An eigenvalue based approach for the stabilization of linear neutral functional differential equations is presented, which extends the recently developed continuous pole placement method for delay equations of retarded type. The approach consists of two steps. First the stability of the associated difference equation is determined and a procedure is applied to compute the supremum of the real parts of its characteristic roots, which corresponds to computing the radius of the essential spectrum of the solution operator of the neutral equation. No restrictions are made on the dimension of the system and the number of delays. Also the effect of small delay perturbations is explicitly taken into account. As a result of this first step the stabilization problem of the neutral equation is reduced to a problem involving only a finite number of characteristic roots. As a second step, stabilization is achieved by shifting the rightmost or unstable characteristic roots to the left half plane in a quasi-continuous way, by applying small changes to the controller parameters, and meanwhile monitoring other characteristic roots with a large real part. A numerical example is presented. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.