The US National Postdoctoral Association (NPA) is advocating for higher stipends from the National Research Service Award (NRSA) given to postdocs by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Many funders around the world use the NRSA as a baseline to determine their own annual stipend levels. However, policy watchers are making cases both for and against bumping up this baseline, which is currently US$37,000 for new postdocs. The last major change to the NRSA came when the NIH was in the middle of a cycle that awarded more and larger grants to principal investigators but left some postdocs behind. In 2000, the US National Academy of Sciences recommended that postdoc stipends be increased by 3% a year to keep up with inflation and the cost of living. "We responded with gradual increases," says Walter Schaffer, senior scientific adviser of extramural research at the NIH. "But since then, they have been relatively flat."
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