UKRI Funding Service

The UKRI Funding Service is the single online platform (funding-service.ukri.org) that UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and its seven research councils use to advertise funding opportunities, receive applications, and manage awards through to reporting. An application, account, or award is 'on the Funding Service' when it was created and processed through this platform rather than UKRI's retired Joint Electronic Submission (Je-S) system, which the Funding Service progressively replaced for competitive research council funding from 2023.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 18 Jul 2026

Worked examples

Is an instance

An applicant to an EPSRC standard research grant creates a UKRI Funding Service account, completes the standardised application questions aligned to the assessment criteria, and submits a Resume for Research and Innovation (R4RI) alongside it rather than a traditional CV.

Is an instance

A university research office administrator uses co-editing access on the UKRI Funding Service to review and submit a multi-partner NERC proposal before the deadline, then later signs back into the same account to submit that award's annual outcomes report.

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance

An application submitted through Innovate UK's separate Innovation Funding Service (apply-for-innovation-funding.service.gov.uk) — a distinct platform from the UKRI Funding Service, even though Innovate UK is itself one of the nine organisations that make up UKRI.

Not an instance

A grant still being administered through the legacy Je-S system because it was awarded before its research council's transition and has not migrated to the Funding Service.

The UKRI Funding Service is the single online platform (funding-service.ukri.org) that UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and its seven research councils use to advertise funding opportunities, receive applications, and manage the resulting awards through to reporting. It is the successor to the older Joint Electronic Submission (Je-S) system, which UKRI’s research councils used for grant applications and award management for close to two decades before the transition.

What replaced what, and when

UKRI began moving research council applications from Je-S to the new UKRI Funding Service from 2023, as part of what UKRI calls its work to simplify and improve the funding experience. Individual research councils (including EPSRC and the other six) transitioned their live funding opportunities onto the new service on a rolling basis through 2023 and into 2024 rather than switching over all at once. Award management functionality — the part of the process that happens after a grant is offered, including accepting an award, reporting on spend, and reporting outcomes — followed applications onto the new platform, with UKRI describing the service as handling the funding lifecycle end-to-end by December 2024. Some legacy processes, such as the Je-S studentship details functionality research organisations use to submit studentship data, are being phased out separately as UKRI builds dedicated replacements. Applicants and administrators should always check the specific funding opportunity’s page on ukri.org to confirm which system a given application actually needs to be submitted through, since a small number of legacy or transitional cases may still reference Je-S directly.

What the UKRI Funding Service is used for

Finding opportunities — UKRI describes the service as a “single front door”: all research council funding opportunities are searchable and viewable in one place, rather than split across council-specific pages and the old Je-S interface.
Applying — applicants create an account, build an application against a standardised set of questions that map directly to the assessment criteria reviewers will use, and can invite collaborators or research-office administrators to co-edit before submission. Information supplied once (such as organisation details) is intended to be reused across later applications rather than re-entered.
Managing awards — once a grant is offered and accepted, the same account is used to manage the live award: accepting the offer, tracking project details, and handling variations, rather than moving to a separate award-management system.
Reporting — grant holders use the service to report on spend and, where required, research outcomes and findings over the life of the award.

How it relates to the UKRI structure

UKRI is the non-departmental public body that brings together the UK’s seven discipline-based research councils — the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), Medical Research Council (MRC), Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), and Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) — alongside Innovate UK and Research England, for nine constituent organisations in total. The UKRI Funding Service is the shared, harmonised application and award-management platform for the seven research councils’ competitive funding. Innovate UK, despite sitting under the same UKRI umbrella, runs its own separate system for its own competitions — the Innovation Funding Service (apply-for-innovation-funding.service.gov.uk) — so an “Innovate UK application” and a “UKRI Funding Service application” are not automatically the same thing, and the two platforms do not share account data.

Relevance to research administrators

For UK research offices, the Funding Service consolidated what had been council-by-council variation in Je-S into one harmonised application flow, which changed how pre-award teams build, review, and route applications internally. Two things matter operationally: first, most UKRI funding opportunities now expect a UKRI Resume for Research and Innovation (R4RI) narrative CV rather than a traditional academic CV, submitted as part of the Funding Service application (see the CASRAI R4RI mandate (UKRI 2024) and R4RI entries, and the NIH biosketch vs. UKRI R4RI comparison for institutions that also work with US funders). Second, because account data does not carry over automatically from Je-S, research offices supporting legacy awards that were made before their council’s transition may still need to track those awards through Je-S until closeout, while new applications go through the Funding Service — a distinction worth confirming per award rather than assuming.

References

About UKRI’s Funding Service — ukri.org
Council transition to the new Funding Service — ukri.org
Our councils — ukri.org
UKRI Funding Service sign-in — funding-service.ukri.org

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

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      vocab-term="UKRI Funding Service"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/ukri-funding-service" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

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