Thanks to the herculean efforts of our dedicated staff, we successfully and fully obligated our Fiscal Year (FY) 2025 NINDS appropriation of $2.69 billion. Superb scientists supported by NINDS continue to advance our mission to seek fundamental knowledge about the brain and nervous system and to use that knowledge to reduce the burden of neurological disease for all people.
We are now looking forward to getting back to stewarding the taxpayers’ investment in neuroscience. We are currently operating under a Continuing Resolution (i.e., using the same budget as FY 2025) as we await Congressional passage of the FY 2026 NIH appropriation.
Because 2025 brought rapid changes in NIH operations, we are highlighting key updates as we move into the new fiscal year. For the most up-to-date information on NIH funding policy, please refer to the NIH Grants & Funding website.
Key Updates
- The Center for Scientific Review (CSR) now reviews all applications. NINDS no longer runs its own study sections. Our exceptional NINDS scientific review officers have moved to CSR, where they continue to ensure careful and rigorous review of NINDS applications.
- Grants.gov will serve as NIH’s single official source for grant and cooperative agreement funding opportunities beginning in FY 2026 (see NOT-OD-25-143). The NIH Guide will continue to be used for policy and informational notices.
- NIH aims to simplify and clarify the application process by reducing the number of Notice of Funding Opportunities (NOFOs) and encouraging broader use of the parent, or investigator-initiated, NOFOs.
- NIH “Highlighted Topics” are a new way to communicate scientific areas that specific NIH Institutes are especially interested in funding and that NINDS will include in our “Select Pay” considerations. Visit the NIH Highlighted Topics webpage for further information. You can also find more information about this new centralized and simplified resource designed to inform the research community about particular areas of science of interest to NIH.
- New requirements for foreign components. For grants requesting NIH funding for one or more foreign components, NIH will require that competing applications submit applications to a NOFO that supports the new PF5 Activity Code for grants, the new UF5 Activity Code for cooperative agreements, or another complex mechanism activity code that supports the International Project component type. Please see NOT-OD-25-155: New Application Structure for NIH-Funded International Collaborations. This announcement covers additional information.
- NINDS is also considering additional changes aligned with the new NIH funding framework announced by the NIH Office of the Director on November 21, 2025. The framework (including details on the core tenets) and an NIH Extramural Nexus article will be publicly available on NIH's Funding Strategies webpage.
Funding Strategy
NINDS no longer intends to use a strict payline funding strategy based on the percentile score of applications reviewed. We will continue to base funding decisions on scientific merit, but may also include portfolio balance, investigators’ effort and other support, and rigor. Accordingly, NINDS will not publish a percentile to define a payline. NINDS will continue to rely heavily on peer-reviewed assessment by study sections and recommendations of the National Advisory Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NANDS) Council in making our funding decisions. NINDS’s research priorities will remain transparent and be featured in NIH Highlighted Topics, NANDS Council presentations, NOFOs, our strategic plan(pdf, 728 KB), and on our webpages.
Although the absence of a published payline may make it harder for investigators to gauge the funding likelihood of their project after receiving a percentile score, this approach aligns with how we have historically funded non-percentiled grants, including clinical trials, therapy development programs, team science projects, high-priority programs, and training grants.
NINDS remains committed to fundamental discovery in neuroscience research and expects to invest a consistent proportion of its base funds (those that are not Congressionally mandated for a particular area of science, e.g., the NIH BRAIN Initiative®, NIH HEAL Initiative®, and Alzheimer’s Related Dementia) in investigator-initiated research.
In the face of increasing costs per research project, NINDS will continue existing policies that apply greater stringency to funding investigator-initiated grants to investigators with more than $1.5 million in NIH funds (see NOT-NS-24-060), as well as to grants with direct costs more than $500,000 per year. We are committed to preserving the overall health of the research enterprise and the future of the neuroscience workforce, and these policies will allow us to fund as many extramural investigators as possible and to continue to provide special funding consideration to trainees and scientists launching their careers (e.g., Early Stage Investigators). For applications from investigators without other grant funding, but for which funds are not fully available, NINDS will continue to convert some R01 awards to Short-Term Project (R56) awards.
We appreciate your patience as NIH works to streamline and consolidate its processes and functions. Please let us know how we can support you.