UKRI funding eligibility rests on two separate tests that pre-award staff must clear before a proposal is submitted: is the applicant an eligible individual at an eligible organisation, and is every line in the costing an eligible cost under Full Economic Costing (fEC)? Both tests are assessed independently, and a proposal can fail on cost eligibility even when the applicant and organisation both qualify.
UKRI funding eligibility is the combined set of individual, organisational, and cost-category rules that UK Research and Innovation applies to determine whether a proposal can be submitted, assessed, and funded under its grant terms and conditions.
- Who Can Apply for UKRI Funding?
- What Counts as an Eligible Cost Under Full Economic Costing?
- How Do Eligibility Rules Vary Across UKRI Councils?
- Common Eligibility Questions
- Implications for Pre-Award Compliance Teams
Who Can Apply for UKRI Funding?
An applicant must satisfy an individual test and an organisational test at the same time. Neither test alone is sufficient. UKRI’s individual eligibility policy, last updated 29 May 2026, focuses on demonstrated capability rather than formal qualifications, which means applicants without a PhD or from non-academic backgrounds can now be assessed on skills and track record alone.
To be eligible for UKRI funding as a project lead or project co-lead, an individual must:
- Be based at a research organisation that is itself eligible for UKRI funding
- Hold a legally binding employment contract with the submitting organisation that runs at least until the grant end date, or demonstrate a substantial ongoing relationship (for example an emeritus or honorary appointment) with equivalent access to infrastructure and management support
- Be resident in the UK at the time of application, or plan to be resident for the duration of the project, subject to defined exceptions for UK-owned organisations with overseas campuses and for applicants resident in the Republic of Ireland but employed in Northern Ireland
- Demonstrate the expertise and project management capability to deliver the proposed work, assessed against the funding opportunity’s stated criteria
Organisational eligibility is assessed separately. UKRI’s organisation eligibility list, published 12 November 2024, groups eligible bodies into higher education providers, UKRI institutes, NHS bodies, public sector research establishments, catapult centres, and independent research organisations that meet minimum research-capacity thresholds. An organisation not on the standard list can still apply through the non-standard eligibility route, assessed case by case against a specific funding opportunity.
| Eligibility test | What it checks | Who confirms it |
|---|---|---|
| Individual eligibility | Employment/relationship status, UK residency, demonstrated capability | Applicant, verified by submitting organisation |
| Standard organisation eligibility | Legal constitution, financial viability, research capacity | Research organisation, listed by UKRI |
| Non-standard organisation eligibility | Case-by-case fit against a specific opportunity | UKRI, on application |
| Cost eligibility | Whether each budget line meets fEC category rules | Pre-award finance team |
What Counts as an Eligible Cost Under Full Economic Costing?
UKRI funds research grants using the Full Economic Costing (fEC) model that UK research councils adopted following the Transparent Approach to Costing (TRAC) reforms. Under standard fEC grant terms and conditions, UKRI typically contributes 80% of a project’s calculated full economic cost, while the host organisation is required to demonstrate 100% of that cost within the application, recovering the remaining share from its own resources.
Eligible costs fall into three categories, each with a distinct evidence standard:
| Cost category | Definition | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Directly Incurred | Costs specifically identifiable as arising from the project, supported by audit-quality evidence | Project staff salaries, travel and subsistence, consumables, equipment items under £10,000, consultancy fees |
| Directly Allocated | Shared resources apportioned to the project using an agreed estimation methodology, not individually audited | Estates and premises costs, shared technical staff time, shared equipment or facility time |
| Indirect | Non-specific overheads calculated as a single institutional rate applied across all projects | Finance, HR and library services, central administration |
Equipment above the directly-incurred threshold generally requires a written business case and supporting quotations before it can be included. NHS research costs, animal costs, and labour costs for non-academic organisations are treated as additional eligible-cost categories with their own calculation rules, so pre-award staff should confirm the applicable methodology against the specific funding opportunity rather than the general fEC guidance alone.
How Do Eligibility Rules Vary Across UKRI Councils?
The individual eligibility policy applies across UKRI’s standard funding opportunities but explicitly does not extend to Innovate UK or Research England, both of which run separate applicant criteria suited to business-facing and higher-education-facing funding respectively. The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) applies the same core individual eligibility policy to its own guidance for applicants, confirmed in STFC-specific guidance updated 18 May 2026.
Business-facing funding through Innovate UK carries a materially different threshold: applicants seeking to lead an Innovate UK-funded project as a business must be UK-registered, a requirement that does not apply to academic project leads applying through the research councils. Pre-award teams triaging a mixed portfolio of research-council and Innovate UK opportunities should not assume a single eligibility checklist covers both routes — each funding opportunity’s own eligibility statement is the authoritative source and overrides general policy where the two conflict.
Common Eligibility Questions
What Is Non-Standard Eligibility in UKRI?
Non-standard eligibility is the route by which an organisation not on UKRI’s standard eligible-organisation list can still apply for a specific funding opportunity. UKRI assesses these applications on an opportunity-specific basis, so approval for one competition does not carry over automatically to the next.
How Do I Check If I’m Eligible for a Grant?
Check both the general UKRI individual and organisation eligibility policies and the eligibility statement published within the specific funding opportunity listing on the UKRI Funding Service. The opportunity-level statement takes precedence over general policy, so pre-award staff should verify residency, employment, and organisational status against that specific text before drafting a costing.
Who Is Eligible for New Investigator Status in UKRI?
New Investigator status generally applies to applicants who have not previously held a substantial grant as principal investigator from a UK research council, allowing early-career researchers to lead applications despite a shorter track record. The exact definition and career-stage threshold are set by the individual funding opportunity, not by a single UKRI-wide rule, so it must be confirmed against each call’s eligibility statement.
Who Is Eligible for UK Research Grants?
Eligibility for UK research council grants requires an applicant with a qualifying employment or substantial relationship at an eligible UK research organisation, UK residency at application, and demonstrated capability to deliver the proposed work. Organisations must independently meet UKRI’s organisational eligibility criteria before any individual on their staff can be named as project lead.
Implications for Pre-Award Compliance Teams
The shift to a capability-based individual eligibility policy widens the applicant pool that pre-award offices must be prepared to triage, including staff without a PhD and those in non-academic roles who previously would have been screened out on qualifications alone. Compliance workflows built around a “PhD plus permanent contract” checklist are now out of date and should be revised to test capability, contract status, and residency separately, as UKRI’s own policy does.
On the cost side, the practical risk is not the fEC categories themselves but conflating directly incurred and directly allocated evidence standards — directly incurred costs need item-level audit trails, while directly allocated costs are estimated and reviewed periodically rather than audited transaction by transaction. Institutional research administration teams that maintain this distinction in their costing templates reduce the single most common source of post-award cost queries. Given that eligibility statements are opportunity-specific and can override general policy, the most defensible pre-award practice is to re-verify both applicant and cost eligibility against the live funding opportunity text at the point of submission, not against a cached institutional checklist from a previous round.
