NIH Grants Policy Statement (NIH GPS)

The NIH Grants Policy Statement (NIH GPS) is the National Institutes of Health’s primary policy document — the actual terms and conditions, not a summary — governing every NIH grant and cooperative agreement. Where a funding announcement or Notice of Award is silent, the NIH GPS is where the governing answer lives.

It is published by NIH’s Office of Extramural Research and is legally distinct from, but works alongside, government-wide requirements such as the Uniform Guidance (2 CFR 200) — the NIH GPS applies and elaborates those government-wide rules specifically for NIH awards, and adds NIH-specific terms that 2 CFR 200 does not address at all (e.g., salary cap limitations, NIH-specific reporting formats, and agency-specific prior-approval requirements).

What makes something governed by the NIH GPS

A requirement is a genuine NIH GPS term — as opposed to a funder recommendation, a best-practice suggestion, or an institution’s own internal policy — when it meets a specific test: it appears in the current edition of the document (or in an NIH Guide Notice that the current edition has since consolidated), and it is incorporated by reference into the Notice of Award for the specific grant or cooperative agreement in question. Two consequences follow directly from this:

• It binds by incorporation, not by announcement alone. An NIH Guide Notice changes policy going forward, but the NIH GPS is where that change is consolidated into the standing terms and conditions a recipient has actually accepted for a given award.
• Award-type variation is built in, not an exception. The GPS explicitly distinguishes terms that apply to every NIH grant from terms that apply only to a specific award mechanism (e.g., cooperative agreements) or a specific activity code — see Structure below.

Structure: Part I, Part II, and Part III

The current NIH GPS is organized into three parts, per NIH’s own Introduction:

• Part I — NIH Grants: General Information (chapters 1–2). A glossary of terms and abbreviations used throughout the document, an overview of NIH and its place within the Department of Health and Human Services, a description of recipient/NIH/HHS staff responsibilities, and an outline of the application and review process.
• Part II — Terms and Conditions of NIH Grant Awards (chapters 3–19), split into two sub-parts:
  • Part IIA — generally applicable terms and conditions that apply to essentially every NIH grant and cooperative agreement (allowable costs, reporting, property standards, and similar administrative and financial requirements).
  • Part IIB — terms specific to particular award types, recipients, or activities that differ from, supplement, or elaborate on the Part IIA standard terms — for example, the additional obligations attached to a cooperative agreement (the NIH “U” activity codes) versus a standard research grant.
• Part III — Points of Contact (chapter 20). Contact information for the NIH offices a recipient would need to reach for a given administrative question.

This Part I/Part IIA/Part IIB structure is exactly why the document works as a single reference rather than a pile of individually tracked notices: a research administrator can look up whether a rule is universal (Part IIA) or mechanism-specific (Part IIB) without cross-referencing dozens of separate Guide Notices by hand.

How often it’s revised, and the current edition

NIH revises the GPS periodically rather than on a fixed annual calendar — each full revision consolidates the individual NIH Guide Notices issued since the prior edition into a single updated document. The current edition is the Revised NIH Grants Policy Statement (Rev. March 2026), published via NIH Guide Notice NOT-OD-26-057 on March 25, 2026. It incorporates Guide Notices in effect as of March 17, 2026, applies to NIH grants and cooperative agreements with budget periods beginning on or after October 1, 2025 (FY2026), and supersedes the prior edition (Rev. April 2024, NOT-OD-24-115) in its entirety as a standard term and condition of the award. Between those two editions there was no separate full-document release — interim policy changes during that period were tracked individually through Guide Notices until the March 2026 consolidation. Because the effective edition changes with each revision, a research administrator working an active award should always confirm which edition applies to that award’s specific budget period, rather than assuming the most recently published edition applies retroactively to every open award.

Why research administrators should treat it as the primary source

Nearly every NIH-specific administrative fact a research administrator relies on — the current salary cap figure, how modular budgets work, what counts as an allowable cost, how NIH treats the de minimis indirect cost rate, or what a cooperative agreement requires beyond a standard grant — ultimately traces back to a specific chapter of the GPS. Secondary summaries (institutional research-office guidance, sponsored-programs training slides, third-party grants newsletters) are useful for orientation, but they are restatements, and restatements can lag a revision, compress a nuance, or simply get a detail wrong. The GPS itself is the version that is actually incorporated into a Notice of Award and that NIH program and grants management staff will cite back to an institution during a compliance question or an audit.

This matters specifically because policy changes are increasingly announced piecemeal through individual Guide Notices before being consolidated into the next full GPS edition — the indirect-cost-rate notices that followed NOT-OD-25-068 and the subsequent reversal covered in NIH’s April 2026 notice reversing indirect-cost flexibilities are a real example of exactly this pattern: a Guide Notice changed the operative policy well before the next GPS edition consolidated it. A research administrator who only reads secondary summaries risks working from an interpretation that is a step removed from whichever primary document — the current GPS edition or an active, not-yet-consolidated Guide Notice — is actually controlling for a given award right now.

Worked examples

• A sponsored-programs office needs to confirm whether a piece of equipment purchased on an R01 counts as an allowable direct cost. The definitive answer is the relevant Part IIA cost-principles section of the current NIH GPS edition, cross-checked against the award’s own Notice of Award — not a paraphrase in an internal budgeting guide.
• An institution is negotiating the terms of a new NIH cooperative agreement (a “U” award) and wants to know what additional NIH staff involvement it should expect beyond a standard research grant. Part IIB spells out the cooperative-agreement-specific terms that supplement the Part IIA baseline.

What the NIH GPS is not

• It is not the same document as the department-wide HHS Grants Policy Statement (HHS GPS) that most other HHS operating divisions (CDC, HRSA, SAMHSA, AHRQ, ACF) use as their primary grants terms-and-conditions document — NIH is the significant exception within HHS that maintains its own separate GPS rather than relying on the department-wide document.
• It is not a government-wide document — 2 CFR 200 (Uniform Guidance) is the government-wide framework that applies across federal agencies; the GPS is NIH’s own agency-specific implementation and supplement to it, not a replacement.
• It is not a single, unchanging document indefinitely — each revision explicitly supersedes the prior edition, and which edition governs a specific award depends on that award’s budget-period start date, not the calendar date a question is being asked.
• It is not the same thing as an individual NIH Guide Notice — a Guide Notice can change policy immediately upon issuance; the GPS is where those individual notices eventually get consolidated into the standing terms and conditions.

Related CASRAI resources

See the Grants Management & Research Funding cluster hub for the full range of CASRAI content on the funding lifecycle. Two pages already draw directly on the NIH GPS as their underlying source: the NIH Grants: An Overview guide and the NIH Salary Cap dictionary term. Also relevant: Uniform Guidance (2 CFR 200), NIH’s 15% Indirect Cost Cap, Indirect costs (overheads), MTDC (Modified Total Direct Cost), and Indirect Cost Rate (F&A Rate). For the department-wide document that governs most other HHS operating divisions, see the HHS Grants Policy Statement (HHS GPS).