Last verified: August 16, 2026. The reason there’s no simple FY2026 payline number to look up is not appropriations uncertainty — full-year FY2026 appropriations were enacted February 3, 2026, and NIH is not operating under a continuing resolution. It’s a deliberate NIH policy change: NIH itself changed how it makes funding decisions partway through the fiscal year, moving Institutes and Centers away from published percentile paylines entirely. Read the policy-shift section below before treating any single percentile number, from this page or any other source, as current guidance.
This page is a cross-institute reference: what an NIH payline is, why FY2026 is genuinely different from prior years, what each major Institute or Center (IC) currently publishes (or doesn’t), and where to verify the current figure directly at the source. CASRAI also maintains deeper, institute-specific pages — linked throughout — for institutes with enough distinct mechanics to warrant their own treatment.
What an NIH Payline Actually Is
A payline is a percentile-rank threshold that an NIH Institute or Center sets, historically at or near the start of a fiscal year, as a planning guideline for which applications it expects to fund without further deliberation. It is a property of the institute, not the application.
A percentile score, by contrast, is a property of the application. After peer review at an NIH study section, an application receives an overall impact score, which is converted into a percentile rank relative to other applications reviewed by the same or a comparable study section over a recent review cycle. Applicants compare their own percentile score against the relevant IC’s payline (when one is published) as a planning signal — not a guarantee. ICs have always retained discretion to fund outside the payline through mechanisms like select pay, exception pay, or bridge funding, and to decline funding inside it in rare cases.
A success rate is a third, related but distinct figure: a retrospective ratio of applications funded to applications reviewed in a completed fiscal year. It describes what already happened; a payline (where published) is forward-looking. See CASRAI’s NIH R01 Success Rates and Paylines by Institute guide for a fuller treatment of this distinction, including how to read NIH’s own success-rate tables.
Why Early Stage Investigators Often See a More Generous Payline
Several ICs that publish a payline have historically published a separate, less restrictive percentile threshold specifically for Early Stage Investigators (ESIs) — NIH’s designation for a Program Director/Principal Investigator within 10 years of completing their terminal research degree or medical residency who has not yet successfully competed for a substantial NIH independent research award. The rationale is structural: NIH has long tracked a “success rate gap” between new and established investigators competing for the same R01-equivalent funding, and an extended ESI payline is one of the tools NIH and individual ICs use to counteract that gap and protect pipeline diversity in the investigator workforce. Where an IC still publishes any payline for FY2026, check whether it distinguishes an ESI figure — do not assume the standard payline applies to an ESI application.
The FY2026 Payline Landscape: What Actually Changed
Two separate developments, on close but not identical timelines, make FY2026 an unusually poor year to trust a remembered or third-party-quoted payline number.
1. NIH’s Unified Funding Strategy (announced November 21, 2025)
NIH’s Office of Extramural Research announced, via an Extramural Nexus News notice titled “Implementing a Unified NIH Funding Strategy to Guide Consistent and Clearer Award Decisions” (November 21, 2025), that Institutes and Centers “will not rely on funding paylines in developing pay plans” going forward, effective from the January 2026 council round onward. Under the new framework, funding decisions weigh peer-review scores alongside institute priorities, strategic plans, portfolio balance, and budget considerations, rather than a single fixed percentile cutoff published in advance.
This is agency-wide guidance to all ICs, not an opt-in by individual institutes, and multiple ICs’ own pages have already been retitled to reflect it (for example, pages formerly framed around a numeric “payline” reframed as “Funding Policies and Considerations”). That said, rollout has not been perfectly uniform or instantaneous across all 27 ICs and every activity code — always confirm against the specific IC’s own current funding-policy page rather than assuming every institute switched over on exactly the same date.
