All members of the Duke community who are serving in any paid capacity on a project must be listed as project personnel. The budget should clearly describe the proposed effort of every person, or position, for which salary is requested. Sponsors may ask that effort be described either in terms of academic, summer, or calendar-year months depending on the type of appointment the person holds. Others want effort described by appointment type and percentages. When instructions are not explicit, such as in some foundation applications, the budget justification should clearly describe the contributed effort and appointment type of every salaried project staff member. Note that effort for all Duke personnel must be recorded in SPS in the Salary Worksheet.

Requested salaries must be supported by basic salary information. However, generally speaking, a strong justification will focus on how the project will be accomplished with the proposed personnel.

Only Duke personnel may appear as salaried persons in a project budget. Those not on the Duke payroll may be consultants, recipients of honoraria, or affiliated with an institution which will be receiving a subaward from Duke if the project is funded.

If personnel are contributing effort to the project for which they do not expect to be reimbursed, they should still be listed as project personnel. Their effort should be described just as the effort of paid personnel, and their contributions clearly described in the budget justification.

Faculty Members

Faculty members may request academic year salary support or supplement their nine-month salary with up to three months of summer support. For each summer month, they may seek funding for one/ninth of their nine-month salary based upon the salary of the previous academic year. Summer salary supplements may be paid for work performed in May, June, July, and August.

If a faculty member is working on several sponsored projects, care must be taken to ensure that no more than 100% of effort is committed to the aggregate of all projects and other university responsibilities.

NOTE: Some agencies place restrictions on the amount of time they will support a faculty member during a given year or on the amount of salary they will pay. For example, generally, NSF will only support two months total in an academic year and summer and NIH caps the total salary a faculty member may receive.

Post-doctoral Associates

Post-doctoral associates may be hired on research grants on a full-time or part-time basis.

Professional and Technical Staff

Other professionals such as technicians or programmers may be hired on a full or part-time basis.

Graduate Students

Graduate students may be hired on research grants as full-time or part-time research assistants. The compensation of graduate students on a research project must reflect an employer-employee relationship. Consequently, all payments are considered wages and are taxable income.

Fellowships and Training Projects: As stipulated by the sponsor, stipends, tuition, and fees may be requested.

NOTE: NIH guidelines restrict payments to graduate students to an amount equal to the maximum amount allowed for a first-year postdoctoral employee at the same institution performing comparable work.

Undergraduate Students

Undergraduate students may work on grants and are usually hired as bi-weekly employees. Undergraduate workloads are necessarily limited to less than 20 hours per week and effort is usually described in hours.

Administrative and Clerical Staff

Administrative and Clerical Staff may be supported by sponsored projects but only under very limited circumstances. Ordinarily administrative support for grants is considered to be part of the F&A costs in the budget.