STAT+: NIH funding rates for early-career researchers plunged in 2025, new data show
A Trump administration change to how the National Institutes of Health awards grants has reduced early-stage investigators’ odds of securing funding, new data from the agency show.
During the 2025 fiscal year, 18.5% of early-stage researchers who applied for grants equivalent to an R01, the agency’s most common type of award, were successful. That’s an 11 percentage point drop compared to the 2023 fiscal year, when the success rate for such applications was 29.8%.
The data were shared during a recent meeting of the advisory council of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, one of NIH’s 27 institutes and centers. NHLBI’s own success rate for early-stage investigators mirrored the agency-wide trend, dropping from around 31% to 21% between the 2023 and 2025 fiscal years.
Anil Oza and Jonathan Wosen
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