Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT): Structure, Funding, and How It Differs From a Standard PhD Studentship

A Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) is a UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)-funded doctoral training model that funds and trains a cohort of PhD students together, in a themed research area, rather than funding individual students one at a time. A CDT is typically hosted by a single university or a small consortium of universities, usually runs for five successive annual intakes (“cohorts”) of roughly 8–15 students each, and combines individual doctoral research with a structured, shared programme of taught coursework, cross-cohort training activities, and — very commonly — direct industry or other non-academic partner involvement. This is the feature that most clearly separates a CDT from a standard, individually-supervised PhD studentship: a CDT is a funded programme with its own management structure, recruitment cycle, and training curriculum, not simply a funding line attached to one supervisor and one student.

UKRI’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is by far the largest single funder of CDTs and effectively defined the model, but other UKRI councils — including the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), and others — also fund CDTs or CDT-type awards, sometimes jointly with EPSRC or with non-UKRI partners such as the Ministry of Defence. Because CDTs sit administratively apart from a standard studentship — separate recruitment, separate reporting, separate partner-funding agreements — they are a distinct object of work for research administrators managing UK doctoral funding, not just “several PhD grants that happen to share a theme.”

What makes a CDT administratively distinct from a standard PhD studentship

Most UKRI-funded doctoral research is delivered through individual studentships awarded within a Doctoral Training Partnership (DTP) — a broad, multidisciplinary funding envelope a university (or consortium) distributes across many separate research topics and supervisors, largely at the university’s discretion. A CDT works differently in several concrete, administratively significant ways:

• Cohort-based recruitment and training. A CDT recruits an entire year-group of students together against a single themed call, rather than filling individual studentship vacancies as they arise. UKRI’s EPSRC guidance for CDT applicants specifies that a centre should support at least 50 students across five cohorts over the life of the award, at an average cohort size of around ten doctoral students per academic year — materially larger and more coordinated than a typical single-supervisor intake.
• A formal, assessable taught component. CDT-funded doctorates commonly run four years rather than the standard three, with the first year (or a distributed equivalent) including a mandatory, often jointly-assessed programme of taught coursework alongside individual research training — sometimes structured as a “1+3” model (one integrated taught/research year plus three further research years). A standard studentship has no equivalent formal curriculum obligation.
• A dedicated centre management structure. A CDT has its own director, management team, and often an external advisory board overseeing recruitment, the training curriculum, and partner relationships across the whole cohort — a layer of programme governance that doesn’t exist for an individual studentship.
• Consortium and multi-institution delivery. UKRI explicitly welcomes CDT applications from both single-institution and multi-institutional teams. Where a CDT spans more than one university, the lead institution (which must be a UKRI-recognised research degree-awarding body) administers the award and typically holds partner or collaboration agreements with the other institutions — the same category of instrument covered in CASRAI’s consortium agreement and grant consortium partner entries.
• Structured industry/non-academic partnership. Non-academic partner involvement — co-funding, project sponsorship, student placements, or joint supervision — is the norm for CDTs rather than the exception, and is frequently a scored element of the funding competition itself (see below). This is a materially different partner-management workload from a typical individual studentship, and overlaps with the territory covered in CASRAI’s guide to industry-university research partnerships.

Funding structure: stipend, fees, and training budget

A CDT award funds the centre as a whole rather than issuing separate, self-contained grants per student, but the money still resolves into the same three components a UKRI-funded doctoral student receives under any mechanism:

• Stipend. A tax-free maintenance payment to the student, at or above UKRI’s published minimum doctoral stipend rate (£20,780 for the 2025/26 academic year, rising to £21,805 from 1 October 2026, with an additional £2,000 London weighting, unchanged since 2006). CDTs are free to pay above the UKRI minimum where partner co-funding allows, and this is common where an industry partner is directly sponsoring a studentship.
• Fees. Tuition fees are paid to the host institution(s) at the UKRI-approved rate, covering the full registration period (typically four years for a CDT doctorate, against the more usual three-and-a-bit for a standard PhD).
• A training/research support budget. Alongside stipend and fees, UKRI training grants (CDTs included) carry a Research Training Support Grant (RTSG) — a per-student or centre-level allocation covering consumables, equipment, fieldwork, conference travel, and the incidental costs of the taught/cohort training programme itself. For a CDT, this budget line also typically funds the shared cohort activities (residential training weeks, cross-cohort workshops, transferable-skills modules) that don’t exist for an individually-supervised studentship.

