CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: mrc grants

  • MRC Grants Awarded: How to Read the Register

    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?

    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.

  • NERC Large Grants vs Standard Grant Eligibility

    NERC Large Grants fund £1.12 million–£3.45 million environmental-science projects through a two-stage, panel-gated review with no organisational demand-management cap — a materially different route from a generic “UKRI Standard Grant,” since each UKRI council runs its own standard/responsive-mode scheme with a different funding ceiling, eligibility rule and review structure.

    NERC Large Grants are a competitively assessed, two-stage funding scheme within the Natural Environment Research Council’s (NERC) Discovery Science portfolio, supporting large-scale, multidisciplinary environmental science research lasting up to five years. Research offices comparing this scheme against a “standard grant” need to understand one thing first: UKRI does not operate a single, unified Standard Grant product. Each of UKRI’s nine councils — NERC included — runs its own version, with its own rules. This guide sets out exactly how NERC’s Large Grant scheme is built, who can apply, how it is assessed, and where it genuinely diverges from the responsive-mode/standard routes offered elsewhere in UKRI.

    What are NERC Large Grants?

    NERC Large Grants fund researchers tackling major, often multidisciplinary environmental science questions that a single-investigator project cannot address. Under the current call structure, NERC funds between £1.12 million and £3.45 million per award, calculated at 100% full economic cost (FEC), of which NERC pays 80% FEC — the standard UKRI cost-sharing rate applied across the councils. Awards can run for up to five years, longer than most responsive-mode grants elsewhere in UKRI.

    Large Grants sit alongside two other NERC applicant-led routes: Pushing the Frontiers (curiosity-driven, no deadline, up to £950,000) and Urgency Funding (fast-track, up to £100,000, for time-critical environmental events). All three, including Large Grants, are explicitly exempt from NERC’s organisational demand-management quota system — a distinction that matters operationally and is detailed below.

    Who is eligible to apply for a NERC Large Grant?

    Eligibility for NERC Large Grants follows the standard UKRI organisational-eligibility framework: the lead applicant must be based at a UK research organisation recognised as eligible for NERC funding, and the proposed research must fit predominantly within NERC’s remit, though it can legitimately cross into other research council areas given the scale and multidisciplinary nature of these projects.

    Because Large Grants exist to fund large-scale, complex, often multi-institutional consortia, research offices should treat the eligibility bar as functionally higher than for a standard responsive-mode grant, even though the formal organisational rules are the same. In practice this means:

    • Co-investigators are typically drawn from multiple departments or institutions to justify the scale of funding requested.
    • Proposals must demonstrate the project cannot be delivered through NERC’s smaller Discovery Science or Pushing the Frontiers routes.
    • There is no organisational demand-management cap restricting how many Large Grant outlines an institution can submit — unlike some of NERC’s other responsive-mode schemes, where a quota system can apply if an institution’s success rate falls below a threshold.

    How does the NERC Large Grant peer-review process work?

    NERC Large Grants use a two-stage application and assessment process, distinct from the single-stage review used by most standard/responsive-mode grants elsewhere in UKRI. Outline applications are submitted first and assessed by a dedicated assessment panel; only applicants invited on the strength of their outline may submit a full proposal, which then undergoes expert (external) review followed by assessment from a moderating panel.

    For the current cycle, the British Antarctic Survey’s official funder guidance records outline proposals closing around 26 February 2026, with invited full proposals due around 5 November 2026 — a roughly eight-month gap between stages that research offices must plan resourcing around, since full proposals require substantially more development time than a standard single-stage grant.

    This gated, two-tier structure exists specifically to protect reviewer capacity: because each Large Grant represents a multi-million-pound, multi-year commitment, NERC screens ambition and fit at outline stage before committing full peer-review resource to detailed technical and financial scrutiny.

    NERC Large Grants vs UKRI Standard Grant: what’s different?

    This is the comparison research offices most often get wrong, because “UKRI Standard Grant” is not a single scheme name — it is shorthand researchers use for whichever council’s own responsive-mode grant applies to their discipline. EPSRC, for example, runs a route it calls “Standard Research,” for which official UKRI guidance states plainly that “there is no limit on the value of the grant or length of the project.” That is the opposite design choice to NERC Large Grants, which impose a fixed £1.12m–£3.45m ceiling and a hard five-year cap.

    Feature NERC Large Grants EPSRC Standard Research (typical “standard grant” comparator)
    Funding ceiling £1.12m–£3.45m at 100% FEC (fixed band) No upper value limit
    Project duration Up to 5 years (fixed cap) No fixed length limit
    Application stages Two-stage: outline, then invited full proposal Single-stage: full proposal submitted directly
    Assessment Assessment panel (outline), then expert review plus moderating panel (full) Expert reviewers, applicant response, then funding panel
    Submission timing Fixed annual deadlines (outline ~Feb, full ~Nov) Can be submitted at any time
    Demand management Explicitly exempt Varies; not scheme-specific in the same way

    The same pattern holds across UKRI more broadly: the Medical Research Council (MRC) and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) each run their own standard/responsive-mode research grants with separate eligibility text, funding ceilings and panel timetables. Researchers searching for “EPSRC small grants” are usually looking for the lower end of EPSRC’s uncapped Standard Research route, since EPSRC does not brand a separate small-grant tier the way NERC brands Large Grants, Pushing the Frontiers and Urgency Funding as distinct named products. Treating “UKRI Standard Grant” as one comparator, rather than nine council-specific routes, is the single most common eligibility-mapping error research offices make.

