Insecurity and intense competition for permanent academic positions appear to be common
experiences for early career researchers across the globe. With academic precarity now firmly on
the international research and policy agenda, this article looks comparatively at postdoc precarity in
three European countries: Ireland, Norway and Switzerland. It suggests that the career prospects
and status of these early career stage researchers depend to a large extent on societal variations in
academic career structures and research funding models. The article underlines the implications of
an increasingly competitive academic labour market on postdoc precarity and identifies both
common and specific (national and/or disciplinary) challenges facing postdocs in these different
contexts.