Implementing a Unified NIH Funding Strategy to Guide Consistent and Clearer Award Decisions

Today, NIH has implemented steps towards a unified strategy that will help guide clearer and consistent funding decisions across all Institutes, Centers, and Offices (ICOs). Building on the August NIH Director’s statement, this framework (effective January 2026 Council round) will help ensure we continue to support the most scientifically meritorious research ideas possible, address health priorities, and support a robust biomedical workforce.  

Our funding decisions must balance many competing and dynamic factors when determining the most meritorious research ideas to support. These factors center around peer review, health priorities, scientific opportunities, the workforce, availability of funds, and the wider research portfolio. Thoroughly addressing this balance has implications for the pace of scientific advancements and responsiveness to the often-changing nature of biomedical scientific progress.  

With our prior approaches as a foundation, implementing this new framework is based on a set of core tenets for ICO funding policies to ensure NIH mission and health priorities are being achieved.

Core Tenets

All ICO funding policies should:

• Align with the NIH’s mission
• Prioritize scientific merit; ICOs should consider peer review information in its entirety
• Integrate a breadth of topics and approaches relevant to the ICO’s priorities
• Consider investigator career stage and promote sustainability of the biomedical research workforce
• Promote broad distribution and geographic balance of funding, considering the total amount and type of NIH funding already available to each investigator
• Align with the availability of ICO funds

More details on the core tenets are shared on NIH’s Funding Decisions webpage. Individual ICO webpages that previously reported similar information will be redirected to this central page.

A new section on the NIH Grants and Funding site is being created to enhance transparency into and accountability for ICO decision-making. Here, ICOs can share their funding policies and financial management plans centrally in a simple, consistent, and streamlined manner. 

Peer Review Remains Essential and Vital

Our decision making on applications will still weigh peer review scores and critiques.

Going forward, ICOs will be considering peer review information in its entirety. NIH ICOs will not rely on funding paylines in developing pay plans. Rather, ICOs will consider these scores in context of their and NIH’s priorities, strategic plans, and budgets. ICO Directors will continue to have the delegated authority to decide what is funded by their ICOs.

Moving Away from Paylines 

Around half of ICOs previously set paylines (akin to a cutoff) based on peer review scores or percentiles as part of their funding decision process. When doing so, ICOs would still need to deliberately consider the funds they have available, out-year commitments to existing multi-year awards, anticipated funding for new and established programs, and predicted trends in grant applications. Applications that fell within the payline would be funded, though not in all instances, and applications could still be funded if they fell outside the payline in special cases. 

The research community occasionally expressed confusion around the payline process and asked for additional clarity as it related to their applications. Now that ICOs will not rely on funding paylines when developing their pay plans, it should be clearer for applicants to know the award decision was not made only based on overall impact score, without necessarily considering the additional valuable information provided by peer review.

These steps will strengthen accountability for the research NIH continues to support, weighing the actual need, opportunity costs, and good stewardship of taxpayer investments.  It will also make NIH’s research portfolio more robust, moving us towards supporting a breadth of basic, applied, clinical, and translational research.