    Frequently asked questions

    What is NERC funding?

    NERC funding is grant support from the Natural Environment Research Council, one of UKRI’s nine councils, for environmental science research spanning earth, biological, atmospheric, ocean and polar sciences. It includes responsive-mode Discovery Science routes, Large Grants, Pushing the Frontiers, and Urgency Funding, alongside strategic and directed programmes.

    What is NERC in the UK?

    NERC is a UK public funding body that sits within UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), alongside councils such as EPSRC, MRC, ESRC, AHRC and BBSRC. It funds and coordinates independent research and training in the environmental sciences at UK research organisations and its own research centres, including the British Antarctic Survey.

    What is the success rate of the NERC grant?

    Historical reporting from Research Professional News found NERC’s overall responsive-mode success rate was around 24% in one funding round, down from 28% the year before — illustrating how competitive standard NERC schemes are even before reaching Large Grants, where the multi-million-pound threshold narrows the field further to a small number of full proposals each year.

    What are the odds of winning a grant?

    Odds vary by scheme, institution and round, but NERC’s demand-management policy is a useful signal: institutions whose success rate falls below a set threshold can be subject to a submission-quota system on affected schemes. Large Grants, Pushing the Frontiers and Urgency Funding are explicitly exempt from that quota system, so institutional track record does not restrict how many outlines a research office can submit to these three routes.

    What this means for research offices

    Research offices supporting environmental-science principal investigators should map funding options by scheme name, not by the generic label “standard grant.” NERC Large Grants demand early, resource-intensive outline development, a realistic assessment of whether a project is genuinely large-scale enough to justify the £1.12m–£3.45m band, and a long lead time between outline and invited full proposal. By contrast, a council running an uncapped, single-stage responsive-mode route rewards a faster, more opportunistic submission strategy.

    Because Large Grants sit outside NERC’s demand-management quota system, institutions with weaker recent success rates on other NERC schemes are not penalised here — a fact worth flagging explicitly to research administration teams building internal triage rules for which NERC route a given proposal should target. As UKRI continues to differentiate its councils’ funding architectures rather than converge on a single model, treating each council’s “standard” route as a distinct product, with its own ceiling, timetable and review structure, will remain the more accurate planning assumption for institutions across the sector.

  • BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grants: Field Guide

    BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grants are a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust funding scheme offering up to £10,000 over one to 24 months to postdoctoral scholars, including independent scholars, ordinarily resident in the UK. Unlike most UKRI council grants, the scheme sits outside the Full Economic Costing (fEC) regime and is administered through the British Academy’s own Flexi-Grant portal, not the UKRI Funding Service.

    The British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grants scheme is one of the British Academy’s highest-volume programmes, making awards to academics working at around 100 institutions across the UK. It is funded as a public-private partnership between the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), the Leverhulme Trust and the Wellcome Trust, alongside several named Special Funds. For humanities and social science researchers who sit outside the large UKRI research councils, it is one of the few nationally competitive routes to discrete, project-defined funding.

    This guide sets out who can apply, what the money can and cannot be spent on, how reporting works, and — critically — how the scheme’s rules diverge from EPSRC, MRC and the wider UKRI funding architecture.

    What are the BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grants?

    The BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grants scheme is a competitive award covering the direct expenses of a clearly defined humanities or social science research project. Awards are worth up to £10,000 and are tenable for between one and 24 months, with a minimum award of £500 for a discrete, identifiable piece of work.

    According to the British Academy’s own scheme guidance, funding is intended to cover initial project planning and development, direct research costs such as travel, subsistence and specialist research assistance, and the advancement of research through workshops, conferences or visits to and from partner scholars. It is explicitly not a personal fellowship or salary-replacement scheme.

    Who is eligible to apply?

    Eligibility is narrower than many applicants assume, but it is also more open in one important respect: independent scholars are welcome.

    • Applicants must be postdoctoral scholars or equivalent and ordinarily resident in the United Kingdom.
    • Applications need the approval of the applicant’s employing institution where one exists, but are not restricted to a particular grade (Lecturer, Professor or otherwise).
    • Independent scholars without an institutional affiliation may apply directly, selecting “independent scholar” in the Flexi-Grant portal.
    • Co-applicants may be based anywhere in the world, provided the Principal Applicant is ordinarily resident in the UK.
    • Postgraduate students are not eligible — this is a postdoctoral-and-above scheme.

    From the 2026 application round, the British Academy introduced a distinct submission window for independent scholars, who must now submit at least five working days before the round closing date; late submissions in this category are not processed. This is a genuine procedural detail that trips up first-time independent applicants, who often assume the standard deadline applies to them.

    What can the budget cover — and what is excluded?

    Because the scheme sits outside UKRI’s Full Economic Costing framework, the budget rules are simpler than a typical research council application, but also more restrictive in specific ways.

    Allowed Not allowed
    Travel and subsistence for fieldwork or archive visits Replacement teaching costs
    Specialist research assistance Payment in lieu of salary
    Workshop, conference and collaboration costs tied to the funded project Computer equipment/hardware
    Project planning and development costs Attendance-only conference fees with no defined research objective

    Applications purely to organise or attend a third-party conference — the kind of activity once covered by the Academy’s discontinued Conference Support Grant and Overseas Conference Grant schemes — will not be considered unless directly tied to disseminating results from the funded project. Grants are also not intended to fund UK–overseas scholarly interchange where there is no defined programme of activity behind it.

