Rock Talk: How Long Is an R01

The R01 research project grant is NIH’s mainstay grant mechanism and is used for much of our investigator-initiated research. When talking about about NIH funding, the subject that most often comes up is the R01 and how support for R01s may be changing over time. Recently I received numerous inquiries about whether the duration of the R01 has been shrinking. NIH has limited the duration of all grants to 5 years but I want to assure the community that there is no NIH-wide policy that dictates a project length duration below 5 years, and that our ICs work hard to provide support both in terms of funding levels and the award length that is commensurate with the work proposed in the application. But to help answer the duration question, we looked at the data to find out the facts about trends in R01 project length.