Application volume is outpacing available funding, intensifying competition and worsening pressure on the peer-review system

The grant lottery: award rates at UK national funding agency fall below 20% But those who win grants are now getting more

Application volume is outpacing available funding, intensifying competition and worsening pressure on the peer-review system

Research budgets have not kept pace with inflation in the United Kingdom.Credit: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty

The proportion of research and innovation awards granted by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the United Kingdom’s national funding agency, has nearly halved over the past seven financial years, as application rates surged by more than 80%, new data show.

The UKRI data, published last month, show that between 2017–18 and 2024–25, the number of applications to the national funding agency increased from 16,355 to 29,927. Meanwhile, the number of awards granted per year increased by only 3% over the same period, to 5,667 in 2024–25 (see ‘Diminishing returns’). A substantial bump in applications was seen in 2020–21, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, and a similar, but smaller, bump was seen in awards, which levelled out over the following years.

The increase in applications is mostly due to applications to Innovate UK — which supports industry-driven research and now accounts for more than 56% of the assessed applications. The award rate for these applications was 14% in 2024–25.

For academic and research-led grants from UKRI, applications and award rates vary between research councils — the subject-specific bodies that allocate funding in areas such as engineering, medical research and social sciences — but many have seen a fall in award rates over the past financial year. Overall, the proportion of awards granted per year — including research and innovation, fellowships and training grants — fell from 36% in 2017–18 to 19% in 2024–25, the lowest in the decade. The total number of active awards has remained fairly stable, and is now around 21,000.

Price of progress

Despite the stagnation in the number of awards, the value of UKRI grants steadily increased from around £3 billion (US$4 billion) to more than £6 billion between 2015–16 and 2023–24, before falling to £4.5 billion this financial year.

Over the past few years, laboratories and universities have reckoned with the consequences of significant inflation. In October 2022, the UK consumer price index hit 11.1%, a 41-year high. According to the UKRI data, over the past three years, the average amount awarded for a successful application exceeded £800,000. In 2015–16, the average value of a grant was just more than £450,000.

Eleanor Riley, an immunologist at the University of Edinburgh and a member of the UKRI’s Medical Research Council (who spoke to Nature in a personal capacity), says that research budgets have barely kept pace with inflation. A lack of investment from the country’s government is mostly to blame, she adds. A research and development analysis, published this year by the Campaign for Science and Engineering, an advocacy group in London, showed that government spending in real terms — when adjusted for inflation — plateaued in 2019 owing to high inflation.

The activities of other funders, including US-based research institutes affected by funding cuts from President Donald Trump’s administration, might have also affected UKRI application volume, with more researchers in the United States looking outside the country to secure funding.

Demand management

In 2022, the Technopolis Group — an international research and consulting organization — published a review of the UKRI’s response to the substantial bump in applications and the expedited review timelines in the COVID-19 pandemic. During this period, UKRI staff and reviewers faced widespread burnout, according to the report, and more than one-third of awardees had experienced delays while waiting for a decision.

A number of UKRI councils have adopted demand-management policies to reduce pressure on their peer-review systems as applications increase. In 2015, the Natural Environmental Research Council (NERC) implemented a demand-management policy limiting the number of applications from individual institutions on the basis of success rate: those with a low success rate were subjected to a cap on the number of applications they could submit. Although this is not the only way to reduce pressure on peer-review and grant systems, it tends to lead to more-robust applications, says Riley. She says other councils could follow suit.