    How does reporting and compliance work?

    Reporting obligations scale with the size and simplicity of the award rather than mirroring the multi-year monitoring cycle of a UKRI standard grant. Award-holders submit progress and financial reporting through Flexi-Grant, and extensions to the tenure of an award (up to the 24-month ceiling) can be requested for a defined set of reasons set out in the British Academy’s current guidance for grant-holders.

    Because the £10,000 ceiling is a direct-cost allocation to the award-holder rather than an institutional fEC award, host institutions typically have a lighter administrative burden than for a UKRI grant — there is no 20% institutional contribution to manage, and no Je-S or UKRI Funding Service record to maintain. This is a material difference for research administration teams that otherwise triage every award through the same fEC costing workflow.

    How does this compare with EPSRC, MRC and the UKRI new funding model?

    Researchers moving between disciplines often assume every UK grant sits inside the same UKRI application and costing system. BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grants are a useful case study in why that assumption fails.

    Feature BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grants EPSRC (UKRI) MRC (UKRI)
    Administering body British Academy (with Leverhulme Trust, DSIT, Wellcome Trust) UK Research and Innovation UK Research and Innovation
    Application portal Flexi-Grant (British Academy’s own system) UKRI Funding Service UKRI Funding Service
    Typical award scale Up to £10,000, direct costs only Responsive-mode/standard grants, typically far larger Responsive-mode/standard grants, typically far larger
    Full Economic Costing (fEC) Not covered by fEC — award is direct-cost only fEC applies; UKRI funds 80% of the Full Economic Cost, institution covers the remainder fEC applies; UKRI funds 80% of the Full Economic Cost, institution covers the remainder
    Independent scholar eligible Yes, with a dedicated submission window Generally requires an eligible host institution Generally requires an eligible host institution

    UKRI’s own reform programme — often referred to informally as the UKRI new funding model — has spent recent years consolidating research council applications onto the single UKRI Funding Service (replacing the legacy Joint Electronic Submission, or Je-S, system) and harmonising grant terms and conditions across councils. BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grants sit deliberately outside this consolidation: they are not migrating to the UKRI Funding Service, and they retain the Academy’s own Flexi-Grant portal and a distinct, non-fEC costing model. For research administrators building a single institutional workflow across funders, that is the single most consequential operational fact in this comparison.

    Answer-first Q&A

    How much can a BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant cover?

    Awards run from a minimum of £500 up to a maximum of £10,000, tenable for between one and 24 months. The award funds a single, clearly defined piece of research with an identifiable outcome, not an open-ended programme of work or a personal fellowship.

    Who is eligible for BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grants?

    Postdoctoral scholars or equivalent who are ordinarily resident in the UK, including independent scholars without institutional affiliation. Co-applicants can be based anywhere, but the Principal Applicant must be UK-resident, and postgraduate students are not eligible.

    Are BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grants covered by Full Economic Costing?

    No. The scheme is explicitly outside the fEC regime that governs most UKRI research council grants. The £10,000 ceiling is a direct-cost award to the researcher, not an institutional fEC settlement, which removes the usual 80/20 UKRI-institution cost split entirely.

    What can BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant funding not be used for?

    Funds cannot cover replacement teaching, payment in lieu of salary, or computer equipment. Grants also exclude stand-alone conference attendance or UK–overseas interchange that lacks a defined research objective tied to the funded project.

    Implications for humanities and social science applicants

    The practical takeaway for applicants and research administration offices is that BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grants require a genuinely different compliance checklist from an EPSRC or MRC application. Institutions whose research administration workflows route every funder through the same fEC costing template risk misclassifying this scheme — either by over-costing an award that is meant to be direct-cost only, or by missing the independent-scholar submission window introduced for the 2026 round.

    As UKRI consolidates research council funding onto a single portal and cost model, schemes like BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grants remain a deliberate exception — and, for humanities and social science researchers, an opportunity: a low-friction, direct-cost route to project funding that never touches the UKRI Funding Service. Teams that keep a funder-specific map of eligibility, costing and reporting rules, rather than one generic template, turn that simplicity into an advantage rather than a compliance gap.

  • EPSRC Grants on the Web: Practical Search Guide

    EPSRC Grants on the Web is a legacy name for the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council’s public grant records, which today live inside UKRI’s Gateway to Research (GtR) — not a standalone EPSRC portal. Research administrators who search “EPSRC grants on the web” are usually looking for pipeline intelligence — who has been funded, at what value, on what panel — and that data is now accessed through GtR’s project, person, organisation and publication search tabs, with facets and Boolean syntax most users never open.

    EPSRC Grants on the Web is the name research administrators still use for EPSRC’s public record of funded projects, even though EPSRC itself no longer runs a separate database under that title. UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) — the body that has governed EPSRC since its formation in April 2018 from a merger of seven UK research councils, Research England and Innovate UK — now reports funding data centrally through Gateway to Research. This guide explains where the old records went, how to run an effective search across UKRI’s award database, and which search fields administrators most often overlook.

    What is EPSRC Grants on the Web?

