything.
doctorat.campusfrance.org is the official government portal listing doctoral subjects. Start here, because everything on it has been placed by a French institution.
adum.fr is the system most doctoral schools use to manage their students, and it carries position listings alongside that. Search by discipline and region.
abg.asso.fr carries PhD and postdoc offers across academia and industry, and is well used by French labs.
EURAXESS lists research positions across Europe, including French doctoral contracts. It is useful because listings there are usually written in English.
Individual research organisation sites. CNRS, INRAE, CEA, INRIA and INSERM all recruit doctoral students directly and post calls on their own pages. Their listings do not always reach the aggregator portals.
Doctoral school pages. Each doctoral school publishes its own competition calendar. If you already know the school you want, go straight to its site rather than waiting for a listing to appear elsewhere.
MSCA COFUND doctoral programmes. These are European Commission co-funded cohorts hosted at French institutions, and they recruit international candidates in batches with a single published deadline. They are worth watching because the process is more transparent than the standard route.
The application timeline, month by month
The rhythm is fairly consistent across institutions, and contracts almost always begin on 1 October.
September to December. Read, shortlist labs, and identify supervisors whose recent work genuinely overlaps with yours. This is also when CIFRE applications are best submitted, and when institutional Eiffel deadlines fall.
January to March. Most doctoral contract calls open. Supervisors start looking for candidates to put forward for their school’s competition. This is the window where cold emails have the highest chance of landing.
March to May. Applications are submitted, and supervisors and labs finalise which candidates they are backing.
June to July. Doctoral school panels interview and select. Decisions are usually communicated during this period.
July to September. Contract signature, Campus France visa procedure, and housing. Non-EU applicants should start the Campus France process as soon as they have an offer in hand, because it commonly takes six to eight weeks.
1 October. Contract begins.
How to email a French supervisor without being ignored
Most cold emails fail for the same reason: they are clearly sent to fifty people. A French supervisor with funding to allocate can tell within two lines.
Read two or three of their recent papers properly, and refer to something specific in them. Not the title, something in the argument or the method. Say what you would want to work on and why their lab in particular is the place to do it. Keep the whole email under 250 words. Attach your CV and a one-page research idea if they have not advertised a specific project.
Close by making the next step easy for them. Something like: “If this fits with the direction of your group, I would be glad to have a short call to discuss whether a doctoral project might be possible.”
Write in English unless the lab’s own pages are French-only. Most French research groups work in English day to day, and a badly translated French email reads worse than a clear English one.
Other funding routes worth knowing
The standard doctoral contract is the main road, but it is not the only one.
CIFRE (industry doctorate). A French company employs you for three years to carry out doctoral research in partnership with a public laboratory. You have two supervisors, one in the company and one in the lab. The company receives an annual €14,000 subsidy from ANRT. CIFRE typically pays more than a standard doctoral contract, and the employment record afterwards is strong. The trade-off is that the company shapes part of your research agenda.
Important: ANRT revises the CIFRE minimum salary each year, and figures circulating online are frequently out of date. Published minimums in recent years have ranged from roughly €23,500 to €27,600 gross annually. Confirm the current floor on the ANRT site before you negotiate anything.
France Excellence Eiffel Scholarship. At doctoral level this pays €2,100 per month from January 2026, plus international travel, insurance and housing search support. It is open to candidates aged 35 or under. Two conditions catch people out. First, tuition is not covered by Eiffel. Second, you cannot apply yourself. A French institution nominates you, which means you need a supervisor and an accepted place before the Eiffel process even starts. At PhD level it is normally tied to a cotutelle or joint supervision arrangement.
Important: The Campus France deadline for the 2026 Eiffel round was 8 January 2026 and has passed. Institutional internal deadlines fall earlier still, usually in October and November. If you are targeting the next cycle, contact your chosen institution’s international relations office by September and check the Campus France page for the current call.
Regional and excellence funding. IDEX and ISITE initiatives at large universities, and regional schemes such as Paris Region PhD, fund additional doctoral positions. These are announced locally rather than nationally, so watch the university sites directly.
Cotutelle agreements. A joint doctorate between a French institution and one in your home country. Useful if you want to keep an institutional base at home, and often the structure Eiffel doctoral funding sits inside.
One programme that is not a PhD scholarship
Make Our Planet Great Again (MOPGA) appears on a great many “PhD funding in France” lists, and it does not belong there. MOPGA is a postdoctoral visiting fellowship. To be eligible you must already hold a doctorate awarded within the past five years. It funds a 12-month research stay in France on climate, energy and environmental topics.
It is an excellent programme, and worth bookmarking for after your PhD. But if you are applying for doctoral study, it is not open to you, and time spent preparing an application for it is time lost.
How to apply, step by step
- Decide your research area precisely enough to name labs. “Machine learning” is not enough. “Graph neural networks for molecular property prediction” lets you find the four groups in France doing it.
- Search the portals. Work through https://doctorat.campusfrance.org/en/phd/offers, then https://adum.fr and https://www.abg.asso.fr. Filter by discipline. Note which positions already have a doctoral contract attached.
- Apply to advertised positions directly. Send the CV, cover letter, transcripts and any research statement the listing asks for, in the format it asks for.
- Email supervisors for positions not yet advertised. Use the approach in the section above. Contact ten to fifteen groups, not one or two.
- Write the research proposal with your supervisor. Once someone is interested, the proposal is drafted jointly. It has to fit the lab’s existing themes and the doctoral school’s remit, and your supervisor knows what those panels want to see.
- Submit through the doctoral school. Your lab nominates you and the school opens the formal application. You will need your research proposal, CV, transcripts, references and a statement of purpose written for that specific school.
- Prepare for a panel interview. French doctoral panels ask about methodology, originality and fit. They will press on why this question, why this method, and why this lab. Rehearse a five-minute summary of your proposal and expect to defend your choices.
- Sign the contrat doctoral and start the visa process. Once selected, sign the contract and begin your Campus France procedure straight away. Allow six to eight weeks.
- Apply for CROUS housing and APL. Submit as early as you can. Housing in French university cities is tight, and in Paris it is very tight.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to speak French? For the research itself, usually not. Most French labs in the sciences work in English, and many in the social sciences do too. For daily life outside the lab, French will make a substantial difference, and if you want to take on paid teaching hours it is normally required.
Do I need a master’s degree? Yes. A French doctorate requires a master’s or an equivalent qualification such as a recognised engineering diploma.
Can I work while doing my PhD? Your doctoral contract is your full-time job. You can take on additional teaching, capped at 64 hours a year, which is paid on top of your salary.
Is my degree from Pakistan, Nigeria or India accepted? Generally yes, subject to the doctoral school confirming equivalence. This is assessed case by case, and your prospective supervisor can usually tell you early whether it is likely to be an issue.
What happens after three years? The contract ends. You are entitled to French unemployment benefit while you look for your next position, which gives you a genuine buffer that most systems do not.
Official information
PhD in France, Campus France subject portal — https://doctorat.campusfrance.org/en/phd/offers
Campus France, financing your doctorate — https://www.campusfrance.org/en
France Excellence Eiffel Scholarship programme — https://www.campusfrance.org/en/france-excellence-eiffel-scholarship-program
ANRT, CIFRE agreements — https://www.anrt.asso.fr
Doctorat.gouv.fr, official French doctoral information — https://doctorat.gouv.fr/en
Figures on this page reflect the rates published for 2026 and the 2026/2027 academic year. Salary floors, registration fees and scheme deadlines are revised annually, so confirm the current numbers on the official pages above before you submit anything.
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