2. The FY2026 appropriations timeline (resolved February 2026)
FY2026 began under a continuing resolution, but that period is over. NIH Guide Notice NOT-OD-26-011, “NIH Operates Under a Continuing Resolution” (issued November 21, 2025 — the same day as the Unified Funding Strategy notice), directed ICs to fund non-competing continuation awards at a reduced level relative to the prior Notice of Award pending full-year appropriations, consistent with NIH’s standard continuing-resolution practice, and covered the period through January 30, 2026. NIH’s notices also document a subsequent lapse in federal government funding (see NOT-OD-26-012 and NOT-OD-26-036 for the reopening guidance). That period ended with enactment of full-year FY2026 Labor-HHS appropriations (which fund NIH) via the Further Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2026 (P.L. 119-75), signed February 3, 2026. Per Congressional Research Service reporting (CRS Report R43341, “National Institutes of Health (NIH) Funding: FY1996-FY2026”), FY2026 enacted appropriations (P.L. 119-75 together with P.L. 119-74) set NIH’s total program level at approximately $47.493 billion — about $458 million, or 1.0 percent, above the FY2025 final level. NIH is not currently operating under a continuing resolution. Any “interim” FY2026 payline an IC published early in the fiscal year (October–December 2025, during the CR) should still not be assumed to reflect current guidance — not because appropriations remain unsettled (they don’t), but because of the separate Unified Funding Strategy policy shift described above, which is the actual reason most ICs no longer publish a payline at all.
Net effect: for most ICs, there is no longer a single stable FY2026 percentile payline to look up the way there was for FY2025 and earlier. The right question for FY2026 is not “what is IC X’s payline” but “what does IC X currently say about how it’s making funding decisions” — which is exactly what the table below points you toward.
FY2026 Payline Status by Institute
The table below covers NIH’s major R01-funding Institutes and Centers. “Historical practice” describes how the institute approached paylines before the November 2025 shift; “FY2026 status” reflects the post-shift landscape described above. Where CASRAI maintains a dedicated page for an institute, it’s linked in the first column — those pages go into more mechanism-specific detail (ESI treatment, interim-vs-final practice, historical archives) than this hub does.
| Institute / Center | Historical payline practice (through FY2025) | FY2026 status | Check current guidance |
|---|---|---|---|
| NCI — National Cancer Institute | Published payline-style percentile goals in some fiscal years, not others; awarded in percentile order as funding allowed when no explicit goal was published. Also runs a separate “bypass budget” appropriations process under the National Cancer Act of 1971. | No fixed FY2026 percentile payline under the Unified Funding Strategy; confirm current framing directly. | cancer.gov |
| NHLBI — National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute | Published a numeric percentile payline most fiscal years, historically with a separate ESI figure. | No fixed FY2026 percentile payline under the Unified Funding Strategy; confirm current framing directly. | nhlbi.nih.gov |
| NIA — National Institute on Aging | Historically published a numeric percentile payline, generally with a separate, more generous ESI figure. | No fixed FY2026 percentile payline under the Unified Funding Strategy; confirm current framing directly. | nia.nih.gov |
| NINDS — National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke | Published a numeric percentile payline, with a historical practice of a separate, extended payline for ESIs. | No fixed FY2026 percentile payline under the Unified Funding Strategy; confirm current framing directly. | ninds.nih.gov |
| NIDDK — National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases | Published a numeric percentile payline in most fiscal years. | No fixed FY2026 percentile payline under the Unified Funding Strategy; confirm current framing directly. | niddk.nih.gov |
| NIAID — National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases | Distinguished an early-fiscal-year “interim” payline from a later “final” payline, and maintained a public archive of final paylines by year. | No fixed FY2026 percentile payline under the Unified Funding Strategy; confirm current framing directly. | niaid.nih.gov |
| NIBIB — National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering | Historically published a numeric percentile payline. | No fixed FY2026 percentile payline under the Unified Funding Strategy; confirm current framing directly. | nibib.nih.gov |
| NICHD — Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development | Historically published a numeric percentile payline. | No fixed FY2026 percentile payline under the Unified Funding Strategy; confirm current framing directly. | nichd.nih.gov |
| NIMH — National Institute of Mental Health | Historically published a numeric percentile payline, generally with a separate ESI figure. | No fixed FY2026 percentile payline under the Unified Funding Strategy; confirm current framing directly. | nimh.nih.gov |
