The UKRI funded projects database — published as Gateway to Research (GtR) — is UKRI’s open-data catalogue of more than 170,000 publicly funded research and innovation awards, searchable by funder, organisation and researcher back to January 2006. Grant offices can query it directly, export it, or pull it via two REST APIs to benchmark their own award portfolio, track what competitor institutions are winning, and run first-pass due-diligence checks on prospective partners.
Gateway to Research is UKRI’s public register of research and innovation awards, built from administrative data held in UKRI’s central Databank and refreshed quarterly under an Open Government Licence.
- What is the UKRI funded projects database?
- How to use GtR for portfolio benchmarking
- How to track competitor institutions in GtR
- What GtR can — and cannot — tell you for due diligence
- Data caveats every grant office must check before citing GtR figures
- Answer-first Q&A: UKRI funding data
- What this means for research offices
What is the UKRI funded projects database?
Gateway to Research (gtr.ukri.org) is UKRI’s public portal onto the awards administered by its seven research councils, Innovate UK, and a set of cross-council funds. According to UKRI’s own guide to the platform, updated April 2026, GtR publishes research and innovation data on 170,000 funded projects by UKRI where the start date is on or after 1 January 2006. Studentship information is separately available from 1 February 2015.
The underlying data is sourced from UKRI’s Innovation Funding Service, the UKRI Funding Service, the Joint Electronic Submission (Je-S) system, off-system project records, and an annual outcomes collection run through a service provided by Elsevier. UKRI publishes this data quarterly, in the second week of January, April, July and October, and makes it available through a search interface, CSV downloads, and two REST APIs. The whole dataset sits under an Open Government Licence, so grant offices can reuse and republish it without a data-sharing agreement.
One structural gap matters for benchmarking work: Research England’s funding is not published in GtR, because most of it is allocated as a formula-based block grant rather than through individual competitive awards. Analysts comparing “UKRI funding” across institutions need to source Research England figures separately from its own Data Portal.
How to use GtR for portfolio benchmarking
Benchmarking with GtR means comparing your institution’s award count, funded value, and council mix against a self-selected peer group over time. The Overview data for each project — title, abstract, duration, funded value, category and status — gives the raw material; the Organisations tab lets you filter by lead or collaborating institution.
- Pull all awards where your institution (and named peers) is the lead research organisation, grouped by funder and start year, to chart relative growth or contraction in council income.
- Break totals down by grant category — research grant, fellowship, training grant, studentship, third-party grant, intramural — since councils apply these inconsistently, and mixing them undetected distorts trend lines.
- Use the People tab, which publishes ORCID iDs where available, to identify which principal investigators drive a peer institution’s growth in a given scheme.
Treat “funded value” as a commitment figure, not cash received — the single most common benchmarking error analysts make with GtR exports, covered in full under data caveats below.
How to track competitor institutions in GtR
Competitor tracking is the same query pattern as benchmarking, run continuously against a fixed watchlist rather than as a one-off snapshot. Set up a standing GtR API pull — or a saved search re-run each quarterly update — against your named competitor institutions.
This surfaces what a research office actually needs: which schemes a rival is winning that you are not, which external organisations appear repeatedly as their collaborating partners, and which researchers are entering new fields, visible via shifts in project abstracts and outcome types such as spin-outs, IP disclosures and policy-influence entries. Because GtR refreshes on a fixed quarterly cycle, building the pull around the January, April, July and October windows keeps intelligence current without daily polling.
What GtR can — and cannot — tell you for due diligence
GtR is a legitimate, free first-pass source for verifying a prospective partner’s funding track record before a formal due-diligence process begins. It can confirm whether an organisation has previously held UKRI awards, what scale of funding it has managed, which UKRI-funded collaborators it has worked with, and whether disclosed outcomes (publications, spin-outs, IP) match what the partner has claimed.
It cannot replace a full due-diligence check. GtR does not publish security-sensitive review outcomes, does not flag active investigations, and — per UKRI’s own publication rules — excludes any project flagged “Do Not Publish” or awaiting a funder assignment. UKRI requires offices entering international collaborations to run their own structured due-diligence process; bodies such as the Association of Research Managers and Administrators (ARMA) publish separate questionnaires for that purpose. GtR data should feed into that process as one evidence source, not replace it.
Data caveats every grant office must check before citing GtR figures
UKRI’s own guide to Gateway to Research — last reviewed in October 2022 and updated again in April 2026 — documents several data-quality limits that most secondary coverage of GtR omits. Any office using GtR figures in a board paper, funding bid, or competitor briefing should check these before publishing a number.
| Caveat | What it means for your analysis |
|---|---|
| 3.6% of projects excluded | UKRI confirms 3.6% of projects are withheld from GtR as “Do Not Publish” or pending funder identification — totals will always undercount true award volume slightly. |
| No unique organisation IDs | UKRI does not hold a single identifier across its constituent systems, so the same institution can appear under multiple name variants — counts of organisations are “likely to be overestimated.” |
| Funded value ≠ actual spend | “Funded value” reflects the commitment made when a project was approved, drawn down over time — not cash disbursed. Innovate UK figures further split “project cost” from the smaller “grant offer” actually paid. |
| Region reflects admin HQ, not research site | Organisation region is based on the lead applicant’s postcode, which overrepresents administrative hubs (London, Oxford, Cambridge) relative to where research is actually conducted. |
| Classifications inconsistent across funders | UKRI’s own guide warns that classification fields are applied inconsistently between councils and should be avoided for cross-funder trend analysis. |
The April 2026 refresh also reclassified a batch of awards previously attributed to the wrong funder: projects delivered through UKRI-managed programmes — including the Advanced Propulsion Centre, the Aerospace Technology Institute and the Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles — were moved from Innovate UK’s totals to their correct designated funder. Any benchmarking series built before this update should be re-pulled rather than trusted as a like-for-like comparison.
Answer-first Q&A: UKRI funding data
What are the 7 research councils?
UKRI’s seven research councils are AHRC (arts and humanities), BBSRC (biotechnology and biological sciences), EPSRC (engineering and physical sciences), ESRC (economic and social research), MRC (medical research), NERC (environment) and STFC (science and technology facilities). GtR’s Funder field lets you filter awards by any of these seven, plus Innovate UK and cross-council funds.
How difficult is it to get a research grant?
GtR does not publish success rates directly, so difficulty must be inferred: divide funded projects in a scheme by known applicant volume from the relevant council’s own reporting. Grant offices typically combine GtR’s funded-award data with council-published statistics — since success-rate data is not stored in GtR itself — for an accurate competitiveness picture.
Did research funding get cut?
GtR is the most reliable independent way to check funding-cut claims, since it shows actual awards made rather than budget announcements. Comparing quarterly totals for a council or scheme year-on-year in GtR — rather than relying on press coverage — lets a research office verify whether award volume genuinely fell or simply shifted between funders, as happened with the April 2026 reclassification.
What this means for research offices
UKRI invests roughly £8 billion of public money a year across its councils and Innovate UK, and GtR is the only complete, machine-readable public record of where that money has actually landed. Offices that build a standing, API-driven pull against GtR — refreshed each quarterly update — gain a benchmarking and competitor-tracking capability most peers still assemble manually from PDFs.
The practical requirement is discipline about the caveats above: treat funded value as commitment, not spend; deduplicate organisation names before counting; and re-pull historical series after each quarterly refresh to catch reclassifications like April 2026’s. Applied with those checks, GtR data is a credible, citable input into a research office’s own due-diligence and strategy work, consistent with the evidence expectations shaping wider research administration practice.
