The ERC personnel costs dashboard is your go-to resource for benchmarking and budgeting for lump sum evaluations. This tool offers a deep dive into historical personnel costs across countries and staff categories, helping you create accurate and justified proposals.
Overview
The dashboard provides historical ERC personnel cost data and is intended for Advanced Grant lump sum calls only:
- for experts involved in the evaluation of lump sum proposals and
- for applicants when preparing the budget part of their application.
The graphs show the average monthly personnel costs distribution per country and staff category for past ERC grants.
The historical data will serve as a benchmark to help experts assess whether the budget proposed for personnel is reasonable and non-excessive, and to help applicants know when they need to provide additional justification for their estimated personnel costs. Personnel cost estimates do not have to follow the past data. Applicants should estimate the costs in line with their own institution’s accounting practices for the preparation of the budget.
Data used
The historical data are based on financial reports of funded ERC projects.
The data cover a period ranging from 1 January, 6 years prior to the call year (i.e. 1 January 2018 for the Advanced Grant 2024 call), until the last refresh date.
The data for the Principal Investigator category are based on reports from Advanced Grants only, while the data for all other staff categories are based on reports from all ERC main grant schemes.
The data will remain static from the opening date of the call until the end of the evaluation process.
For each participant in each grant, the average cost per person month per staff category is calculated (total personnel costs divided by the total staff effort of a given staff category).
Histograms are produced using a bin size of €500. For each bin, histograms show the total number of person months that were funded at a rate within the bin. Person months having costs below 10% and above 90% are not shown.
The date of the latest update is available on the dashboard.
Note
The EU Funding & Tenders portal has also published a very similar dashboard applicable to lump sum calls under the overall Horizon Europe programme (i.e. Horizon dashboard for lump sum evaluations), which is based on data covering the other parts of Horizon Europe and where all staff categories are merged into one.
Please note that only the “ERC personnel costs data for lump sum evaluations“ will be used as a benchmark by experts in the evaluation of ERC Advanced Grant lump sum calls.