| NIAMS — National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases | Historically published a numeric percentile payline. | No fixed FY2026 percentile payline under the Unified Funding Strategy; confirm current framing directly. | niams.nih.gov |
| NIGMS — National Institute of General Medical Sciences | Did not use a traditional percentile-cutoff payline even before FY2026 — funding decisions weighed percentile score alongside investigator support level and portfolio balance, partly reflecting its MIRA (R35) mechanism, which funds a whole research program rather than one project. | Its pre-existing holistic approach is now closer to how the rest of NIH also operates under the Unified Funding Strategy. | nigms.nih.gov |
| NIDA — National Institute on Drug Abuse | Historically published a numeric percentile payline. | No fixed FY2026 percentile payline under the Unified Funding Strategy; confirm current framing directly. | nida.nih.gov |
| NEI — National Eye Institute | Historically published a numeric percentile payline. | No fixed FY2026 percentile payline under the Unified Funding Strategy; confirm current framing directly. | nei.nih.gov |
| NHGRI — National Human Genome Research Institute | Historically published a numeric percentile payline. | No fixed FY2026 percentile payline under the Unified Funding Strategy; confirm current framing directly. | genome.gov |
| NIDCR — National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research | Historically published a numeric percentile payline. | No fixed FY2026 percentile payline under the Unified Funding Strategy; confirm current framing directly. | nidcr.nih.gov |
| NIEHS — National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences | Historically published a numeric percentile payline. | No fixed FY2026 percentile payline under the Unified Funding Strategy; confirm current framing directly. | niehs.nih.gov |
| NIAAA — National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism | Historically published a numeric percentile payline. | No fixed FY2026 percentile payline under the Unified Funding Strategy; confirm current framing directly. | niaaa.nih.gov |
| NIDCD — National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders | Historically published a numeric percentile payline. | No fixed FY2026 percentile payline under the Unified Funding Strategy; confirm current framing directly. | nidcd.nih.gov |
| NIMHD — National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities | Historically published a numeric percentile payline. | No fixed FY2026 percentile payline under the Unified Funding Strategy; confirm current framing directly. | nimhd.nih.gov |
| NINR — National Institute of Nursing Research | Historically published a numeric percentile payline. | No fixed FY2026 percentile payline under the Unified Funding Strategy; confirm current framing directly. | ninr.nih.gov |
| NCATS — National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences | Runs a smaller, more mechanism-varied R01 portfolio alongside its translational-science centers/programs; has generally not centered communications around a single R01 percentile payline the way larger ICs did. | No fixed FY2026 percentile payline; confirm current framing directly. | ncats.nih.gov |
| NCCIH — National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health | Historically published a numeric percentile payline. | No fixed FY2026 percentile payline under the Unified Funding Strategy; confirm current framing directly. | nccih.nih.gov |
| NLM — National Library of Medicine | Smaller R01-equivalent research portfolio relative to its informatics/resource-grant programs; has not centered communications around a single R01 percentile payline the way larger ICs did. | No fixed FY2026 percentile payline; confirm current framing directly. | nlm.nih.gov |
Read the table as a starting point, not a final answer. Institute-level pages and communications change without notice, and this table reflects the general FY2026 picture as of the last-verified date above — not a live feed. For a submission-critical decision, always click through to the IC’s own current page.
How to Check Current Data Yourself
- NIH RePORT (report.nih.gov) publishes NIH’s official success-rate tables, broken out by IC, fiscal year, and activity code — the authoritative source for retrospective success-rate figures once a fiscal year closes.
- NIH RePORTER (reporter.nih.gov) is the searchable award database, useful for seeing what an IC has actually funded recently (mechanism, amount, institution), complementing the aggregate tables with award-level detail.
- Each IC’s own funding-strategy or “current funding policy” page (hosted on that institute’s own site — see the table above) is the only place to check for institute-specific current-year guidance. Third-party tables, including this one, can lag or miss a recent update.
- Your assigned NIH program officer is, for a specific application close to a threshold, a more current and application-specific source than any published table.