    EPSRC Grants on the Web is a defined term: a public register of grants awarded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, historically published as a searchable database in its own right and now consolidated into UKRI’s cross-council Gateway to Research service. The phrase persists in search behaviour and in older bookmarks, guidance documents and institutional wikis, but the underlying dataset is maintained centrally by UKRI rather than by EPSRC alone.

    For funding decisions made before 2018, EPSRC’s historic “funding rates” data — what the council called success and funding rates prior to the UKRI merger — sits in the UK Government Web Archive rather than in any live, searchable interface. That distinction matters for benchmarking: pre-2018 figures require an archive lookup, not a GtR query.

    Where did EPSRC’s “Grants on the Web” go?

    EPSRC’s council-specific funding page on ukri.org — last updated 29 September 2025 — directs users to Gateway to Research (gtr.ukri.org) for “research and training grants funded by EPSRC,” alongside a Tableau dashboard of panel outcomes. There is no standalone “EPSRC Grants on the Web” URL left to bookmark; the consolidation happened as UKRI centralised funding reporting across its research councils.

    This is a genuine source of confusion in the sector, because not every council followed the same path. NERC still operates its own distinct “Grants on the Web” portal at gotw.nerc.ac.uk, separate from Gateway to Research. Administrators who assume EPSRC has an equivalent standalone tool will end up on an archived or dead link instead of the live dataset.

    • EPSRC-funded projects, people and organisations: searchable live via Gateway to Research.
    • EPSRC panel outcomes and funding application results: a dedicated Tableau dashboard, linked from ukri.org.
    • Pre-2018 EPSRC funding/success rates: UK Government Web Archive snapshot only.
    • NERC awards: a separate, still-branded “Grants on the Web” portal at gotw.nerc.ac.uk.

    How do you search UKRI’s award database for EPSRC awards?

    Gateway to Research is built on Elasticsearch and Apache Lucene, so it supports full Boolean and field-level search syntax that most casual users never invoke. To find EPSRC awards specifically, run a keyword search and then apply the “Funder” facet to restrict results to EPSRC — the same mechanism works for MRC, NERC, BBSRC, ESRC, AHRC, STFC, Research England and Innovate UK, since all sit inside the same index.

    The search fields research administrators most often miss are the ones below the basic keyword box:

    • Quoted phrases — wrapping a term in quotation marks (e.g. "quantum sensing") matches the exact phrase rather than the individual words, which cuts noise dramatically on common technical terms.
    • Boolean operators — AND, OR and NOT must be capitalised to function; lower-case “and” is treated as a stray keyword, not an operator.
    • Wildcards — a question mark (?) matches a single character and an asterisk (*) matches zero or more, useful for catching spelling variants across a large grant corpus.
    • Fuzzy and proximity search — a tilde after a term (test~0.8) finds near-matches; a tilde after a quoted phrase ("test blood"~10) finds terms within a set word distance of each other.
    • Resource-type tabs — Projects, Persons, Organisations and Publications each expose a different advanced-search form, so a search run on the Projects tab will not surface matching Person or Organisation records by default.
    • Facets — ordered alphabetically and additive; selecting facets across categories (funder, scheme, research topic, lead organisation) narrows a result set, but switching tabs clears facets from the previous search.

    For institutional benchmarking, combine a funder facet (EPSRC) with an organisation facet and a date range, then bookmark the query URL — GtR search results are shareable by link, useful for a live funding-strategy dashboard rather than a static export.

    How does EPSRC’s data compare with MRC, NERC and BBSRC?

    Not every UKRI council presents its award data the same way. The table below summarises where each dataset actually lives, which is the detail administrators need before writing a search strategy that spans more than one funder.

    Council Primary live database Legacy/standalone portal Notes
    EPSRC Gateway to Research (gtr.ukri.org) None — retired into GtR Panel outcomes tracked separately via Tableau; pre-2018 rates in the Government Web Archive
    MRC Gateway to Research (gtr.ukri.org) None — retired into GtR MRC award and studentship data reported through the same GtR index as EPSRC
    NERC Gateway to Research (gtr.ukri.org) gotw.nerc.ac.uk (“Grants on the Web”) NERC still runs a dedicated legacy portal alongside GtR
    BBSRC Gateway to Research (gtr.ukri.org) Referenced as “Grants on the Web” in search behaviour, no dedicated live URL Council-specific funding page links back to GtR

    A single, correctly faceted Gateway to Research query will retrieve EPSRC, MRC, BBSRC and most other UKRI council awards from one interface — but anyone chasing NERC records should also check gotw.nerc.ac.uk, since it is not a simple synonym for GtR.

    Answer-first Q&A

    What is an EPSRC grant?

    An EPSRC grant is a funding award made by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council to support research or training in engineering, mathematics, physical sciences and related disciplines. Awards are assessed at panel meetings, recorded centrally by UKRI, and searchable through Gateway to Research alongside awards from every other UKRI council.

    What is the EPSRC standard grant?

    The EPSRC standard grant is EPSRC’s core responsive-mode funding route, supporting investigator-led research proposals that fall within the council’s engineering and physical sciences remit. It sits alongside programme grants, fellowships and other UKRI application routes, and outcomes for standard-grant applications appear in the same panel-outcomes Tableau dashboard as other EPSRC schemes.

    Who is eligible for EPSRC funding?

