Austrian OeAD Scholarships for European Students and Researchers
By Muntasir Minhaz • Published Aug 03, 2026 • Education Planning, Study in Europe, Scholarships & Funding
OeAD is Austria's national agency for education and research mobility. It runs multiple scholarship lines for people from outside Austria, the best known being the Ernst Mach Grant Worldwide for short research stays, alongside bilateral agreements with individual European countries.
🎓 Ernst Mach Grant Worldwide funds postgraduate and postdoctoral research stays in Austria, open to applicants from universities outside Austria.
⏱️ Typical stays run from one to several months, not a full degree programme.
📩 You search and apply through the OeAD scholarship database, filtering by your nationality and study level.
🏠 Many European countries also have separate bilateral scholarship agreements with Austria, with their own quotas and deadlines.
What OeAD does
OeAD, Austria's Agency for Education and Internationalisation, manages most of the country's inbound scholarship programmes for students and researchers from outside Austria. Rather than one scholarship, it runs a portfolio of separate funding lines, each with its own eligibility rules, funding level and deadline. The starting point for any of them is the OeAD scholarship database, where you filter by your home country and current study level to see which programmes you qualify for.
Ernst Mach Grant Worldwide
The Ernst Mach Grant Worldwide is OeAD's broadest research scholarship, open to postgraduate researchers, PhD candidates and postdocs affiliated with a university outside Austria, regardless of nationality. It funds a research stay in Austria rather than a full degree, and explicitly does not cover a complete Bachelor's, Master's or PhD programme taken entirely in Austria. It suits you if you already hold a PhD position or postdoc post elsewhere in Europe and want a funded research period at an Austrian institution as part of that work.
Along with the monthly grant, OeAD helps arrange accommodation and health insurance for the stay, which removes a lot of the logistical work you would otherwise handle alone when moving to Austria short term.
Bilateral scholarship agreements
Beyond the worldwide programme, OeAD administers bilateral scholarship and researcher-mobility agreements that Austria has signed with individual partner countries, including several in Europe. These agreements set their own quotas, funding amounts, and deadlines per country, and they change from year to year depending on what has been negotiated between Austria and the partner government. If your country has such an agreement, it typically fits better than the worldwide grant, since bilateral quotas are not competing against every nationality at once.
Other named OeAD fellowships worth checking
Two smaller, subject-specific fellowships sit alongside the Ernst Mach Grant. The Franz Werfel Fellowship funds young university teachers of German language and Austrian literature for four to nine months. The Richard Plaschka Fellowship funds young university teachers and researchers working on Austrian history within the historical sciences, for four to eighteen months, the longest duration among OeAD's main research fellowships. Both are narrower in scope than the Ernst Mach Grant, so they fit a smaller pool of applicants precisely rather than a broad discipline range.
Who these scholarships fit
These programmes work best for postgraduate researchers and postdocs who want a defined research stay, not students looking to fund a full degree from year one. If you want to study a complete Bachelor's or Master's programme in Austria, look instead at Austrian university-specific scholarships and general student finance options, since the OeAD research grants are structured around short, defined stays.
How to apply
Search the OeAD scholarship database by your nationality and academic level to see which specific programme fits.
Check whether your country has a bilateral agreement with Austria before defaulting to the Ernst Mach Grant Worldwide.
Contact an Austrian host institution and supervisor early. Most of these programmes expect a confirmed host before you submit a full application.
Confirm the current monthly grant rate and deadline directly on the programme page you apply to, since these figures are set and updated by OeAD each cycle rather than fixed long term.
What to check before you commit
Grant amounts and quotas shift between cycles, and the exact monthly rate for programmes like the Ernst Mach Grant Worldwide is set by OeAD's current call rather than published as one fixed figure across years. Confirm the live number on the OeAD scholarship database or through EURAXESS Austria's scholarship overview before you plan a budget around it.