Prior Fiscal Years: FY2025 and Earlier
This section exists so that a search for an older year’s figure (FY2025, FY2024, and earlier) lands here rather than requiring a separate page per year. CASRAI does not republish specific historical percentile numbers on this page — those are archived at the institute level and at NIH RePORT, and reproducing them here risks going stale the moment an institute updates or removes its own archive. Instead:
| Fiscal year | What was generally true | Where to find the actual figures |
|---|---|---|
| FY2026 | Transitional year: ICs operated under an early-fiscal-year continuing resolution (NOT-OD-26-011) through January 30, 2026; full-year appropriations were enacted February 3, 2026 (P.L. 119-75). Separately, and more consequentially for paylines specifically, ICs moved off published percentile paylines entirely under the Unified Funding Strategy from the January 2026 council round onward. | See the table above and each IC’s current page. |
| FY2025 and earlier | The traditional payline mechanism described in the “What an NIH Payline Actually Is” section above was in effect at most R01-funding ICs (NIGMS being the longstanding exception), each publishing its own annual figure, often with a separate ESI figure. | Individual IC websites frequently retain a payline-history or archive page (NIAID’s archive of past final paylines is a documented example); where a live archive isn’t available, NIH RePORT’s historical success-rate tables by IC/fiscal year/activity code are the durable official record, though success rate and payline are not the same figure — see the distinction explained above. |
Frequently Asked Questions
What is an NIH payline?
An NIH payline is a percentile-rank threshold that an individual NIH Institute or Center sets, historically in advance of or early in a fiscal year, as a planning guideline for which peer-reviewed applications it expects to fund. No single, agency-wide NIH payline exists — each IC has historically set its own, and as of FY2026 most ICs no longer publish one at all (see below).
Does NIH still publish paylines in FY2026?
Mostly no. NIH announced in November 2025 that, effective from the January 2026 council round, Institutes and Centers would stop relying on published percentile paylines as the primary basis for funding decisions, weighing peer-review scores against institute priorities and budget considerations instead. Implementation has not been perfectly uniform across all 27 ICs — confirm against the specific institute’s current funding-policy page rather than assuming a blanket cutoff date.
What’s the difference between a payline and a percentile score?
A percentile score belongs to a specific application — it ranks that application’s peer-review impact score against comparable applications reviewed over a recent cycle. A payline belongs to the institute — the percentile rank an IC has said it expects to fund up to, in a given fiscal year and mechanism. Applicants compare their own percentile score against the relevant payline (where one exists) as a planning signal, not a guarantee of funding or rejection.
What’s the difference between a payline and a success rate?
A payline is forward-looking — a threshold an institute sets as planning guidance. A success rate is backward-looking — the ratio of applications funded to applications reviewed in a fiscal year that has already closed. A retrospective success rate is useful for calibrating how competitive an IC’s pool was; it does not tell you whether your specific application would have cleared any particular cutoff.
Why do Early Stage Investigators often get a more generous payline?
Several ICs that have historically published a payline also published a separate, less restrictive percentile threshold specifically for Early Stage Investigators (ESIs) — NIH’s designation for a PI within roughly 10 years of their terminal degree or residency who has not yet won a substantial NIH independent research award. This reflects NIH’s broader, long-documented concern with a success-rate gap between new and established investigators, and an extended ESI payline is one tool used to narrow it.
Is NIH currently operating under a continuing resolution?
No. FY2026 began under one — NIH Guide Notice NOT-OD-26-011 (November 21, 2025) directed Institutes and Centers to fund non-competing continuation awards at a reduced level pending full-year appropriations — but full-year FY2026 Labor-HHS appropriations were enacted February 3, 2026 via the Further Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2026 (P.L. 119-75), setting NIH’s total program level at approximately $47.493 billion (about 1.0 percent above the FY2025 final level, per CRS Report R43341). NIH is not currently operating under a continuing resolution. Federal appropriations status is a per-fiscal-year question and can change again in a future year — confirm NIH’s current operating-status notices at grants.nih.gov before assuming either a CR or full-year funding is in effect for a fiscal year other than the one this page addresses.
Where can I find my institute’s current FY2026 funding policy?
Directly on that institute’s own website — see the “Check current guidance” column in the table above for each major IC’s domain. NIH RePORT and RePORTER (linked in the “How to Check Current Data Yourself” section) are the right places for historical success-rate and award data; an individual IC’s own page is the only reliable source for its current-year funding-decision framework.
What happened to NIH paylines in 2026?
NIH announced a “Unified NIH Funding Strategy” in November 2025, moving Institutes and Centers away from relying on fixed, published percentile paylines when developing pay plans, effective from the January 2026 council round. This landed in the same fiscal year as an early continuing resolution, making FY2026 an unusually disrupted year for anyone trying to track institute-level funding thresholds — see the sections above for both threads in detail.
