Discretionary Awards: funding outside of Wellcome’s schemes and funding calls

Lead applicant

You must contribute at least 10% of your research time to the award. 

Lead applicants based in the UK or Republic of Ireland

You cannot ask for your salary if you work for a: 

• higher education institution
• research institute
• healthcare organisation

You can ask for a contribution to your salary if you work for a:

• charity
• non-governmental organisation (NGO)
• social enterprise
• or a commercial organisation

The amount we pay will be proportionate to the time you contribute to the award, for example if you contribute 30% of your time to the award we will fund 30% of your salary.

Lead applicants based outside of the UK or Republic of Ireland

You can ask for a contribution to your salary if you work for a:

• higher education institute
• research institute
• healthcare organisation
• charity
• non-governmental organisation
• social enterprise
• commercial organisation

If you work for a higher education institute, research institute, or healthcare organisation, we will only pay your salary if you hold a permanent, open-ended or long-term rolling contract that states that you must get your salary from external grant funding. Your administering organisation must confirm:

• that you must get salary recovery from external grant funding
• they will guarantee to provide salary support, including any salary not covered by Wellcome, if you cannot get it from other sources for the period of time that you will be working on the grant

In all cases, the amount we pay will be proportionate to the time you contribute to the award. For example, if you contribute 30% of your time to the award we will fund 30% of your salary.

Coapplicants

Coapplicants must contribute at least 10% of their research time to the award.

Coapplicants employed by higher education institutes, research institutes or healthcare organisations

1. Coapplicants with permanent, open-ended or long-term rolling contracts

   Coapplicants with these contract types can ask for a contribution to their salary if their employment contract states that they must  get their salary from external grant funding.

   The amount we pay will be proportionate to the time they contribute to the award, for example if they contribute 30% of their time to the award we will fund 30% of their salary. The coapplicant’s employing organisation must confirm: 

   • that they must get salary recovery from external grant funding
   • they will guarantee to provide salary support, including any salary costs not covered by Wellcome, for the period of time that the person will be working on the grant

2. Coapplicants who don’t have permanent, open ended or long-term rolling contracts

   Coapplicants without a permanent, open ended or long-term rolling contract can request salary depending on the amount of their time they will spend on the grant:

   • Less than 80% of coapplicant’s time on the grant: they can request salary proportionate to the time they will spend on the grant. Their organisation must guarantee space and salary support if they cannot get it from other sources for the period of time they are working on the grant. Their post cannot be dependent on the application being successful.
   • 80% or more of coapplicant’s time on the grant: they can ask for their full salary. Their organisation does not have to guarantee salary support if salary cannot be obtained from other sources for the period of time they are working on the grant. The post can be dependent on the application being successful.
   • If the coapplicants are employed on the award as research assistants and they are to spend 100% of their time on the award, their post does not need to be underwritten by the administering organisation and can be dependent on the application being successful.

   Alternatively, coapplicants may get their salary through employment on another grant.

Coapplicants employed by charities, social enterprises, non-governmental organisations or commercial organisations

Coapplicants can ask for salary if they are employed by these organisations. The amount we pay will be proportionate to the time they will contribute to the award. Their employment contract does not need to state that they must get their salary from external grant funding.   

Staff working on your programme

We will cover the salary costs of all staff, full or part-time, who will work on your grant.

Staff members may include:

• research assistants or technicians employed on your grant
• experts with lived experience
• specialist service staff and technical experts, for example in environmental sustainability, data analysis, fieldwork and clinical studies
• project manager, if you have multiple applicants on your programme
• support if you or a member of staff employed on your grant is disabled or has a long-term health condition

Teaching buyout

Humanities and social science researchers can ask for funds for research or teaching replacement to cover the cost of a temporary replacement lecturer. They must retain at least a 10% commitment to teaching.

Costs:

• can cover up to 33% FTE of your contracted time
• are usually for a person at a more junior level than the postholder
• can be spread across the full period of the grant

Researchers who already get buyout costs from another grant (funded by Wellcome or elsewhere) can ask us for this cost, but only for the period of time on the award when they won't receive buyout costs from another grant.

Researchers must provide a letter from their employing organisation, confirming that their contract includes a teaching commitment. They should include this in the grant application.