    Eligibility for EPSRC funding generally requires an applicant to be based at an eligible UK research organisation and to hold, or be applying for, a role recognised by UKRI as suitable for a principal or co-investigator. Exact eligibility rules vary by funding scheme, so administrators should check the specific opportunity’s guidance on ukri.org before assuming a route applies.

    Are UKRI and EPSRC the same?

    No — UKRI and EPSRC are not the same body. UKRI is the umbrella organisation formed in 2018 that brings together seven research councils (including EPSRC and MRC), Research England and Innovate UK. EPSRC is one constituent council operating under UKRI’s governance, which is why EPSRC’s award data now reports through UKRI’s shared Gateway to Research rather than a council-only system.

    What this means for research administrators

    Treating “EPSRC Grants on the Web” as a live, separate URL wastes time chasing archived or dead pages. The efficient workflow is to query Gateway to Research directly, apply the EPSRC funder facet, and layer in Boolean, wildcard or proximity syntax when a common technical term returns too much noise. Institutions building funding-pipeline dashboards for research administration teams should bookmark faceted GtR query URLs rather than static exports, since the index updates as new awards are recorded.

    As UKRI continues centralising reporting across its councils, expect fewer standalone legacy portals to survive outside NERC’s. Administrators who build benchmarking habits around GtR’s search syntax now will not need to relearn an interface if NERC’s “Grants on the Web” is eventually folded into the same system.

  • UKRI Grant Success Rates by Research Council

    UKRI grant success rates vary sharply by research council and should never be read as a single UKRI-wide number. UKRI’s overall award rate fell from roughly 36% in 2017-18 to around 19% in 2024-25, but that headline figure blends councils where success runs at 20-24% (MRC, ESRC research grants) with response-mode schemes at the Arts and Humanities Research Council running below 7%. Administrators comparing options should read council- and scheme-level data, not the aggregate.

    A UKRI grant success rate is the proportion of assessed applications that receive an award within a given council, scheme and financial year, calculated by UK Research and Innovation and its seven constituent research councils from data published in the annual investment and outputs series.

    What is a UKRI grant success rate, and how is it calculated?

    A grant success rate is the number of applications awarded funding divided by the number of applications assessed in a scheme, within a defined financial year. UKRI publishes this metric through its investment and outputs publication, which lets users compare award rates, funding recipients and award values across all nine of its funding bodies: seven research councils, Research England and Innovate UK.

    Success rates are typically reported at three levels: UKRI-wide (an average across every council and scheme), council-wide (an average across one council’s schemes) and scheme-specific (a single funding call, such as AHRC’s Curiosity scheme or MRC’s Experimental Medicine Scheme). Each level tells a different story, and conflating them is the single most common misreading of UKRI funding statistics. UKRI’s own “What we’ve funded” hub, and its investment and outputs publication, are the primary sources for all three levels.

    Success rates are driven by two inputs that move independently: the volume of eligible applications and the size of the available budget for that round. A scheme’s rate can fall even when funding holds steady, simply because application volume rises — which is precisely what has happened across most UKRI councils since 2018.

    How do success rates compare across UKRI’s research councils?

    The gap between UKRI’s headline figure and individual council performance is wide. MRC grants and ESRC research grants cluster around one-in-four to one-in-five applications funded, while AHRC’s most competitive response-mode schemes now fund fewer than one in fourteen applications. UKRI EPSRC funding data has not been reported as a single overall rate since 2015-2017, when it moved between 29% and 34%.

    Research council Most recently published success rate Scheme / notes Data period
    UKRI (all councils combined) 36% falling to approximately 19% All schemes, UKRI-wide average 2017-18 to 2024-25
    Medical Research Council (MRC) 24% overall; 16% for the Experimental Medicine Scheme Research grants 2022-23
    Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) 15-20% (main research grant scheme); 25-35% for other opportunities; around 20% for early-career schemes Research Grants scheme and related opportunities Published May 2026
    Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) 6.9% (Curiosity); 5.1% (Catalyst) Applicant-led response-mode schemes May 2025
    Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) 32%, 34%, 29% (last published single overall rate) Research grants; recent reporting has shifted to demographic-outcome analysis rather than a unified rate 2015-2017

    The spread matters more than any single average. AHRC’s applicant-led schemes have fallen from around 30% for Standard Research Grants and Fellowships in 2013-14 to single digits a decade later — a far steeper decline than MRC or ESRC have experienced over the same period. A researcher or grants office reading only the UKRI-wide figure would badly misjudge their odds in either direction, depending on which council they are applying to.

    Why has the overall UKRI success rate fallen so sharply?

    UKRI’s overall award rate has fallen because the number of grant applications assessed has roughly doubled since 2017-18, while available funding has not grown at the same pace. This dynamic has been reported consistently by Research Professional News and by Nature, both of which describe UKRI-wide award rates dropping below 20% by 2024-25.

    The effect is uneven across councils because application growth itself is uneven. Response-mode humanities and social science schemes, which have comparatively few alternative funding routes in the UK, have absorbed disproportionate volume growth — a key reason AHRC’s Curiosity and Catalyst schemes now sit well below the UKRI average. Science and engineering councils with larger, more diversified scheme portfolios have been better able to spread demand.

    • Rising application volume without matched budget growth compresses success rates fastest in schemes with the narrowest eligible pool of funders.
    • Councils that report scheme-level breakdowns (MRC, ESRC, AHRC) show far more volatility than the smoothed UKRI-wide average suggests.
    • EPSRC’s shift away from publishing a single overall rate towards demographic and outcome-based analysis makes like-for-like year-on-year comparison harder for applicants.

