EURAXESS is the European Commission’s pan-European initiative for researcher mobility and careers. Most people who search for it are trying to do one of four different things — find a job or funding offer, get practical relocation help, understand a policy document their institution cites, or figure out how to pursue an institutional accreditation — and the portal itself doesn’t clearly separate these for a first-time visitor. This page does: what each part of EURAXESS actually is, who it’s for, and how research-administration offices specifically use the institutional accreditation side of it.
EURAXESS in one paragraph
EURAXESS (“Researchers in Motion”) is run by the European Commission as the largest pan-European initiative supporting researcher mobility and career development. It covers 43 European countries plus a worldwide network of regional hubs outside Europe, and combines four distinct things under one brand: a free jobs-and-funding database, a network of over 600 national Service Centres offering personalised relocation support, a policy document (the European Charter for Researchers) that sets out shared principles for research careers, and an institutional accreditation process (HRS4R, leading to the HR Excellence in Research Award) that research organisations pursue to demonstrate they implement those principles.
The four things EURAXESS actually is
| Component | What it is | Who uses it | What you’d use it for |
|---|---|---|---|
| EURAXESS Jobs | A free, searchable pan-European database of research job, funding, and hosting offers, plus researcher and organisation profiles | Individual researchers job-hunting or planning a move; HR/recruitment teams at research-performing organisations | Searching and applying for positions; posting vacancies for free; setting job alerts |
| EURAXESS Service Centres | A network of 600+ nationally based advisory centres across 43 European countries | Researchers (and their families) relocating internationally | Free, personalised help with visas, social security, taxation, housing, and family/childcare logistics |
| European Charter for Researchers | The European Commission’s policy statement of shared principles on researchers’ rights and responsibilities, addressed to researchers, employers, funders, and policymakers | Institutional leadership, HR policy teams, funders, and policymakers | Benchmarking institutional recruitment, assessment, and working-conditions policy against a common European framework |
| HR Excellence in Research Award (HRS4R) | A formal European Commission accreditation process and award for institutions that implement the Charter’s principles in practice | Research-performing organisations’ HR offices and research-administration leadership | Signalling institutional commitment to researcher-friendly HR practice; a prerequisite step is required to formally endorse the Charter at all |
EURAXESS Jobs: the part most people mean by “EURAXESS”
When the bare term “EURAXESS” is searched, most searchers want this component: the portal at euraxess.ec.europa.eu where research organisations post job, funding, and hosting offers and researchers search and apply for them, free of charge on both sides. A researcher can create a free account to save searches, receive alerts for new or expiring offers, and build a public profile; an organisation can create a profile, publish vacancies, and be discovered by candidates across the network. This is navigational intent — the reader wants the portal itself, not an explanation of it — but it sits alongside three other components that the portal’s own navigation doesn’t always make clear are separate things, which is the gap the rest of this page addresses.
EURAXESS Service Centres: the practical-mobility layer
Separately from the jobs portal, EURAXESS operates a network of more than 600 Service Centres located across the 43 participating European countries. These are the free, personalised-assistance layer: help with visa and residence-permit procedures, social security coordination, taxation questions, housing, and family logistics (schooling, spousal employment, childcare) for a researcher moving into, within, or out of Europe. Service Centres are typically hosted by universities, research institutes, or dedicated national/regional mobility offices, and a researcher does not need to be actively job-hunting through EURAXESS Jobs to use one — the Service Centre network exists independently to support any research-related move.
It’s worth distinguishing Service Centres from Horizon Europe’s National Contact Points (NCPs), a separate EC-recognised network that research administrators are more likely to encounter elsewhere on this site: NCPs give free advisory guidance on Horizon Europe funding applications (topic fit, proposal mechanics, partner search), while EURAXESS Service Centres handle the practical logistics of a researcher physically relocating. The two networks are complementary and often co-located, but they answer different questions.
The European Charter for Researchers
The Charter is a European Commission policy document setting out principles for the rights and responsibilities of researchers, their employers, their funders, and research policymakers. It was substantially revised and reissued as a single unified document via the Council Recommendation of 18 December 2023 on a European framework to attract and retain research, innovation and entrepreneurial talents in Europe, effective from 2024. That Recommendation replaced the previous 2005 pairing of the “European Charter for Researchers” and the separate “Code of Conduct for the Recruitment of Researchers,” folding both into one current document (Annex II of the 2023 Recommendation), and updated the definition of researcher career stages (the R1–R4 profiles) along the way.
The current Charter for Researchers is organised around 20 principles under four pillars:
- Ethics, Integrity, Gender and Open Science
- Researchers’ Assessment, Recruitment and Progression
- Working Conditions and Practices
- Research Careers and Talent Development
It applies across all research sectors (academic, public, and private), all disciplines including STEM and social sciences and humanities, and all research types from frontier to close-to-market. If your institution’s policy documents cite “the Charter and Code” as a 2005-era pairing, that reference is now superseded — the current, single, and correctly cited document is the 2023 Charter for Researchers.
HR Excellence in Research Award (HRS4R): the institutional accreditation research offices actually manage
This is the part of EURAXESS that the portal itself explains poorly for a first-time institutional visitor, and the part squarely relevant to research-administration teams rather than individual researchers. The HR Excellence in Research Award is the European Commission’s formal recognition that a research-performing organisation is implementing the Charter’s principles in its actual HR policy and practice, not just endorsing them on paper. Since 15 May 2018, an organisation cannot formally endorse the Charter with the European Commission at all without simultaneously committing to implement it through this process — endorsement and the HRS4R accreditation process are no longer separable steps.
