F31 (NIH Predoctoral Individual NRSA Fellowship)

The F31 sits inside a family of NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (NRSA) mechanisms, and the detail research administrators need most is the one the bare activity code doesn’t convey: it’s an individual award, held in the predoctoral student’s own name with a named faculty sponsor, not a slot inside a department’s training grant. That distinction drives everything downstream — who signs the application (the student is the Program Director/Principal Investigator, with the sponsor as a co-signer), how the aggregate NRSA support clock is tracked, and which office administers it.

Eligibility, beyond the operational definition

The standard F31 (Parent Funding Opportunity Announcement, most recently reissued as PA-25-422) requires the candidate to be a U.S. citizen or non-citizen national, or have been lawfully admitted for permanent residence, by the time of award. They must be currently enrolled in a research doctoral degree program — a PhD or an equivalent research doctorate (Eng.D., D.N.Sc., Dr.P.H., D.S.W., Pharm.D., Sc.D.) — in the biomedical, behavioral, or clinical sciences at a domestic institution, and must be at the dissertation research stage at the time of award: coursework and qualifying/candidacy requirements essentially complete, with the remaining work being the dissertation project itself.

Students in a formally combined dual-degree program (MD/PhD, DO/PhD, DDS/PhD, DVM/PhD, and similar) who need support for both the dissertation research and the clinical-training component are not eligible for the F31 — the F31 does not fund clinical training. That combined case is what the related F30 mechanism (Individual Predoctoral MD/PhD or Other Dual-Doctoral Degree Fellowship) exists for.

The F31-Diversity companion track

A parallel track — commonly referred to as F31-Diversity — uses the same basic fellowship structure (individual award, named sponsor, dissertation-research stage) but is scoped to candidates from groups NIH has identified as underrepresented in biomedical, behavioral, and clinical research: specific racial and ethnic groups, individuals with disabilities as defined under the Americans with Disabilities Act, and individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds meeting NIH’s published criteria. The diversity track has its own parent Funding Opportunity Announcement, reissued periodically alongside the standard F31 — administrators should confirm the currently active announcement number directly on grants.nih.gov/funding/activity-codes/F31 rather than citing an FOA number from memory, since these are reissued on a rolling multi-year cycle.

Duration and the aggregate NRSA support limit

Individuals may receive up to 5 years of aggregate Kirschstein-NRSA support at the predoctoral level (up to 6 years for dual-degree/F30 training), counting any combination of institutional training-grant support (T32) and individual fellowship support (F31) already received. A department’s T32 administrator and a student’s F31 sponsor are therefore tracking the same clock from two different systems — a genuine coordination point sponsored programs offices should flag when a trainee moves between a T32 slot and an individual F31 mid-program.

Budget structure (FY2026 levels)

Per NIH’s annual NRSA stipend notice (NOT-OD-26-044, effective FY2026), the predoctoral stipend is a flat $29,364/year ($2,447/month) regardless of the student’s years of experience — predoctoral NRSA stipends do not step up by year the way some postdoctoral levels do. On top of the stipend, the award includes an institutional allowance (a fixed per-fellow amount covering research supplies, travel, and other training-related costs) and a tuition/fees component set at 60% of actual institutional tuition and fees, up to $16,000/year for a standard F31 (up to $21,000/year for the dual-degree F30). Stipend and allowance levels are revisited annually — treat the specific dollar figures here as current for FY2026 and re-check the live NOT-OD notice before citing them in anything meant to stay accurate long-term.

How the F31 differs from F30, F32, and T32

These four codes are the mechanisms a research administrator handling training-grant compliance encounters most often, and they’re frequently confused because they share the same NRSA statutory basis and overlapping budget rules:

• F31 vs. T32 — the F31 is an individual fellowship; the student writes and holds the award directly, with a named sponsor. A T32 institutional training grant is held by the department or program itself, which nominates and rotates trainees through slots it administers; the trainee is never the PD/PI of a T32. Both count against the same aggregate predoctoral NRSA support limit described above.
• F31 vs. F30 — the F31 supports dissertation research only, for students in a single research-doctorate program. The F30 supports the combined dissertation-research-plus-clinical-training path for students in a formally dual-degree program (MD/PhD and equivalents), and carries a higher tuition/fees cap and a longer 6-year aggregate limit to reflect the added clinical-training years.
• F31 vs. F32 — both are individual NRSA fellowships with the same basic structure (named sponsor, mentored research training), but they sit at different career stages. The F31 supports predoctoral students still working toward the doctorate; the F32 (Ruth L. Kirschstein Individual Postdoctoral Fellowship) supports researchers who already hold the doctorate and are undertaking mentored postdoctoral training, typically at an institution other than the one that granted their degree.

The Career Development (K) Award family sits one stage further along this same pathway — K awards (K01, K08, K23, K25, K99/R00, and others) support postdoctoral-to-independent-investigator transitions rather than doctoral or postdoctoral training itself, and unlike the F-series they require substantial protected research effort (commonly 75%) rather than full-time training status. For research administrators tracking a trainee across their career, the typical NRSA/career-development sequence runs T32 or F31 (doctoral) → F32 (postdoctoral) → K99/R00 or another K mechanism (transition to independence) — see the K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award guide for that specific bridge mechanism — with the NIH Loan Repayment Program available as a separate, parallel benefit at several of these stages for eligible researchers carrying qualifying educational debt.