Leverhulme Trust

What the Leverhulme Trust is

The Leverhulme Trust is an independent UK charitable foundation, established under the will of William Hesketh Lever (1st Viscount Leverhulme), founder of the soap manufacturer Lever Brothers — now part of Unilever — and operating as a grant-making trust since 1925. It is funded from an endowment rather than from government or public funds, which is the key structural fact that shapes how it operates: unlike ESRC, BBSRC, or the other eight discipline-specific councils that make up UKRI, the Leverhulme Trust has no parliamentary remit tying it to a particular subject area, government priority, or national research strategy. In practice this means it funds across every discipline — sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities alike — on the same terms, which is notable because a meaningful share of UK research funders (including several UKRI councils individually) do not cover the full arts-and-humanities range a single Leverhulme scheme can.

For research administrators, the Leverhulme Trust is worth tracking as a distinct sponsor type: its application windows, review process, and reporting requirements follow the Trust’s own calendar and rules rather than Research England or UKRI’s shared systems (such as the UKRI Funding Service), so proposal timelines and budget templates need to be handled separately from UKRI submissions.

Main grant schemes

The Trust runs several standing schemes, the terms of which it reviews and updates periodically — always check leverhulme.ac.uk for the current cycle’s closing dates and values before advising a PI:

• Research Project Grants (RPG). The Trust’s core open scheme, supporting a defined research project (not a fellowship or personal salary top-up) for up to three years. As of the 2026 cycle, awards can be worth up to GBP 500,000, with Detailed Application closing dates of 1 July and 1 September 2026.
• Leverhulme Research Fellowships. Awards to individual established researchers to buy out teaching and administrative time for a dedicated period of research, rather than funding a team or a large project. For the 2026 cycle, the maximum total fellowship value is GBP 70,000, the scheme opens on the Trust’s usual 1 September date, and fellowships must be taken up between 1 June 2026 and 1 May 2027. The Trust has discontinued International Fellowships as a separate standalone scheme, though Research Fellowships continue to accommodate projects with an international research focus.
• Leverhulme Research Centres. The Trust’s largest and longest-horizon award type: substantial, multi-year funding (into the millions of pounds) for a university-hosted centre pursuing a sustained programme of research on one major theme, rather than a single time-limited project. Centres are awarded through a competitive outline-then-full-application process on an infrequent cycle — the next round of outline applications is due to open in February 2027 and close in June 2027, with outline-stage outcomes released in September 2027.

The Trust also runs smaller, more targeted schemes (early-career and emeritus fellowships, prizes, and doctoral scholarship programmes among them) that sit alongside these three core mechanisms; scheme names and eligibility criteria are periodically revised, so confirm current terms directly with the Trust rather than relying on a fixed list.

How it differs from UKRI and other UK funders

The distinction that matters most for research administration is structural, not just disciplinary. UKRI and its nine councils (including ESRC and BBSRC) are publicly funded, government-accountable bodies operating within statutory and strategic remits set out in government funding settlements — see UKRI Funding: How UK Research and Innovation Works for how those councils fit together. The Leverhulme Trust, by contrast, is a private charity governed by trustees and its own endowment income, free to set its own priorities year to year without a government remit letter. That independence is also why the Trust does not use the shared UKRI Funding Service portal, and why its funding cannot be assumed to carry the same open-access, data-management-plan, or reporting conditions that apply to UKRI awards by default — always check the specific Leverhulme scheme’s terms and conditions rather than assuming UKRI-equivalent policy.

Other major UK research charities occupy adjacent but distinct niches: Wellcome funds primarily health and biomedical research, the Royal Society and British Academy run smaller, discipline-bounded fellowship and grant programmes, and US-based private funders such as the William T. Grant Foundation similarly operate as independent, non-federal grant sources with their own proposal mechanics and reporting cadence, distinct from both UKRI and Leverhulme.

References

• The Leverhulme Trust, Leverhulme Grant System overview and Research Project Grants / Research Fellowships / Research Centres scheme pages, leverhulme.ac.uk (accessed 2026).
• The Leverhulme Trust, “Important changes to the Research Project Grant scheme in 2026,” leverhulme.ac.uk/news/RPG2026.