A crowd of people, many wearing red t-shirts or high-visibility jackets, holding blue and white placards.

Academic workers on a picket line at the University of California, Los Angeles.Credit: Gary Coronado/Los Angeles Times via Getty

Amid a reckoning over poor job prospects and stagnating wages for early-career scientists, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) said this week that it will raise the salaries of thousands of postdoctoral researchers and graduate students who receive a prestigious NIH research fellowship. The move could boost pay for other scientists as well, because academic institutions often follow guidelines set by the NIH.

Beginning immediately, postdocs who hold one of the agency’s Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Awards (NRSAs) will earn at least US$61,008 per year — an 8% increase and the largest year-over-year increase the NIH has implemented since 2017. Postdocs’ salaries, which are adjusted for years of experience, are capped at $74,088 per year. Graduate students’ yearly salaries will rise by $1,000, amounting to an annual salary of $28,224. The agency will also provide an extra $500 in subsidies for childcare and $200 for training-related expenses.

“This is a major step in the right direction and something that the majority will agree is widely needed to retain talent in the biomedical and academic research sectors,” says Francisca Acosta, a biomedical engineer and postdoc at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, who is herself funded through an NRSA.

Postdoc shortage

In 2022, the agency assembled a working group to advise it on how best to retain and cultivate postdoctoral talent, after reports that principal investigators were struggling to fill vacant postdoc positions. In December last year, the panel recommended a minimum salary of $70,000 for postdocs.

The NIH agreed that a salary increase is indeed needed for the more than 17,000 trainees covered by the NRSAs. But in its announcement, the agency acknowledged that the pay rise it has implemented falls short of the council’s recommendation. It cited its tight budget in recent years as a reason.

It added that “pending the availability of funds through future appropriations”, the agency would increase salaries to meet the recommended $70,000 target in the next three to five years.

The agency also suggested that NIH-funded institutions could supplement salaries in other ways. That presents a challenge, according to Sharona Gordon, a biophysicist at the University of Washington in Seattle, given that the NIH’s modular R01 grants — one of the main NIH research awards with which principal investigators fund their labs — have remained at $250,000 per year since they were introduced in 1998. Such grants cannot be used to supplement salaries, meaning that lab heads have to pull money from other sources to increase trainees’ pay.

Even scientists who approve of the NIH’s move say it could have unintended consequences. “For institutions such as ours, which mandate that the postdoc minimum salary be set to the NIH minimum, there are some concerns that this increase in personnel costs could be a barrier for labs based on funding levels,” Acosta says.

For some, the five-year timeline for the increase feels insufficient. Haroon Popal, a cognitive-science postdoc at the University of Maryland in College Park whose work is funded by the NIH, says that although he understands the pressures on the agency, the new salary will not be enough to support him as he assumes multiple caring responsibilities. Even with the boost, postdoc salaries in academia fall far short of what researchers could make in government, industry or non-profit positions.

“This is an issue of diversity and equity for me,” he says. “The new postdoc salary is not allowing people like me to be in academia, which is counter to the NIH’s, institutions’ and our scientific community’s goals of increased diversity.”