    Frequently asked questions

    What is the current UKRI grant success rate?

    UKRI’s overall success rate has fallen from around 36% in 2017-18 to approximately 19% in 2024-25, according to UKRI’s published investment and outputs data as reported by Research Professional News and Nature. This is a blended average across all nine UKRI funding bodies and masks large differences between individual councils and schemes.

    Which UKRI research council has the lowest success rate?

    Among councils with published data, the Arts and Humanities Research Council currently reports the lowest rates, with its Curiosity and Catalyst schemes averaging 6.9% and 5.1% respectively as of May 2025 — down from around 30% for equivalent schemes a decade earlier.

    Why do MRC and ESRC success rates differ so much from AHRC’s?

    MRC and ESRC research grant schemes report success rates of roughly 20-24%, well above AHRC’s response-mode schemes. The gap largely reflects application volume growth relative to available budget: humanities and social science applicants have fewer alternative UK funders, concentrating demand onto a small number of AHRC schemes.

    Has the UKRI grant success rate improved recently?

    No council has reported a sustained improvement. UKRI’s overall rate has continued to decline as application volume keeps outpacing budget growth, and AHRC’s most competitive schemes have fallen further still, from roughly 30% in 2013-14 to single digits by 2025.

    What council-level data means for research administrators

    For institutions running a UKRI grant search across schemes, the practical implication is straightforward: budget planning, internal peer review and go/no-go decisions should be set against the relevant council and scheme rate, not the UKRI-wide average. A funding office citing “26% across UKRI” to a principal investigator applying to an AHRC response-mode scheme is giving that applicant a badly miscalibrated expectation.

    Research administration teams should build a standing council-by-scheme reference table, refreshed each time UKRI or a council publishes new investment and outputs data, rather than relying on a remembered headline figure from a previous funding round. As application volumes keep rising across most councils, the gap between the UKRI-wide average and any single scheme’s real odds is likely to widen further, not narrow.

    This is ultimately a data-literacy issue for research administration as a discipline: aggregate funder statistics are a starting point for policy conversations, not a substitute for scheme-level figures when advising an individual applicant or costing a grants pipeline.

  • Wellcome Trust Grants vs CRUK: Compliance Guide

    Wellcome Trust and Cancer Research UK (CRUK) are both major UK charitable research funders, but their grant governance rules diverge sharply: Wellcome funds open-access (OA) publishing costs only in fully open-access venues, while CRUK stopped funding OA publishing costs entirely from 1 October 2026, pushing researchers toward the green (repository) route instead. Reporting cadences and data-sharing expectations also differ in structure, though both track outputs through Researchfish.

    A wellcome trust grants award and a CRUK award are governed by two separate rulebooks, and institutions holding both must satisfy each on its own terms rather than assuming a single compliance workflow covers both funders.

    Overview: two funders, two rulebooks

    Wellcome Trust is a charitable foundation established in 1936 that funds biomedical and health research; Cancer Research UK is a charity dedicated exclusively to cancer research, prevention and treatment. Both sit outside UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and therefore set their own grant conditions rather than following the UKRI open access policy by default.

    Institutions that hold grants from both — a common scenario in UK medical schools and cancer centres — cannot treat “funder compliance” as a single checklist. Wellcome and CRUK differ on when open access funding is available, how data-sharing plans are assessed, and which portal is used for annual reporting.

    What open access rules apply to Wellcome and CRUK grants?

    Wellcome’s open access policy, updated 2 January 2025, applies to all original research articles submitted for publication after 1 January 2021. It requires immediate deposit in Europe PMC under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence, with a CC BY-ND exception available only case-by-case. Since 1 January 2025, Wellcome funds article processing charges (APCs) only for publication in fully open-access journals or platforms — it no longer supports hybrid-journal APCs.

    CRUK’s position has since moved further away from direct OA funding. In a policy update announced 1 April 2026, CRUK confirmed it will no longer provide financial support for open access publishing costs from 1 October 2026, citing a projected saving of £5.2 million over three years. CRUK-funded researchers are instead directed to the green route: depositing the author-accepted manuscript in a repository such as Europe PMC within six months of publication, under a CC BY 4.0 licence for the deposited version.

    • Wellcome: gold/fully-OA route funded via block grants and Wellcome Open Research; CC BY required; immediate deposit.
    • CRUK: green route only from October 2026; no institutional block grant or underspend funding for APCs; six-month embargo permitted on the deposited manuscript.

    How do data sharing requirements differ?

    Both funders require a data-sharing plan at application stage, but they weight it differently in the funding decision. Wellcome asks applicants for an outputs management plan covering data, software and materials, and expects data underpinning a publication to be available at the time that publication appears, with fewer restrictions where possible; data related to public health emergencies must be shared on an accelerated timeline.

    CRUK requires a data management and sharing plan as a scored component of the application review itself, with a stated expectation that data be released no later than acceptance of the paper reporting the main findings. Both funders require consent documentation that anticipates future data sharing, reflecting alignment with FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) data principles used across UK biomedical funding.

    What are the reporting deadlines and systems?