On the funder side, EPSRC’s most recent full CDT competition (closed 2023) illustrates the scale and cost-sharing structure typical of the mechanism: EPSRC funded up to 100% of eligible costs for centres it supported directly, but expected a minimum of 20% additional leverage from non-UKRI sources — universities, industry, and other partners — on top of its own contribution, with a maximum of around 40 EPSRC-funded studentships per centre and a minimum total of 50 students once partner-funded places were added in. Individual competitions and match-funding requirements vary by research council and by round, so the exact split should always be checked against the specific, currently-open UKRI funding opportunity rather than assumed from a past round.

Who funds CDTs, and at what scale

EPSRC is the dominant funder of CDTs by volume and value. Its most recent large-scale competition, announced 12 March 2024, committed over £1 billion to 65 new EPSRC-led CDTs across five strategic technology areas — quantum technologies, artificial intelligence, engineering biology, semiconductors, and telecoms — funding an estimated 4,000 doctoral students over nine years. That total combined EPSRC’s own £479 million contribution with £169 million from host universities and £420 million from more than 1,400 participating businesses, higher education institutions, charities, and other partner organisations, with BBSRC and the Ministry of Defence co-funding a small number of centres directly. UKRI’s parallel AI CDT programme is a useful illustration of how a single strategic theme can be funded across successive rounds: an initial £100 million supported 16 AI CDTs from 2018, followed by a further £117 million for 12 new AI centres (based across 16 universities) announced in 2023, expected to train around 900 students over eight years with the first new-round cohort starting in the 2024/25 academic year and partnerships spanning some 370 organisations.

Other UKRI councils run CDTs at smaller scale and with somewhat different structural requirements. ESRC, for example, funds a small number of CDTs (distinct from its more numerous, broader Doctoral Training Partnerships) specifically to build capacity in focused, emerging interdisciplinary areas — its model requires at least 20% of funding from an external, non-academic partner and, reflecting ESRC’s disciplinary remit, requires each funded studentship to sit at least 50% within the social sciences even where the centre itself is genuinely interdisciplinary.

CDTs inside UKRI’s current doctoral funding framework

A research administrator working with UKRI doctoral funding today needs to know one further piece of context: “Centre for Doctoral Training” is a long-established and still widely-recognised term — the name every existing CDT carries, and the term researchers, universities, and prospective students overwhelmingly still search for and use — but it is no longer how UKRI badges brand-new competitions. Since UKRI’s Doctoral Training Investment Framework (part of its wider move to “collective talent funding,” with the framework itself dating to November 2023), all new UKRI doctoral training investment is organised around two award types instead of the older set of scheme names:

• Doctoral Focal Awards — targeted, strategic, often cross-council investments in a specific thematic or emerging area, funding cohort-based, multi-year doctoral training with a tailored programme. UKRI’s own framework guidance states explicitly that focal awards “include centres for doctoral training (CDTs) and CDT-type national capability awards,” and that ongoing CDTs align with this award type. In practice, new competitions that would previously have been badged as a CDT call are now issued as a “Doctoral Focal Award” (for example, UKRI’s Doctoral Focal Award in AI and Data in the Biosciences, or its doctoral focal awards in the environmental sciences).
• Doctoral Landscape Awards — broader, more flexible, discipline-spanning investments, the successor category for what were previously Doctoral Training Partnerships (DTPs) and similar broad-based schemes.

Practically, this means: existing, currently-recruiting CDTs (including the 65 EPSRC-led centres announced in March 2024 and the AI CDTs above) continue to operate and are described as CDTs on their own pages and by their host universities, and “Centre for Doctoral Training” remains the correct term for that body of live, ongoing awards. But a research administrator scoping a genuinely new UKRI doctoral funding competition should expect it to be published as a Doctoral Focal Award (thematic, cohort-based, CDT-equivalent) or a Doctoral Landscape Award (broad, DTP-equivalent), and should read UKRI’s own current opportunity listing rather than searching for “CDT” as a live competition category going forward.

