The National Institutes of Health longstanding “payline” has helped everyone see the connection between the scientific peer review process and NIH grant funding decisions. What will the latest NIH announcement mean to this? (Photo by MICHAEL MATHES/AFP via Getty Images)
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Are you are interested in getting National Institutes of Health funding or do you benefit from NIH-funded research in any way—meaning that you have a human head or body? Well, then, you may want to pay attention to this new NIH announcement about paylines. Make sure that you read this November 21, 2025, announcement in its entirety, though, because the word “payline” doesn’t appear in the title of the announcement that reads “Implementing a Unified NIH Funding Strategy to Guide Consistent and Clearer Award Decisions.” In fact, the word “payline” doesn’t even appear until the second half of the entire announcement. Nevertheless, it’s important to pay close attention to the lines that do include the word “payline” and read between these paylines to understand the significance of this latest change to the NIH under the Trump administration.
The Word Payline Appears Only In The Second Half Of The NIH Announcement
The first appearance of the word “payline” in the 583-word announcement is at the 341st word. That’s within a line that says, “NIH ICOs will not rely on funding paylines in developing pay plans.” Here NIH ICOs stands for Institutes, Centers and Offices. And the link provided in that sentence goes straight to an August 7, 2025, Executive Order from U.S. President Donald Trump.
The fact that this word “payline” appears so late in the announcement is interesting since it is really at the crux of the announcement and the most concrete and specific change being declared in this announcement. It’s a bit like having to wait until the second half of a movie to learn the actual plot, sort of like what happened in the 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Or maybe it’s more like the ending of the 1999 movie The Sixth Sense, where what that Bruce Willis character finds out at the end changes the meaning of the entire movie.
What Is A Payline for the NIH
If you know what NIH paylines are, then maybe you already have a sixth sense of what’s going on here. If not, here’s the skinny on what paylines are. The payline, otherwise known as the funding cutoff, is the percentage of all grant applications submitted to a particular NIH Institute, Center or Office that will end up getting funded.
Let’s look at an example of something I detailed in Forbes last month. A new multiyear funding policy for NIH grants established by the Trump administration has dropped the funding rates for National Cancer Institute grants from around one in 10 applicants all the way down to one in 25. That would correspond to a drop in the payline for NCI from around 10% down to 4%.
As a percentage, the payline number could theoretically run from a low of 0%—meaning that no grant proposals get awarded—up to 100%, where all grant proposals submitted manage to get funding. Of course, paylines, which have typically varied among different NIH ICOs, have never been near 100%, except in some alcohol-induced, ate-way-too-much-fruitcake fantasy world. That would mean that you could write almost anything on your grant application, such as the lyrics to the song Just A Gigolo, and still get funded.
No, historically, paylines have run much lower and have been progressively dropping lower and lower since the 1990s to the dismay of many scientists. Entering 2025, most paylines at different NIH ICOs had long fallen below 10%, which again meant less than one in ten grant applications were getting funded. And guess what’s happened to paylines in 2025. The answer rhymes with “down frown”—yep, they’ve gone down even more.
The falling paylines over the past two decades plus have reflected the fact that Congressional-allocated funding to the NIH has only barely kept up with inflation since the 1990s. That’s despite the fact that scientific research has gotten a lot more complex and expensive since the 1990s, you know bak when Walkmans, boomboxes, corded telephones and the Macarena were still common things: Each NIH ICO would then set its payline each fiscal year then based on the amount of funds they had available.
Also, historically, when your grant application has gone through the scientific peer review process, a committee of scientific experts external to the NIH and U.S. government, that is a committee of your peers, would review your application and then assign it a priority score. Each member of the committee would give the application a score between one and nine. Like golf scores and the number of times you’ve been slapped in the face with a fish, the lower the score the better. The average of all the committee members’ scores would determine the overall priority score for that application.
The NIH would then convert that overall priority score into a percentile. Similarly, like the probability of a marmot punching you in the groin, the lower the percentile the better. The percentile would show where your application essentially ranked among all applications. If that percentile fell below the current payline percentage for that NIH institute, center or office then you knew you were in the running to get funded. If it fell above the current payline percentage, especially well above this percentage, then you typically were what is known technically as bleep out of luck. Now, there have been exceptions to the latter if your score was just above the payline but very closely matched the priorities of that NIH ICO.
