EU Competitions 2026: What Is Open, What Closed, and How to Get In

"How do you get a job in the European institutions?" is one of the most searched career questions in Europe and one of the worst answered — buried under an avalanche of acronyms, EPSO, AD, AST, CAST, NoC, before anyone draws the map. This page is the map: which competitions actually exist right now, who can apply to what, where the ranking is decided and what the job pays, with figures taken from the official sources rather than from repetition.

The 2026 cycle in one table: what closed, what is still to open

This is the part almost no guide keeps current, and the only part that changes what you should do today. Position as of 7 October 2026.

Two warnings worth more than the table itself. First: dates for announced competitions stay indicative until the notice is published in the Official Journal, and they slip with some regularity. Second: "applications closed" does not mean the train has gone, because every cycle leaves behind a reserve list and a successor competition — but it does mean that if you are reading this now, your next concrete appointments are the two open competitions — AD8 ICT experts until 13 October 2026 and AST 3 data management until 11 November 2026 — or CAST, which has no appointments because it is always open.

The detailed calendar tracks the updates as they are published, and the open competitions page refreshes daily from the EPSO source.

Three doors, three different logics

Selection for permanent staff is centralised in EPSO, the European Personnel Selection Office, which runs competitions on behalf of the Parliament, Council, Commission, Court of Justice and the other institutions. There are three doors and they are not variations on one another.

AD5 — the graduate route. Any three-year degree gives access to the entry grade of the administrator career: policy, analysis, drafting, project management. No experience needed. It is the competition with the largest numbers and the harshest applicants-to-places ratio, and it is what almost everyone means by "the EU competition". The full mechanics are in the EPSO preparation guide.

AD7 and AST — the specialist route. For professionals with a relevant degree and documented experience: IT, audit, law, statistics, procurement, building management, communication. The applicant pools are far smaller, the entry grade is higher, and — the detail that changes everything — the ranking instrument is a field-related MCQ, 30 questions in 40 minutes, not a generalist battery. A solid technical profile has much better odds here than at AD5. The map of fields is in the specialist competitions guide.

CAST Permanent — the always-open route. Selection for contract agents with no cycles and no ranking: you register, you are invited when a service wants your profile, you pass three pass/fail reasoning tests and the result is valid for ten years. It does not make you an official, but it puts you in an office, on a payroll, and inside the institutions — which then counts. The mechanics are in the CAST 2026 guide, and AD5 versus CAST settles which to put first.

The three doors are not mutually exclusive. Registering for CAST while preparing an AD5 is the rational move: it costs an evening and consumes nothing of the competition route.

One country supplies 45% of the field

Of the 174,727 people who applied to AD5 2026, 79,343 were Italian — 45.4% of the whole field. No other Member State comes close.

That number is worth knowing whichever passport you hold. If you are Italian, your real competition is largely with other Italians: people reading the same sources, preparing with the same scarce material in their own language and making the same format mistakes. If you are not, the field you are competing in is far smaller than the headline figure suggests, because reserve lists are not allocated by nationality but the applicant pool is anything but evenly spread.

Either way the lesson is the same, and it is the one the raw number hides: most of those applicants arrive without having seen the test format. Selection does not reward the best CV. It rewards whoever arrives prepared for the format.

The requirements, demystified

The formal bar is lower than the folklore around it:

• Citizenship of an EU Member State, with full enjoyment of civil rights and military obligations discharged where applicable.
• A qualification matching your route: a completed degree of at least three years for AD5 — with the rule, present in almost every notice, that final-year students who graduate by a set date can apply; a degree plus relevant professional experience for AD7 profiles.
• Two official EU languages. Reasoning tests are taken in your first language.

What is not required: prior experience in Brussels, contacts inside the institutions, a degree in European studies, or being under a certain age. The full checklist, including the documentary traps that eliminate otherwise eligible candidates every year, is in the eligibility guide; the step-by-step registration is in how to register with EPSO.

Where it is actually decided: the arithmetic of the score

This is the section that separates a guide from a list of acronyms. The AD5 tests do not carry equal weight:

Two practical consequences. First: verbal reasoning and EU knowledge alone determine 60% of your position, so that is where study time belongs. Second: numerical and abstract reasoning only have to be cleared — spending weeks moving from "passed" to "passed well" does not move you a single place up the list. It is the most expensive misallocation in EPSO preparation, and the most common.

How the score works in full, including the minimum thresholds, is in how EPSO scores and ranks candidates.

Tests are taken remotely on the TAO platform, with AI-assisted proctoring. Candidates who have never seen that interface lose real minutes on exam day for reasons that have nothing to do with preparation: the TAO platform guide exists for that.

The money, with the real figures

An administrator at AD5 step 1 starts at €6,153 gross a month — €73,832 a year. That is not an estimate: it is the salary table in the Staff Regulations.

On top of that base sits the rest of the package: the expatriation allowance where it applies, family allowances, the institutions' own pension scheme, and a correction coefficient that adjusts pay to the cost of living of the place of employment. The Union tax replaces national income tax, which makes a like-for-like comparison with a national gross salary actively misleading — compare net. The full analysis, step by step and city by city, is in the EU official salary guide.

It is worth reading before deciding whether to apply rather than after: pay is the variable candidates underestimate most consistently, and in many cases it is what makes six months of preparation a rational investment.

Where to start, in four moves

1. Pick your door. Graduate with no specific experience → AD5. Professional with five or more years in a technical field → specialist competitions, where the applicants-to-places ratio is incomparably better. Want to get in sooner and learn from inside → CAST.
2. Register for CAST anyway. It is always open, the result is valid for ten years, and it prejudices nothing.
3. Diary the announced competitions. Two are open now — AD8 ICT experts until 13 October 2026 and AST 3 data management until 11 November 2026; then come the lawyer-linguists (from 21 October 2026, indicative) and the lawyers, running into January 2027.
4. Measure where you are today, not the week before. The free practice tests cover all five test types with no account, and the Question of the Day posts six new ones daily. One session tells you how far the bar is — which is the only input a study plan actually needs.

The 2026 cycle is the widest hiring window the institutions have opened in a decade, and it has not closed: at least five competitions remain to be published between September 2026 and January 2027. The people who walk through them will mostly be the ones who started before it became urgent.