CDT vs DTP, in brief

The two mechanisms are easy to conflate because both are cohort-oriented, both are typically administered by a lead university or consortium, and both now sit under the same doctoral training framework. The practical distinction that matters for administration:

• A DTP (aligning with Doctoral Landscape Awards) is a broad funding envelope: the host institution or consortium recruits and allocates studentships across a wide range of topics and supervisors within its subject remit, largely at institutional discretion, without every student sharing a single themed research programme or a fixed joint curriculum.
• A CDT (aligning with Doctoral Focal Awards) is theme-locked and programme-locked: every student in a given cohort is recruited into the same thematic area, follows a shared taught/training curriculum alongside their individual project, and the centre itself — not just the host institution generally — is the administrative unit UKRI funds, monitors, and reports against.

The distinction is comparable, at a structural level, to how CASRAI’s guide to Innovative Training Networks (ITN) and MSCA Doctoral Networks describes the EU’s own move from individual awards toward consortium-delivered, cohort-based doctoral training — UKRI’s CDT model and the European Commission’s Doctoral Networks model both formalise the same underlying shift: funding a structured training programme for a group, not a single supervised project.

What this means in practice for research administrators

Supporting a CDT — whether as the host institution’s research office, a consortium partner institution, or an industry co-funder — differs from supporting an individual studentship in several concrete ways worth planning for:

• Recruitment is cyclical and cohort-sized, not continuous. Expect a single, larger annual recruitment round per cohort rather than ad hoc individual vacancy filling, and plan induction, onboarding, and stipend setup for a batch of students starting simultaneously.
• Consortium and partner agreements need active management across the whole award lifetime. Where a CDT spans multiple institutions or has committed industry co-funders, the underlying collaboration and partner agreements — covering IP, in-kind contributions, cash co-funding schedules, and student placement terms — need the same ongoing compliance attention as any multi-party grant, not a one-time signature at award stage.
• Reporting is centre-level as well as student-level. UKRI monitors a CDT as a programme (cohort progression, completion rates, partner contribution delivery, training curriculum delivery) in addition to the standard per-student reporting that applies to any UKRI-funded doctoral researcher.
• Budget management spans stipend, fees, and a shared training/RTSG line that isn’t purely per-student. Some CDT training-budget spend (cohort residentials, shared modules, centre-wide events) is genuinely centre-level rather than attributable to one student’s individual allocation, which changes how it needs to be coded and justified against UKRI’s training grant terms and conditions compared with a standard studentship’s RTSG.
• Terminology in current competitions has shifted. When scoping new UKRI doctoral funding opportunities rather than administering an existing award, search and monitor for “Doctoral Focal Award” alongside “Centre for Doctoral Training” — UKRI’s live opportunity listings increasingly use the newer term for what is functionally the same cohort-based, thematic model.

Frequently asked questions

How many students are in a typical CDT cohort?

EPSRC’s guidance for its own CDT competitions describes an average cohort of around ten doctoral students per academic year, with a centre expected to support at least 50 students in total across five cohorts over the life of the award. Cohort sizes at other research councils, and at centres funded outside a full EPSRC-scale competition, can be smaller — ESRC’s CDTs, for example, are built around groups of at least ten students per year across a smaller number of intakes.

How long does a CDT-funded PhD take?

Most CDT studentships fund a four-year doctorate (PhD or, at some centres, EngD), rather than the roughly three-to-three-and-a-half years typical of a standard UKRI studentship — the additional time accounts for the CDT’s formal taught/training component, which is frequently front-loaded into the first year.

Do CDTs always involve industry partners?

Not by definition, but industry or other non-academic partnership is the norm rather than the exception, and is commonly a scored element of the funding competition itself — UKRI’s large 2024 EPSRC CDT investment round, for example, involved more than 1,400 partner organisations contributing £420 million in co-funding and in-kind support across the 65 funded centres.

Can a CDT span more than one university?

Yes. UKRI explicitly accepts CDT applications from both single-institution and multi-institutional consortium teams, provided the lead applicant institution is a UKRI-recognised research degree-awarding body with a demonstrated critical mass of doctoral supervision expertise in the centre’s theme.

Is “Centre for Doctoral Training” still the right term to search for?

For an existing, currently-recruiting centre, yes — CDT remains the term those centres and their host universities use. For a brand-new UKRI doctoral funding competition, expect UKRI to badge it as a Doctoral Focal Award instead; UKRI’s own framework guidance describes ongoing CDTs as aligning with, and effectively continuing under, the Doctoral Focal Award category.