PhD/Research Masters fees

We do not provide studentships on this award. But if applicants employ research staff, including technicians, on the grant they can ask for the costs to cover their PhD/Research Masters fees. Each applicant can ask for fees for up to two research staff in total on the grant, to a maximum of eight per team. Research staff should be hired to undertake specific research activities on the grant and we will cover the fees for their PhD/Research Masters studies.

Early-career applicants (up to and including holders of early-career fellowships) may not supervise a PhD student alone but can be a co-supervisor with a mid-career or established colleague. If fees are not requested at the application stage, grant funds cannot be repurposed for them during the award.

Research staff should be defined as staff members and incur a lower fee than the student rate. Where organisations do not have a staff rate, they may request fees at the home student rate. If no other rate is available, they may request the international student rate.

We will pay for the materials and consumables you need to carry out your project, including:

• laboratory chemicals and materials (for example reagents, isotopes, peptides, enzymes, antibodies, gases, proteins, cell/tissue/bacterial culture, plasticware and glassware)
• project-specific personal protective equipment (PPE) that is above the standard expected for the setting
• printing associated with fieldwork and empirical research
• associated charges for shipping, delivery and freight.

You can ask for the cost of access to shared equipment, facilities or services if they’re essential to your project.

These may include materials and consumables, plus a proportion of:

• maintenance and service contracts
• staff time costs for dedicated technical staff employed to operate the equipment or facility

We don’t cover the costs of:

• estates and utilities
• depreciation or insurance
• other staff, for example, contributions towards departmental technical, administrative and management staff time

We do cover these costs if related to animal housing facilities.

If the facilities or equipment were paid for by a Wellcome grant, you can only ask for access charges if:

• the grant has ended
• any support for running costs and maintenance contracts has ended

Equipment purchase

You can ask for the research equipment you need to carry out your project where:

• it is not available at your administering organisation or through collaborations, and
• you will be the main user, with priority access to it.

Costs may include purchase, delivery, installation, maintenance and training, where necessary.

You can purchase second-hand equipment if it is more environmentally sustainable to do so.

We will cover VAT and import duties if:

• the usual UK exemptions on equipment used for medical research don’t apply
• you’re applying from a non-UK organisation, and you can show these costs can’t be recovered

Equipment maintenance

We will cover maintenance costs for equipment if it is for new equipment or it is for existing equipment that is:

• funded by us or another source
• essential to the proposed research project
• five years old, or will become five years old during the lifetime of the grant
• cost effective and environmentally sustainable to keep maintaining it

We won’t cover maintenance costs for equipment if there is a mechanism in place to recoup these costs through access charges.

Computer equipment

We will cover the cost of one personal computer or laptop per person up to £1,500.

We won't pay for:

• more expensive items, unless you can justify them
• installation or training costs

If your organisation uses full economic costing methodology:

You can ask for funds to buy animals if they are essential to your project. We will also fund the charge-out rates for animal house facilities. These costs include:

• running costs (including animal maintenance, any experimental procedures, licences and relevant staff training)
• appropriate estates costs
• cage and equipment depreciation costs, but not building depreciation costs

If the research will be carried out in the UK and use macaques, they must be sourced from the MRC Centre for Macaques.

We may not pay the full charge-out rate for an animal house facility if we've provided significant funding towards the infrastructure and/or core support of the facility.

If your organisation does not use full economic costing methodology:

You can ask for funds to cover:

• the cost of buying and transporting animals
• running costs (including animal maintenance, any experimental procedures, licences and relevant staff training)
• staff costs, for example, contributions towards the salaries of animal house technicians
• equipment maintenance
• housing equipment specific to the project
• microbiological monitoring
• waste disposal
• personal and project licences
• specific and relevant training and environmental enrichment costs

In these cases we will not provide:

• estates costs
• cage or building depreciation costs

We will provide funds if you need to outsource project work to:

• contract research organisations
• other fee-for-service providers

Contract research organisations must be able to sign up to our grant conditions. 
 

If you need to carry out clinical research in the UK using NHS patients or facilities, we will cover some of the costs.

