Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A research office manages a grant that was offered under an EPSRC call before that council's 2023 cutover to the new platform. Because account data did not carry over automatically from Je-S to the UKRI Funding Service, the office still signs into Je-S to view and administer that award's remaining reporting until it closes out, even though new EPSRC applications now go entirely through the Funding Service.
- Is an instance
An administrator preparing a new application checks a UKRI opportunity page and finds an explicit instruction that the call must be applied for via the UKRI Funding Service, not Je-S — the correct approach for any current application, since UKRI's own guidance recommends confirming the required system per opportunity rather than assuming based on which council is funding it.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A new UKRI standard research grant application submitted in 2026 is not created in Je-S at all — it is built and submitted directly on the UKRI Funding Service, which is now the standard entry point for new competitive research council applications across all seven councils.
- Not an instance
An Innovate UK competition application was never routed through Je-S in the first place; Innovate UK has long run its own separate system, now the Innovation Funding Service (apply-for-innovation-funding.service.gov.uk), distinct from both Je-S and the UKRI Funding Service.
Editorial commentary
Je-S (Joint Electronic Submission) is UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI) older online system, at je-s.rcuk.ac.uk, for submitting research grant applications and managing the resulting awards through to reporting. UKRI’s seven discipline research councils relied on Je-S for close to two decades before UKRI began progressively replacing it with the newer UKRI Funding Service from 2023. Research administrators searching for ‘Je-S’ today are usually trying to work out one of two things: whether a specific application should still go through Je-S, or what happened to a legacy award that was originally set up on it.
What Je-S was used for
Before the transition, Je-S was the common route research councils used for the full grant lifecycle: applicants built and submitted proposals against council-specific forms, host organisations routed and endorsed applications through their research office, and award holders used the same system afterward to accept offers, report on spend, and submit outcome and progress reports. Because each research council configured its own Je-S forms and workflows, the experience varied noticeably from council to council — one of the frictions UKRI’s Funding Service was built to remove.
The transition to the UKRI Funding Service
As part of what UKRI calls its Simpler and Better Funding work, UKRI began moving live funding opportunities from Je-S onto the new Funding Service from 2023. The rollout happened on a rolling, council-by-council basis rather than as a single cutover: individual research councils, including EPSRC and the others, moved their open calls across through 2023 and into 2024, and award-management functionality followed applications onto the new platform. UKRI has described the Funding Service as handling the funding lifecycle end-to-end by December 2024. Account data did not automatically carry over from Je-S to the Funding Service, which is why some awards made before a council’s cutover date have continued to be tracked in Je-S until they close out.
Is Je-S still in use?
Largely, no — for new applications. By 2026, UKRI funding opportunity pages generally state directly that applications must be made through the UKRI Funding Service rather than Je-S, and Je-S is no longer the default route for new competitive research council funding. That said, Je-S has not been switched off outright for every purpose. Some legacy processes, such as the Je-S studentship details functionality research organisations used to submit doctoral studentship data, have been phased out on their own separate timeline as UKRI built dedicated replacements, and UKRI has published transitional guidance covering grants that involve both systems (for example, guidance on the Horizon Europe Guarantee that references both Je-S and the Funding Service for awards spanning the changeover). The safest practice for a research office is to treat this as a per-award, per-opportunity question rather than a blanket rule: check the specific UKRI opportunity page, or the original award documentation for a legacy grant, to confirm which system actually applies, rather than assuming based on the funding council or scheme name alone.
How Je-S differs from the UKRI Funding Service
Je-S and the UKRI Funding Service are two generations of the same underlying job — application submission and award administration for UKRI’s research councils — not two systems doing different things in parallel. The practical differences research administrators run into are: council-by-council form variation in Je-S versus a single standardised application flow in the Funding Service; no shared account or data carryover between the two; and the Funding Service’s newer expectation that most applications include a Resume for Research and Innovation (R4RI) rather than a traditional CV, which was not how Je-S-era applications were typically structured. Innovate UK is a separate case again: it never used Je-S for its own competitions and instead runs its own Innovation Funding Service, unconnected to either Je-S or the research-council Funding Service.
For research administrators
Two operational points matter most in practice. First, a research office supporting a mixed portfolio of older and newer UKRI awards may genuinely need to work in both systems simultaneously for a transitional period — Je-S for legacy award closeout, the Funding Service for anything new — so don’t assume a single login now covers everything. Second, because account data and application history do not transfer between the two systems, institutional knowledge that lived in Je-S (past submitted applications, reviewer feedback, prior award documentation) needs to be retained separately rather than expected to reappear inside the Funding Service account.
References
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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