CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: ukri grant success rates

  • 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.

  • 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.