“UKRI grants” is not a single funding scheme. UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) is an umbrella public body that channels UK government research and innovation funding through nine constituent organisations, each with its own remit, application rules, and (in most cases) its own funding calls. Understanding “UKRI grants” means understanding that structure first, because the practical details a researcher or research administrator actually needs — where to apply, what the funding rate is, what reporting is required — depend on which part of UKRI is funding the work.
What UKRI is: nine organisations under one umbrella
UK Research and Innovation was formed in April 2018, bringing together the seven previously separate UK research councils, Innovate UK, and Research England under a single non-departmental public body sponsored by the UK government’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT). UKRI’s stated purpose is to fund and convene research and innovation across all disciplines, in partnership with universities, research organisations, businesses, and charities. Its nine constituent parts are:
- Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) — funds arts and humanities research and postgraduate training.
- Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) — funds bioscience research, from fundamental biology to applied biotechnology.
- Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) — the UK’s largest funder of economic, social, behavioural, and human data science research.
- Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) — funds engineering and the physical sciences, including mathematics, chemistry, and physics; the dominant funder of UKRI’s Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) programme.
- Medical Research Council (MRC) — funds biomedical and clinical research.
- Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) — funds environmental science, from climate and earth systems to biodiversity.
- Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) — funds particle physics, astronomy, nuclear physics, and large-scale scientific facilities.
- Innovate UK — the UK’s innovation agency, funding business-led innovation and technology commercialisation rather than academic research per se.
- Research England — funds English higher education institutions’ research directly, largely through block grants (including the outcomes of the Research Excellence Framework, REF) rather than individually assessed project grants.
The seven bodies in the first list are usually referred to collectively as “the research councils.” Each sets its own scheme names, funding thresholds, and panel processes, and a genuinely interdisciplinary proposal is often co-funded across two or more councils. Researchers searching for “UKRI grants” are, in practice, almost always looking for a scheme run by one specific council — see CASRAI’s ESRC funding guide for a worked example of one council’s scheme structure.
How to apply: the UKRI Funding Service
Since 2023–2024, applications across the seven research councils have moved onto a single platform, the UKRI Funding Service (funding-service.ukri.org), which replaced the legacy Joint Electronic Submission (Je-S) system. The Funding Service is UKRI’s attempt at one common front door for finding opportunities, applying, and managing an award through to reporting, regardless of which research council is funding it — part of what UKRI calls its “Simpler and Better Funding” programme. The transition happened on a rolling, council-by-council basis rather than all at once, and account data did not carry over automatically from Je-S, so some awards made before the cutover may still be tracked in the older system until they close out.
Innovate UK is the one constituent part of UKRI that does not use the Funding Service: its competitions run through a separate platform, the Innovation Funding Service (apply-for-innovation-funding.service.gov.uk), with no shared account data between the two systems.
Funding rates: full economic costing (fEC)
Research council grant and fellowship proposals are costed on a full economic cost (fEC) basis — the total cost of the research to the host institution, including a share of overheads, not just the direct project costs. UKRI research councils fund at 80% of fEC, and the host institution is expected to find the remaining 20% from its own resources. Universities calculate their fEC rates using the Transparent Approach to Costing (TRAC) methodology, validated by UKRI; other eligible research organisations may use dispensation rates or their own UKRI-validated rates instead. This 80%/TRAC structure is common across all seven research councils — it is not specific to any one of them.
Reporting and compliance obligations that come with a UKRI award
Accepting a UKRI grant carries standing conditions that continue well past the award start date:
- Annual outcomes reporting via Researchfish. The lead researcher (PI) on most UKRI awards must submit an annual outcomes update as a term and condition of the grant, from early in the project until at least five years after it ends. Non-compliance carries real consequences: ineligibility to be named PI or Co-I on further UKRI awards across all councils, and payments withheld on the current award. See CASRAI’s Researchfish guide for the full reporting cycle — including Elsevier’s announced closure of the platform, effective 31 July 2027, which leaves UKRI and 90-plus other funders without a confirmed successor system as of mid-2026.
- Open access compliance under the R4RI mandate. UKRI’s Research for Research and Innovation (R4RI) open access policy, in force since 2024, sets requirements for making funded outputs openly accessible. See CASRAI’s R4RI mandate entry for the specifics.
- Research integrity oversight. UKRI expects funded institutions to maintain research integrity arrangements consistent with the UK Concordat to Support Research Integrity; the UK Research Integrity Office (UKRIO) is the independent advisory body most UK institutions reference on this, separate from UKRI itself.
Tracking UKRI-funded research: Gateway to Research
UKRI publishes its own funded-project data publicly and free of charge through Gateway to Research (GtR), covering more than 170,000 projects with start dates from 2006 onward across all seven research councils plus Innovate UK. GtR is a read-only public discovery tool, not a submission system — it is distinct from Researchfish, which is where PIs actually submit outcomes as a funding condition; GtR republishes a curated feed of that outcomes data alongside UKRI’s own award records.
Doctoral and studentship funding under UKRI
A large share of UKRI’s postgraduate funding runs through two cohort-based models rather than individual studentships: Doctoral Training Partnerships (DTPs), more common outside engineering-heavy disciplines, and Centres for Doctoral Training (CDTs), EPSRC’s dominant model. Since UKRI’s Doctoral Training Investment Framework (November 2023), new doctoral competitions are increasingly badged as “Doctoral Focal Awards” (targeted/cohort-based, the CDT-aligned category) or “Doctoral Landscape Awards” (broader, DTP-aligned) rather than under the older scheme names, though existing centres keep their original “CDT” and “DTP” branding. The UKRI minimum doctoral stipend is set centrally and revised each October (£20,780/year for 2025/26), applying across research councils regardless of which one funds a given studentship.
Frequently asked questions
Is “UKRI funding” the same thing at every research council?
No. UKRI sets some structural rules centrally — the 80% fEC funding rate, the minimum doctoral stipend, the Funding Service application platform, Researchfish reporting — but each research council runs its own scheme names, funding thresholds, panel processes, and deadlines within that shared framework. A scheme’s exact terms always sit with the individual council, not UKRI as a whole.
Do all UKRI organisations fund the same way?
No. The seven research councils fund competitively assessed grants and fellowships to individual researchers and teams. Research England mostly allocates block grants to English universities based on the Research Excellence Framework (REF) rather than assessing individual project proposals. Innovate UK funds business-led innovation projects, often involving industry co-funding, through its own separate Innovation Funding Service platform.
What replaced Je-S?
The UKRI Funding Service. Research council applications moved from the legacy Joint Electronic Submission (Je-S) system to the Funding Service on a rolling basis from 2023 into 2024, with UKRI describing the new platform as covering the funding lifecycle end-to-end by December 2024. Innovate UK was never on Je-S and continues to use its own separate system.
Who do I contact if I’m not sure which UKRI council to apply to?
Most UK universities’ research/grants office (sometimes called the pre-award office) can advise on which council and scheme fits a given proposal, including interdisciplinary and cross-council co-funded calls; UKRI’s own opportunity-search tool on the Funding Service site is also searchable by discipline and council.
