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.