Annex A of the guidelines for attributing the costs of health and social care research and development (AcoRD) sets out the costs we cover in the UK, and which costs should be funded through the Department of Health and Social Care in England, or its equivalent in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. If you're based in the Republic of Ireland, we expect you to adhere to the spirit of these principles.

If your proposal involves clinical research using NHS resources, check if you need to upload a SoECAT form with your application.
 

Fieldwork expenses can include:

• survey and data collection, including communication and data collection services and any associated costs such as essential field materials, travel costs and language translation services
• the purchase, hire and running costs of vehicles dedicated to your project
• expenses for subjects and volunteers, including the recruitment of participants, their participatory fees and travel costs
• statistical analysis

You can ask for other fieldwork costs that aren’t listed here. You’ll need to justify them.

You can ask for these costs if you are applying from a:

• higher education institution
• research institute
• healthcare organisation
• charity, social enterprise or non-governmental research organisation
• small company

Environmentally conscious travel

Travel on grants should be done in an environmentally conscious way, in line with our environmental sustainability funding policy. You should consider if you could meet your trip’s objectives using video conferencing, hybrid meetings or virtual attendance.

Where travel is necessary, you can ask for:

• the cost of low carbon travel where practical, even if it's more expensive (for example travelling by train instead of flying)
• economy flights when train journeys are over 10 hours, or not possible due to availability, safety, or visa permit reasons, or in exceptional circumstances such as a disability, long-term health condition or caring requirements necessitating faster travel. We will not pay for business class flights.
• project-related resources or activities that provide an alternative to travel, such as video conferencing, communication and file-sharing software
• costs to mitigate the carbon emissions of the essential travel by purchasing accredited carbon credits. If carbon mitigation for travel is not part of your organisational sustainability strategy, you can ask us for a similar level of support for other sustainability initiatives. Your organisation must contact us for approval before submitting your application.

We won't pay for the core infrastructure that your administering organisation should provide, unless you're eligible to ask for these costs under our overheads policy. Examples of these costs include:

• organisation-wide video conferencing packages
• high-speed broadband
• HD screens

Conference attendance

You can ask for a contribution towards the costs of attending scientific and academic meetings and conferences, including travel, accommodation, and registration fees. The limits are:

• Lead applicant – £2,000 a year
• Coapplicants – £2,000 each a year
• Research and technical staff employed on your grant – £1,000 each a year

You can ask for the cost of accredited carbon credits to mitigate the emissions from conference travel in addition to these limits.

We provide costs to cover caring responsibilities for any staff employed on your grant to attend a conference. This includes childcare and any other caring responsibility they have. We will pay these if:

• Wellcome is providing the salary
• the conference is directly related to the research
• the caring costs are over and above what they would normally pay for care
• the conference organiser and their employing organisation are unable to cover the costs

You can ask for up to £1,000 per person for each conference.

Other essential travel

You can ask for travel and subsistence costs for collaborative visits for you, any coapplicants and any staff employed on your grant to visit collaborators (or for them to visit you), and for other essential visits, for example to facilities, for sample collection and for field work. You’ll need to justify each visit and its duration.

Subsistence costs

Up to one month

If you’re away for up to one month you can ask for subsistence costs. These include accommodation, meals and incidentals (for example, refreshments or newspapers).

If your administering organisation has a subsistence policy, use their rates.

If your administering organisation doesn’t have a subsistence policy, please use the HMRC rates.

1 to 12 months

If you’re away for more than one month and up to 12 months, we will pay reasonable rental costs only, including aparthotels. You should discuss appropriate rates with the administering and employing organisations, or Wellcome, as needed. We expect you to choose the most economical options, booked in advance where possible.

If you’re from a low- or middle- income country and will be working in a high-income country for more than one month and up to 12 months, you can also ask for up to £10 a day to cover extra costs, such as transport.

More than 12 months

If you’re away for more than 12 months, we will pay the costs of your housing. You should discuss your needs with your administering and host organisations.

The allowance we provide will be based on family and business need. We will set the maximum allowance we pay for each location. This will be based on current market data or, where data is unavailable, in consultation with your administering organisation, using equivalent market rates. Please contact us if you need help calculating the costs.