    Wellcome grantholders submit annual progress reports through the Wellcome Funding platform, plus end-of-grant reports; for award types ending on or before September 2026, end-of-grant reporting runs through Researchfish. Wellcome also requires separate annual reporting on intellectual property and commercialisation activity where relevant.

    CRUK manages grant applications and administration through its Flexi-Grant portal — the same underlying system used by several other UK funders, including the Royal Society and the British Academy — and uses Researchfish for annual output reporting. CRUK-funded researchers must submit a Researchfish return every year the award is active and for three consecutive years after the award ends, a longer post-award tail than Wellcome applies to most schemes. Missing a submission window can affect eligibility for future funding from either organisation.

    Side-by-side comparison

    Governance area Wellcome Trust Cancer Research UK
    Open access funding Funds APCs in fully open-access venues only (since 1 Jan 2025) No OA funding of any kind from 1 Oct 2026
    Default compliance route Gold/fully-OA, immediate deposit Green route, 6-month embargo permitted
    Required licence CC BY (CC BY-ND by exception) CC BY 4.0 on deposited manuscript
    Data plan required at Application (outputs management plan) Application (scored data management & sharing plan)
    Grant admin portal Wellcome Funding platform Flexi-Grant
    Output reporting system Researchfish (most schemes, to Sept 2026) Researchfish, annually + 3 years post-award

    Answer-first Q&A

    Where does Wellcome Trust funding come from?

    Wellcome Trust’s endowment originates from the estate of pharmaceutical entrepreneur Sir Henry Wellcome, built on the Burroughs Wellcome (later Wellcome Foundation) pharmaceutical business. The Trust sold its remaining stake in Wellcome plc to the public in the 1990s and now funds research from investment income on that endowment, independent of government or industry grants.

    How do I contact Wellcome Trust about funding?

    Funding-specific queries should go to [email protected], the address Wellcome designates for applicant and grantholder questions. General enquiries route through Wellcome’s main contact channels, but funding support has its own dedicated inbox to keep response times predictable for active applicants.

    Who is eligible for a Wellcome Career Development Award?

    A Wellcome Career Development Award targets mid-career researchers ready to lead a substantial, innovative research programme. Applicants must demonstrate they can generate a significant shift in understanding within their field and typically need an existing track record of independent or semi-independent research output.

    Implications for research administrators

    Institutions running co-funded projects — for example, a cancer biology programme with both Wellcome and CRUK support — need two separate compliance calendars, not one. The CRUK OA funding withdrawal effective October 2026 shifts real cost onto institutional library budgets or block grants for any CRUK-funded output that cannot clear a six-month green embargo, while Wellcome retains a funded gold-OA pathway. Research offices should map which grants sit under which policy before setting a single “institutional OA workflow,” since applying Wellcome’s rules to a CRUK-funded paper — or vice versa — risks a compliance breach that is grounds for withholding future funding.

    Reporting also needs separate tracking: CRUK’s three-year post-award Researchfish tail outlasts most Wellcome end-of-grant obligations, so a grant closed on paper may still carry an active reporting duty. Building funder-specific reminders into grants-management systems — rather than a single generic “reporting due” flag — is the practical safeguard against missed submissions and the funding-eligibility penalties both organisations attach to them.

  • MRC Funding Update UKRI: Grants Reopened

    MRC funding update, in brief: the Medical Research Council paused several applicant-led grant schemes from February 2026 while UK Research and Innovation restructured to an “always open” application model; research grants, new investigator grants and partnership grants reopened on 7 April 2026, experimental medicine opportunities reopened on 30 April 2026, and MRC Proof of Concept and Impact Acceleration Awards are scheduled to reopen in July 2026. For grant holders, the practical implications are a new rolling submission window, a consolidated review structure, and firm caps on how many applications one person can lead at once.

    The MRC funding update ukri has published since February 2026 marks the most significant procedural change to Medical Research Council grant administration in over a decade. Medical Research Council (MRC) is one of UK Research and Innovation’s seven disciplinary councils, responsible for funding biomedical and health research across the UK’s higher education and institute sector. This briefing sets out exactly what changed, what remains open, and what research administrators and principal investigators need to do differently when planning 2026 applications.

    What actually changed in the MRC funding update

    On 1 February 2026, UKRI Chief Executive Ian Chapman issued an open letter to the research and innovation community announcing a new investment approach for the 2026–2030 spending review period. The letter described a shift toward a “more strategic, UKRI-wide model” for funding decisions, and confirmed that MRC would use the transition to refresh its approach to applicant-led funding.

    The headline structural change is a move to an “always open” responsive-mode system, replacing fixed application deadlines. UKRI states that published deadlines “cause significant variation in the volume of applications we receive and in reviewer availability,” and that removing them smooths these peaks and troughs. This is an operating-model change, not a funding cut — MRC says curiosity-driven research remains a committed priority, underpinned by a UKRI-wide 50% budget commitment to that category of research.

    To implement the “always open” system, MRC had to pause several applicant-led funding opportunities from February 2026 while the assessment infrastructure was rebuilt. Awards that had already been offered, accepted or started were explicitly unaffected throughout the transition.

    Reopening timeline: what’s open now and what’s still paused

    As of the most recent UKRI update (15 June 2026), most MRC applicant-led schemes have reopened. Grant holders should treat the table below as the operative reference, not the earlier February pause notice, which is now superseded.

