NHMRC Personnel Support Package (PSP)

A Personnel Support Package (PSP) is the fixed, role-banded salary rate Australia’s NHMRC pays for research personnel — other than a named Chief Investigator A — on Research Support-type grants such as Ideas Grants, published annually in a PSP rate schedule (PSP1, PSP2, PSP3, and further bands). NHMRC indexes and updates these rates each year rather than reimbursing an institution’s actual on-costed salary.

What PSP covers, and what it doesn’t

NHMRC’s Direct Research Cost Guidelines set out what a grant budget can and cannot include. Salary costs for project personnel on Research Support grants — technical officers, research assistants, and junior postdoctoral researchers working on the funded project — are claimed as a PSP at the band matching the role’s responsibilities, not the specific expertise or pay grade of whoever is actually appointed to the position. NHMRC is explicit that "the level of PSP applied for must align with the roles and responsibilities of the required position," not the individual filling it.

PSP tiers run from lower-band technical/support roles up through more senior graduate-research-assistant and junior-postdoctoral roles (published by NHMRC as PSP1, PSP2, PSP3, and further bands in recent rounds). NHMRC applies annual indexation to the PSP schedule, and it publishes historical "previous Personnel Support Package rates" archives going back multiple funding rounds — treat any specific dollar figure as tied to a particular funding-commencement year, not as a stable, citable constant.

PSP vs SSP: two different salary mechanisms

NHMRC runs two parallel, differently structured salary mechanisms, and confusing them is a common budgeting mistake:

• PSP (Personnel Support Package) funds project staff — technical support, research assistants, junior postdocs — on Research Support-type grants such as NHMRC Ideas Grants. It is role-banded, not person-banded.
• SSP (Salary Support Package) funds the named Chief Investigator A on an NHMRC Investigator Grant. It is banded by career stage — Emerging Leadership (EL1/EL2) and Leadership (L1-L3) — reflecting seniority of the funded researcher rather than a support-staff role. NHMRC publishes a separate "previous Salary Support Package rates" archive for this mechanism.

In NHMRC’s own framing: salary costs on Research Support grants are provided as a PSP, except for Investigator Grant CIAs, who are instead provided an SSP. The two schedules are set, indexed, and archived separately, and are not interchangeable line items.

Why NHMRC has no equivalent to a US-style indirect-cost rate

Researchers coming from funders like the US NIH — where a negotiated indirect-cost-rate agreement adds facilities-and-administrative (F&A) reimbursement on top of direct costs — sometimes expect NHMRC’s PSP to work similarly. It doesn’t, and NHMRC’s own guidelines are explicit about the distinction: a grant cost must not be for "facility, administrative or other indirect costs that would be provided by an institution in the normal course of undertaking and supporting health and medical research" — including utilities, regulatory and research-compliance administration, and other costs typically incurred for common or joint institutional objectives. NHMRC does not fund institutional overhead as a distinct budget category at all; Australian universities absorb those costs themselves rather than recovering them from the grant, unlike the negotiated F&A/indirect-cost-rate model used by NIH and other US federal funders. A PSP is purely a personnel salary line, not a stand-in for an indirect-cost rate.

Where to find current PSP rates

Because PSP rates are indexed and revised with each NHMRC funding round, the current figures should always be checked directly against NHMRC’s own "Personnel and Salary Support Packages" page and its linked current and previous rate schedules, rather than a fixed number cited elsewhere. Grant administrators budgeting an application should confirm which funding-commencement year’s PSP table applies to their specific scheme and round before finalising a budget.

Related terms

• NHMRC Ideas Grant — the main Research Support-type scheme where PSP is used to budget project staff.
• NHMRC Investigator Grant — funds the Chief Investigator A via SSP rather than PSP.
• National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) — the funding agency that sets both schedules.
• Indirect costs / overheads — the US/UK-style mechanism NHMRC does not use, contrasted above.
• Australian Research Funding: How the ARC, NHMRC, and MRFF Fit Together — the broader landscape guide this term extends with NHMRC-specific budgeting detail.