We will cover the direct expenses you have to pay to find and rent a home. We will not cover the cost of utilities or any refurbishment.

Overseas research

If you or any research staff employed on your grant will be doing research away from your home organisation, we'll help with the additional costs of working on the project overseas. Read the 'Overseas allowances' section for details.

You can ask for these costs if you are applying from a:

• higher education institution
• research institute
• healthcare organisation
• charity, social enterprise or non-governmental research organisation
• small company

If you or any staff employed on your grant will be spending time in another country, we’ll help you with the additional costs of working on the project overseas.

Our overseas allowances are:

• a contribution towards the personal cost of carrying out research overseas, to ensure that you are not disadvantaged
• provided on the assumption that you’ll be paying income tax, either in your home country, or the country you will be working in (your personal tax is your responsibility)
• provided on the understanding that you or your partner will not receive equivalent allowances from elsewhere
• determined by the amount of time you will spend away from your home country

Carbon offset costs

We expect the people we fund to choose travel that has a lower carbon impact, where practical, even if it’s more expensive (for example travelling by train instead of flying). We will not pay for business class flights.

You can ask for costs to offset the carbon generated by the travel, as part of your overseas allowances. If carbon offsetting for travel is not part of your organisational sustainability strategy, you can ask us for a similar level of support for other sustainability initiatives. Your organisation must get our approval for other sustainability initiatives to be included in applications.

Read our environmental sustainability funding policy for what you and your organisation can do.
 

You should ask for the necessary costs to integrate key stakeholders’ perspectives across the life cycle of your project, from agenda setting, funding, and research design to implementation, monitoring, and evaluation. You cannot ask for costs for any activities that take place before the grant start date. 

Costs can include, but are not limited to:

• compensation for stakeholders’ time and expertise
• recruitment of participants, participatory fees, travel and other reasonable expenses
• incentives and recognition for involvement for example, gift cards, one-off awards. These must be aligned with our Research involving human participants policy and avoid undue inducement to take part.
• engagement professionals, for example community outreach coordinators, patient advocates, engaged research advisory board, lived experience experts
• room hire, catering and other associated costs of running interviews, workshops, focus groups, partnership building and other activities to integrate stakeholder voices into your research
• translation services, accessibility costs, survey tools to facilitate inclusive knowledge sharing
• monitoring and evaluation activities

For more information, read our guidance on using an engaged research approach.

You can ask for costs associated with disseminating research results and findings from Wellcome-funded research, including podcasts, media outreach, websites and talks.

For costs associated with written publications, consult our open access policy.

You can ask for overheads if your grant will be based at a:

• university outside the UK
• research organisation that does not receive core funding for overheads
• charitable or not-for-profit organisation
• small or medium-sized commercial organisation

Universities in the UK

If you’re based at a UK university, you may be eligible to receive overheads on a Discretionary Award if the award does not meet the criteria for the Charity Research Support Fund. We will tell you if this applies to you.

We may provide overheads on any part of your grant that is sub-contracted to any of the organisations listed above, however, if you are based at a UK university, you cannot ask for overheads for sub-contracted activity if your university will include the sub-contracted funding in its annual report to the UK Charity Research Support Fund.

Overheads can include:

• estates, for example building and premises
• non-project dedicated administrative and support staff
• administration, for example finance, library and room hire

The total cost for overheads should not be more than 20% of the direct research costs.

These costs must directly support the activity funded by the grant.

How to apply for these costs

If you are requesting funds for overheads, in your application you will need to provide a letter from your Finance Director providing information on how you have calculated these costs. 

If your organisation has an externally audited or otherwise verified methodology for calculating overhead rates, then the letter must include:

• confirmation of the validated rate
• how the rate was arrived at/who provided the rate
• when the rate was last reviewed
• where details of the rate can be found

If your organisation does not have an externally audited or otherwise verified methodology for calculating overhead rates, then the letter must include:

• a breakdown of the costs requested
• confirmation that the request is a true representation of the costs incurred

You can ask for these costs if you are applying from a:

• higher education institution
• research institute
• healthcare organisation
• charity, social enterprise or non-governmental research organisation
• small company

Continuing professional development and professional skills training

You can ask for a contribution towards these costs.