    MRC funding opportunity Status Reopening date
    Applicant-led research grants Open 7 April 2026
    New investigator research grants Open 7 April 2026
    Partnership grants (applicant-led) Open 7 April 2026
    Experimental medicine opportunities Open 30 April 2026
    MRC Proof of Concept (formerly Developmental Pathway Funding Scheme, stage one) Reopening July 2026
    MRC Impact Acceleration Awards (formerly MRC Gap Fund) Reopening July 2026
    Fellowships, studentships, Centres of Research Excellence Never paused Continuously open

    UKRI expects the wider transition to be complete by the start of the 2027–2028 financial year (6 April 2027 to 5 April 2028). Institutions running internal peer-review or costing pipelines timed to the old deadline calendar should recalibrate now: under “always open” mode, there is no annual cycle to plan around.

    The new College of Experts review structure

    MRC’s four disciplinary research boards — covering infections and immunity, molecular and cellular medicine, neurosciences and mental health, and population and systems medicine — have been consolidated into a single College of Experts. Funding panels are now drawn flexibly from this combined pool rather than fixed to a single board.

    This restructuring supports cross-disciplinary applications that previously sat awkwardly between boards, and enables faster decisions by decoupling panel composition from a rigid quarterly schedule. Applications closed before the transition — including the legacy boards’ November 2025 round and Developmental Pathway Funding Scheme stage two — are still assessed under the old structure, with decisions expected in April 2026; MRC has confirmed a reduced number of awards from that backlog, reflecting the changeover rather than any change in typical grant size going forward.

    Application caps and resubmission rules grant holders must know

    Two new eligibility mechanics apply under the “always open” model and directly affect how principal investigators should sequence their applications:

    • Application cap: a maximum of two applications as project lead may be submitted across applicant-led responsive-mode funding calls within any rolling 12-month period.
    • Resubmission bar: an application previously unsuccessful with MRC — or with any other funder — will not be considered again for 12 months, unless MRC has explicitly invited a resubmission.
    • Cost basis unchanged: MRC continues to fund 80% of the full economic cost (FEC), with grant durations ranging from 18 months to five years and no fixed cap on requested amount, provided the sum is proportionate to project scope.

    For research offices, “always open” does not mean unlimited throughput per investigator — it shifts the constraint from a calendar deadline to a rolling personal quota. Grant-writing capacity planning built around a fixed autumn or spring deadline now needs continuous tracking of each investigator’s rolling 12-month application count.

    Budget signals: what the wider UKRI settlement means

    UKRI has stated that its overall research and innovation budget is rising across the 2026–2030 spending review period, and that the budget for biomedical and health research specifically is “in an excellent position.” Independent analysis from the Campaign for Science and Engineering notes that the overall UKRI budget is set to rise toward £10 billion a year by 2030, though how that funding is distributed across councils and themes is shifting considerably as part of the same restructuring.

    A parallel strand channels additional funding through the UKRI Life Sciences Priority Programme — a cross-council theme through which MRC accesses coordinated funding beyond its standalone curiosity-driven allocation. UKRI frames this as additive: fellowships, studentships and Centres of Research Excellence funding was unaffected throughout, and the pause applied only to specific applicant-led schemes during infrastructure changes.

    BBSRC underwent the same “always open” transition in parallel; its new investigator award and standard research grant have also reopened. Grant holders working across MRC and BBSRC funding lines should expect the same rolling-quota and resubmission mechanics on both councils, since the operating model is shared across the UKRI-wide transition rather than council-specific.

    Frequently asked questions

    Why did MRC pause its funding opportunities in 2026?

    MRC paused several applicant-led schemes from February 2026 to implement UKRI’s move to an “always open” application system. UKRI stated that fixed deadlines caused uneven application volumes and reviewer availability problems, and that removing them required behind-the-scenes changes to assessment infrastructure before reopening.

    Which MRC grants have reopened?

    Applicant-led research grants, new investigator research grants and partnership grants reopened on 7 April 2026, and experimental medicine opportunities reopened on 30 April 2026. MRC Proof of Concept and MRC Impact Acceleration Awards are scheduled to reopen in July 2026.

    Were MRC fellowships and studentships affected?

    No. MRC has confirmed that funding for fellowships, studentships, and MRC Centres of Research Excellence was not affected by the 2026 pause and remained continuously open for applications throughout the transition period.

    How many MRC applications can one person lead at once?

    Under the new rules, a principal investigator may lead a maximum of two applications across applicant-led responsive-mode funding calls within any rolling 12-month period, and unsuccessful applications face a 12-month resubmission bar unless MRC has invited one.

    Implications for institutions and grant holders

    Research offices should update three things now. First, replace deadline-driven internal sign-off calendars with continuous submission tracking, since “always open” removes the predictable peaks institutions have historically planned costing and QA cycles around. Second, build a per-investigator rolling application count into grants-management systems to enforce the two-applications-per-12-months cap before a proposal reaches MRC and is rejected on eligibility grounds. Third, brief investigators explicitly on the 12-month resubmission bar — a previously unsuccessful proposal, even a strong one, is not eligible for quick resubmission without an explicit MRC invitation, which changes revision strategy considerably.

    MRC has said it will continue to share updates and reopen remaining funding opportunities as they become ready, with full transition to the new model expected by April 2027. Institutions with active or upcoming submissions should monitor the MRC application timeline directly rather than relying on the February 2026 pause notice, which the June 2026 update has substantially superseded.