NIH Paylines Helped Make It Clear What Percentage Of Grant Applications Were Being Funded
One of the benefits of haves these paylines clearly established and announced is that it made it relatively clear to everyone what percentage of all grant applications to a particular NIH ICO was getting funded. It’s a bit like knowing the grading curve for an exam or class. You kind of want to know your chances before trying for something. It’s a big difference realizing that you have a 10% chance of being successful versus a 4% chance. The latter might motivate you to try something else like buying a lottery ticket or selling photos of your feet.
Knowing paylines has allowed everyone—ranging from scientists to patient advocates to the general public—keep the NIH more accountable. Again it’s like knowing whether a teacher is giving only 1% of the class the grade of an A versus 10% versus 50%. This way you could complain if NIH funding rates get too low and suggest that NIH funding be increased. Of course, that hasn’t guaranteed that anyone in the Presidential administration or Congress will listen to you. But at least you can raise your fist to the sky and yell in the voice that William Shatner used to yell “khaaaan” in the 1982 Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan movie.
Paylines also have helped everyone see what was happening in different NIH ICOs over time. It helped you decide to which ICO you might submit a given grant application. After all, whenever your application could in theory fall within the purview of two or more different ICOs, you’re not going to say, “Let’s make this even harder for myself and choose the place where I have the least chances.” The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Strokes, has long indicated on its website, “Recognizing the diversity of the grant portfolio, NINDS views paylines as the fairest way to make most funding decisions.”
Moving Away From Paylines Could Mean The NIH Relies Less On Scientific Peer Review
As you can see, historically again, it’s been relatively straightforward to see how the scores from the scientific peer review process have corresponded to the chances of you getting awarded the grant. A good score from the committee of scientific peers that translated to a percentage falling below the payline did not necessarily always guarantee funding since the lack of available funds and significant differences from the priorities of that NIH ICO could stand in the way. However, in general, there was a clear association between what the committee of external scientific experts thought and your chances.
Without the presence of paylines adn no reasonable alternative put in place, it could be a lot more difficult to tell how much the NIH will be listening to the external scientific peer review process. Previously, I covered in Forbes the August 7 Executive Order from Trump that had given his administration much more control over determining what grants will be awarded to whom. It seemed to relegate the scientific peer review process to more of a role where recommendations can be more readily ignored.
The NIH announcement did state, “Our decision making on applications will still weigh peer review scores and critiques.” But it didn’t say specifically how. Nor did it specify what weight peer review would still have in the final funding decision. Is that a bit like a teen telling his or her parents, “Don’t worry. When I go off to college, I will take into consideration everything that you’ve told me?”
Will No Paylines Mean That NIH Grant Decisions Become Less Transparent And More Arbitrary?
Even though the NIH announcement about moving away from paylines did open with “Today, NIH has implemented steps towards a unified strategy that will help guide clearer and consistent funding decisions” and did repeat words like “support the most scientifically meritorious research ideas possible,” the announcement did not clarify what exact system will be put in place to make all of this happen. Saying that something will be “clearer”, “consistent” and “meritorious” can be a bit like someone stating on a dating profile “I’m an open book”, “I don’t want drama” or some other overused phrase that doesn’t mean a whole lot as I’ve detailed in Psychology Today. Your next question should be, “How specifically are you going to assure me that this will be the case?” After all, there’s the age old saying, “Look at what people do and not at what they say.”
The overriding concern is that a lot of the Trump administration’s actions to date have been leading to the administration having greater control over NIH funds rather than the scientific community and the tax-paying public. For example, the Trump administration has already terminated numerous NIH grants that were already awarded via the scientific peer review process. It also has withheld already awarded NIH funding to different universities like Harvard while demanding that the universities comply with Trump administration demands that have had little to do with the NIH funding and the scientific projects that they supported.
Without the use of paylines or any other transparent metric that clearly available to the public, the risk is that funding decisions will get even more politicized and less scientific. Will certain NIH grants get awarded even though they got bad reviews and poor scores from scientific peer review simply because they match what the Presidential administration wants to see? Similarly, will certain NIH grant proposals not get funded just because they go against what the administration wants to say to the public? Will this allow NIH grants to be awarded more as political favors? Although the payline system has be far from perfect, it was one of the biggest ways of keeping track of what’s happening with NIH funding. Therefore, it pays to pay more attention to what is happening to paylines.