MRC grants awarded data is published across three separate UKRI sources — Gateway to Research, the legacy Grants on the Web (GOTW) register, and MRC’s board and panel outcomes pages — and reading it correctly for benchmarking means matching each source to a different question: what was funded, who applied, and how competitive each specific panel meeting was.
The MRC grants awarded register is the collective term for the public funding-decision records that UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) publishes for the Medical Research Council, spanning historical award spreadsheets, a live searchable grants database, and meeting-by-meeting board and panel outcome listings. For research office staff building competitor intelligence or benchmarking their institution’s success against peers, the register is genuinely useful — but only if its structure and its stated caveats are understood before the numbers are used.
- What is the MRC grants awarded register?
- Where to find MRC grants-awarded data: three sources compared
- How to read board and panel outcomes for benchmarking
- How to benchmark success rates and competitor institutions correctly
- Common questions on reading the MRC register
- Implications for research offices and what happens next
What is the MRC grants awarded register?
There is no single document called the “MRC grants awarded register” — it is a set of linked publications UKRI maintains under its “What MRC has funded” pages. These cover awarded grants and fellowships from April 2006 to December 2019 as a downloadable spreadsheet, interactive Tableau dashboards for 2022–23 funding decisions, and rolling board and panel outcome listings for funding meetings from 2017 onward, with earlier records held in the UK Government Web Archive.
Before 2018, MRC referred to this material as “success rates”; UKRI has since folded the reporting into the wider board and panel outcomes format used across all seven research councils. Any benchmarking exercise therefore has to account for a terminology and format change partway through the period being analysed.
Where to find MRC grants-awarded data: three sources compared
Three distinct tools hold MRC award data, and each answers a different research-intelligence question. Confusing them is the single most common reading error institutions make when building competitor comparisons.
| Source | What it covers | Update pattern | Best use |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gateway to Research | Full award records once a grant has started, including principal investigator, institution and value, across all UKRI councils | Continuous, as grants start | Cross-council portfolio and competitor analysis |
| Grants on the Web (GOTW) | Legacy register of MRC-administered grants, fellowships and training grants, filterable by institution | Static; predates the UKRI merger | Institution-level historical lookups |
| Board and panel outcomes | Score out of ten and funding decision for every application discussed at a given meeting | Usually within four weeks of each meeting | Competitive positioning within a specific funding round |
| Archived spreadsheet and success-rate data | Award listings April 2006–December 2019 and pre-2018 success-rate summaries | Frozen, held on the UK Government Web Archive | Long-run trend analysis |
For most benchmarking work, Gateway to Research and the board and panel outcomes pages should be the primary pair: the former gives the awarded portfolio, the latter gives the competitive context each award was won against.
How to read board and panel outcomes for benchmarking
MRC scores every application from one to ten, with ten the best, and this scoring structure applies across all types of MRC funding meeting. Applications are then listed in numerical order within blocks according to their median score group and funding decision, according to UKRI’s published board and panel outcomes guidance.
Outcomes are usually published within four weeks of a meeting, though UKRI notes this can sometimes take longer. Crucially, applications that are unsuccessful after an earlier shortlisting stage are not discussed at the funding meeting and are therefore not included in board and panel outcomes at all — a data-quality point that matters enormously for anyone computing a success rate, since the visible denominator understates total submissions.
- Score and decision are recorded per application, not per institution, so institution-level rates must be aggregated manually.
- Shortlisting-stage rejections are invisible in this dataset — factor this into any success-rate calculation.
- Full award detail (value, abstract, classification) only appears on Gateway to Research once the grant has actually started.
How to benchmark success rates and competitor institutions correctly
UKRI states explicitly that funding decisions are made “in circumstances unique to each panel meeting” and that the funding cut-off is dependent on the budget available at that specific meeting — not a fixed quality threshold. UKRI’s guidance is direct: institutions should not compare funding cut-off points made in different meetings, and UKRI will not consider challenges or enquiries based on such comparisons.
This has a practical consequence for benchmarking: a proposal scoring 7/10 that was funded in a budget-flush round and a proposal scoring 8/10 declined in a tighter round are not evidence that the second panel was harsher. A robust competitor-analysis method therefore favours relative, within-round comparisons — an institution’s share of awards made at a given meeting, or across a given scheme over several rounds — over any single cross-period success-rate percentage pulled from a headline figure.
Combining Gateway to Research (what was funded), board and panel outcomes (how competitive that round was), and GOTW’s institution filter (a second, independent cross-check for MRC-specific awards) gives a defensible three-source method rather than a single-source snapshot.
Common questions on reading the MRC register
How do I search MRC grants awarded by institution?
Use Grants on the Web (GOTW), the legacy register hosted at gotw.nerc.ac.uk, and filter by “Institution > Medical Research Council (MRC)”; each project links to the full grant record, including principal investigator and value. For more current, cross-council records, Gateway to Research offers the same institution-level filtering.
Where can I find MRC board and panel outcomes?
UKRI publishes MRC’s board and panel outcomes in the “What MRC has funded” section of ukri.org, usually within four weeks of each funding meeting. Outcomes list every application discussed, its score out of ten and its funding decision, allowing panel-by-panel benchmarking rather than reliance on one headline figure.
Is there a live MRC grants search tool?
Gateway to Research is UKRI’s live, searchable database of funded projects across all seven research councils, updated continuously as grants start. Grants on the Web remains a parallel legacy tool for MRC-administered awards, useful for cross-checking older or training-grant records.
Can I compare MRC funding cut-off scores between panel meetings?
No — UKRI explicitly advises against this. Each meeting’s funding cut-off depends solely on the budget available at that specific meeting, not a fixed quality bar, so scores funded in one round and declined in another are not directly comparable as evidence of relative panel rigour.
Implications for research offices and what happens next
For research administration and funding-intelligence teams, the practical implication is that MRC grants-awarded data supports rigorous benchmarking only when the three sources are triangulated and UKRI’s own comparability caveats are respected. A single downloaded spreadsheet or a bare success-rate percentage, taken in isolation, will systematically misrepresent competitive position because of the shortlisting-stage exclusion and the meeting-specific funding cut-off.
UKRI last updated its board and panel outcomes guidance on 3 March 2026 and its “What MRC has funded” summary page on 29 September 2025, and continues to migrate historical reporting into Tableau-based dashboards — most recently for 2025 panel outcomes and attendance. Institutions building recurring funding-intelligence dashboards should expect this format to keep evolving, and should re-check source URLs each reporting cycle rather than hard-coding links to any single spreadsheet. Research administration teams that build this triangulated method once can reuse it across other UKRI councils, since board and panel outcomes reporting now follows a common structure council-wide.
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