Types of training can include:

• research leadership, professional and people management skills
• career development support
• responsible conduct of research
• diversity and inclusion
• promotion of a healthy research culture
• understanding and reducing the environmental impact of research

We expect the employing organisation to provide and fund this training. However, if these types of training are not available, or the quality is inadequate, you can ask for up to £500 a year for lead applicants, coapplicants and each member of staff employed on your grant who will be:

• in a post of 12 months duration or more only and
• working on Wellcome funded awards for at least 50% full time equivalent

You will need to justify these costs in your application.

Research skills training

You can ask for costs to cover training for the technical and research skills you need to deliver your proposed research.

You can ask for whatever research skills training you need for lead applicants, coapplicants and each member of staff employed on your grant, who will be:

• in a post of 12 months duration or more only and
• working on Wellcome funded awards for at least 50% full time equivalent

You will need to justify these costs in your application.
 

If your organisation receives open access block grant funding, you can ask them to cover your open access article processing charges.

If you're at an organisation that does not receive block grant funding, we’ll supplement your grant when your paper has been accepted for publication.

You cannot ask for these charges in your grant application.

How we calculate your inflation allowance

We will add an inflation allowance to your award. Your inflation allowance is based on your total eligible costs and the duration of the award.

We will use an inflation allowance that reflects the inflation rate of the country where the host organisation is based using data from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). You'll receive the following allowance if the costs in your application are in pounds sterling.

The costs in your application must be based on current known costs, excluding inflation.

You should allow for salary pay awards during Year 1. These should be based on pay awards already agreed. If you don’t know what the pay award is yet, then use the IMF rate for the currency your award will be made in.

Allowed costs

You may ask for the following costs (you will have to justify them in your application):

• specialist publications that are relevant to the research and not available in institutional libraries
• consultancy fees, including for lived experience experts and where such fees are required to receive advice on a specific aspect of your proposed work which cannot be provided by anyone involved in the application
• ethics approval costs where these are charged by the approval body and they are a direct cost of the research. We will only pay the actual cost of the review. We will not pay a percentage cost of the grant.
• expenses for subjects and volunteers – includes recruitment of participants, their participatory fees and travel, as well as interviewee expenses
• reasonable research-associated costs related to the feedback of health-related findings but not any healthcare-associated costs
• costs associated with developing an outputs management plan
• questionnaires, recruitment material, and newsletters for clinical, epidemiological and qualitative research studies
• public engagement materials where dissemination (including printing and publishing) is a key activity of the project
• recruitment, advertising and interviewee travel costs for staff to be employed on the grant
• purchase, hire and running costs of project-dedicated vehicles
• project-specific personal protective equipment (PPE) that is above the standard expected for the setting

• costs to host/a contribution towards hosting:

  • a conference
  • a session within a conference
  • a symposium
  • a seminar series
  • advisory board meetings, if appropriate

  The meeting should either be:

  • for research purposes, for example data gathering
  • to disseminate your research findings, for example to policy makers.

  Costs can include:

  • travel and accommodation for keynote speakers
  • external room hire and catering
  • event publicity and conference materials
  • childcare and other caring responsibility costs for delegates
  • any costs related to accessibility and inclusion

Disallowed costs

We will not pay for:

• phone, postage, photocopying and stationery, unless you can justify these within a clinical or epidemiological study
• page charges and the cost of colour prints
• PhD stipends
• office furniture, such as chairs, desks and filing cabinets
• clothing such as lab coats and shoes
• non-research related activities such as catering, room and venue hire for staff parties, team-building events and social activities
• indemnity insurance (insurance cover against claims made by subjects or patients associated with a research programme) unless it is for a clinical trial and the insurance is a direct cost of the research
• radiation protection costs
• contingency funds
• organisation insurance
• clinical examination or course fees
• working capital costs of commercial organisations
• engagement activities that do not support an engaged approach to research or for one-off events/exhibitions

We will only fund these costs in the case of animal-related research and/or where we are providing overheads:

• estates costs – such as building and premises costs, basic services and utilities (if your organisation uses full economic costing methodology)
• research, technical and administrative staff whose time is shared across several projects and isn’t supported by an audit record
• cleaning, waste and other disposal costs