Institutions pursue the award for reasons a research-administration office will recognise: it functions as a credible external signal of researcher-friendly HR practice to prospective faculty and postdoctoral hires, it gives HR and research-support offices a structured framework for institutional change rather than an ad hoc policy review, it increases visibility within the European Research Area (ERA) community of similarly accredited institutions, and it aligns directly with the ERA policy agenda’s push (ERA Action 4, “attractive research careers”) toward more sustainable, transparent research careers — the same policy direction reflected in Horizon Europe’s broader emphasis on open, transparent, and merit-based recruitment (OTM-R) and researcher career development.
The process, as EURAXESS structures it, runs through three phases:
- Initial phase: the institution conducts an internal gap analysis benchmarking its existing HR policies, recruitment practices, and working conditions against the Charter’s 20 principles, including an OTM-R (Open, Transparent and Merit-based Recruitment) review of its hiring practices. It then develops an HR Strategy for Researchers — a concrete action plan addressing the gaps identified — and submits both documents to the European Commission for assessment. If approved, the institution is granted the right to use the “HR Excellence in Research” logo and is listed on the EURAXESS HRS4R dashboard and map of recognised organisations.
- Interim phase: partway through the award period, the institution carries out a self-assessment reporting on its progress implementing the action plan and any accompanying measures, submitted for internal (and where relevant, Commission) review rather than a full external audit at this stage.
- Award renewal phase: to maintain the award beyond its initial period, the institution goes through a fuller external review process — the specific renewal mechanics and current timing are set out on EURAXESS’s own HRS4R renewal-phase pages, which research offices beginning this process should consult directly for the current cycle length, since EC procedural detail here is more likely to be revised between site checks than the underlying Charter principles are.
Because the exact interim/renewal timing has shifted with the 2023-24 Charter revision, an institution beginning or renewing HRS4R should confirm current cycle lengths directly against the EURAXESS HR Excellence in Research hub rather than relying on older third-party summaries, this page included.
How this connects to Horizon Europe, ERC, and MSCA
EURAXESS Jobs is a common channel through which positions tied to major EU-funded schemes get advertised — a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) fellowship host, an ERC-funded project hiring a postdoc, or an Erasmus Mundus consortium recruiting are all likely to post through it. Research administrators supporting applicants to these schemes will find related coverage useful alongside this page: see this site’s guides to ERC Starting and Consolidator Grants 2027 eligibility and deadlines, how to write an MSCA fellowship proposal, Horizon Europe lump-sum funding, and Erasmus Mundus Joint Masters scholarships. Institutions active in these programmes are also disproportionately likely to be HRS4R-accredited, since ERA-aligned funders increasingly treat the award as a marker of institutional research-career maturity even where it is not a formal eligibility requirement.
The national layer: EURAXESS is a network of networks
Each participating country runs its own EURAXESS national portal and national bridgehead organisation feeding into the pan-European system, typically operated by that country’s national research-funding or research-council agency. This site covers several of those national funders directly, including the Estonian Research Council (ETAg), Rannís (Iceland), AEI Spain, the Research Council of Norway, and TÜBİTAK (Türkiye) — each of these agencies also functions as that country’s EURAXESS bridgehead organisation, coordinating national participation in the wider network.
Who should use which part of EURAXESS
- A researcher planning to move for a position: use EURAXESS Jobs to search and apply, and contact a local Service Centre for relocation logistics once a move is confirmed.
- A department or PI recruiting internationally: post through EURAXESS Jobs for free pan-European visibility, and point incoming hires to their destination country’s Service Centre.
- An HR or international-office team: the European Charter for Researchers is the policy reference point; EURAXESS Service Centres are a potential outreach/referral partner for incoming and outgoing staff.
- Research-administration or institutional leadership considering accreditation: HRS4R and the HR Excellence in Research Award are the relevant process — start with the gap analysis against the Charter’s 20 principles.
Frequently asked questions
Is EURAXESS free to use?
Yes. Job-seeking, creating a researcher profile, posting vacancies, and using Service Centre advisory support are all free of charge. EURAXESS is funded and operated by the European Commission as a public initiative, not a commercial platform.
What is HRS4R, in one sentence?
HRS4R (Human Resources Strategy for Researchers) is the European Commission’s accreditation procedure through which a research-performing organisation demonstrates, via gap analysis, an action plan, and periodic review, that it is implementing the European Charter for Researchers’ principles — successful completion earns the HR Excellence in Research Award.
Do UK institutions participate in EURAXESS and HRS4R?
UK institutions historically engaged with the Charter and HRS4R through EURAXESS; the UK’s closest domestic equivalent is the Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers, coordinated by Vitae, which traces to the same 2007 European Commission endorsement lineage as HRS4R but operates as the UK’s separate domestic implementation and recognition process. Institutions and researchers working across both the UK and EU contexts should treat the two as related but administratively distinct.
Is the “European Charter for Researchers” the same document people mean by “the Charter and Code”?
Not exactly. “Charter and Code” refers to the 2005 pairing of two separate documents, superseded from 2024 by a single, revised European Charter for Researchers adopted via the Council Recommendation of 18 December 2023. If a source still describes “the Charter and Code” as two documents, it is describing the pre-2024 framework.
Is EURAXESS the same as a Horizon Europe National Contact Point (NCP)?
No. NCPs advise on Horizon Europe funding applications; EURAXESS Service Centres advise on the practical logistics of researcher mobility (visas, tax, social security, family). The two networks are separate, though often housed at the same institutions.
Facts on this page were checked directly against euraxess.ec.europa.eu (homepage, the HR Excellence in Research hub, and the European Charter for Researchers page) and the Council Recommendation of 18 December 2023, last verified 16 August 2026.
