Issue in question
Beneficiaries of Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe projects (based on actual costs) often need to recruit new staff to work on the action and thus face additional costs related to recruitment, including visa fees in some cases.
Clarification
In accordance with Article 8 of the H2020 Model Grant Agreement (PDF) and the equivalent Article 7 of the Horizon Europe model Grant Agreement (PDF), the beneficiary is required to have the necessary human resources to implement the action. This is the main reason why the recruitment costs and all costs related to it are normally not eligible as direct costs.
However, for projects based on actual costs, the related costs of recruitment activity would be considered part of the beneficiary’s normal indirect costs, which are covered by a 25% flat-rate of the eligible direct costs.
An exception to this rule applies to ERC grants. For ERC grants, recruitment costs may be eligible as direct costs if they are clearly attributable to the action, because recruitment is part of the activities of ERC actions (unlike other actions) – see the ERC specific annotations for the H2020 Model Grant Agreement (p.386) (PDF) or for the Horizon Europe Model Grant Agreement (p.180) (PDF). However, these recruitment costs must be incurred during the lifetime of the grant i.e. after the grant start date, in order to be eligible. Principal Investigators should therefore be careful during the grant preparation stage – prior to signing the Grant Agreement – when they are updating their Annex 1. If they are planning to take on new staff for the beginning of their projects, they should carefully consider their institutional recruitment lead times if they wish to charge these recruitment costs to their ERC grants.