K. REDINGER/DESIGN PICS/CORBISWhen Yegor Domanov moved from Ukraine to the University of Helsinki on a fellowship funded by the Academy of Finland four years ago, he received a monthly stipend of 
2,000 (US$2,600). The good news was that he didn't have to pay any taxes on it. The bad news was that he received no benefits, so he opted not to pay for health-care coverage. Now, he is in the second year of a 4,500-a-month Marie Curie fellowship administered by the European Commission. However, because taxes, pension and health care are deducted from his stipend, his take-home base salary is 2,200 a month. But he also receives a non-taxable monthly 'mobility supplement' — an incentive to encourage researchers to ferry knowledge to different parts of Europe — that adds another 600 a month to his pay.
Optimist: Yegor Domanov.V. TRUSOVA.Domanov's next fellowship, at the Curie Institute in Paris and funded by the city's Fondation Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, will cover health insurance and social-security deductions and include pension contributions and some local-transportation costs. But the 2,800 base will be taxable. Although French taxes aren't as high as Finland's, Domanov expects to earn about the same base salary he now receives. Still, he is holding out hope that he can actually grow his pay along with his career. He is applying to the European Commission for a two-year, 15,000-per-year 're-entry' grant intended to help Marie Curie fellows establish themselves in another country.
Although postdoc stipends start at a base of about US$40,000 in the United States and 30,000 in Europe, what fellows can expect to take home varies between countries, funding agencies and even grant types within an agency. Differing policies on taxation, health benefits, pensions and supplements can all combine to make calculating the take-home pay for potential fellowships a complex prospect.
Foundations, funding agencies and individual institutions are all working to create a fairer compensation scheme for postdocs. But even if the base stipends seem the same, prospective postdocs should investigate the variables before signing on, otherwise they might be unpleasantly surprised by their take-home pay.
Solid guidelines
Domanov credits the European Commission's research charter for improving postdoc benefits in Europe. Detlev Arendt, head of postdoctoral training at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, says that a growing number of European postdocs are getting European Commission grants, which include provisions for mobility and benefits such as health care. Even though EMBL's postdocs aren't funded through the commission, the institution has tried to stay competitive by adopting many of the recommendations set out by the charter, which EMBL signed last year (see Nature 455, 426–428; 2008).
For example, EMBL offers supplements of 300 a month for each dependent — including children and unemployed spouses. It is also now preparing a pension scheme that will allow fellows to contribute towards their retirement. The institution looks to a host of European funders — such as the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation; Germany's main research funding agency, the DFG; and Britain's Wellcome Trust — to set its starting base salary of 2,500 a month.
Grant-giver: Phil Perlman.UT SOUTHWESTERN MEDICAL CENTER AT DALLASAround the world, various groups are trying to push the base higher. This is especially important because a major benchmark, the National Research Service Award provided by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), has remained flat for the past three years at about $3,083 (2,300) per month for new postdocs (see 'Follow the leader'). The scale increases incrementally for those with more experience, topping out at $4,250 a month for postdocs with seven or more years of experience.
Foundations have a history of offering better salaries and benefits to postdocs than government funding agencies. And in doing so, they aim to prod the government to up their contributions accordingly. The Wellcome Trust, for example, offers supplements to 'top up' stipends, thus making these positions more desirable than those funded, say, by the UK Medical Research Council. The trust adds £2,500 (US$3,510) a year to recipients of training and junior fellowships, £7,500 a year for intermediate fellowships and £12,500 a year for senior fellowships.
Anthony Woods, head of medicine, society and history grants at the Wellcome Trust, says that these enhancements are necessary to keep top people in science — and in Britain. "We do not want these people being lost from science because of low salaries," Woods says. "We want to make science an attractive career."
Foundations such as the Wellcome Trust and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland, have conventionally tried to pay higher salaries and prompt the government to match them. "We were trying to force the government agencies to pay higher," Woods says.
At Howard Hughes, that means paying attention to baseline levels such as the National Research Service Award amount, then consistently topping them. Even though the principal investigators at Howard Hughes set the salaries for their fellows, only about 10% of the fellows receive the baseline rate; the remainder are paid at higher levels, says Phil Perlman, a grants officer at the institute. Howard Hughes' stipends are taxable, and the institute doesn't allow fellows to supplement their salaries with other grants, but it does provide additional money to pay for health care if the fellow's host organization doesn't provide it, he says.
Leaps and lulls
NIH officials are aware of this trend. Walter Schaffer, senior scientific adviser of the agency's Office of Extramural Research, says that in the past 25 years, NIH stipends have been "spotty". "There have been big jumps followed by long periods of quiescence," he says.
Maxine Singer, author of the National Academies of Science report Enhancing the Postdoctoral Experience for Scientists and Engineers and emeritus president of the Carnegie Institution in Washington DC, says that addressing stipends alone won't improve the plight of postdocs. Although postdoc salaries have been generally too low and flat for too long, she says, bigger issues are the growing length and number of fellowships young scientists now face. "When people did their PhDs in four years and a postdoc for two years, low stipends weren't such a big deal," Singer says. In the life sciences, the time it takes to earn a PhD has now grown to an average of seven years and the length of an average postdoc has nearly doubled to four.
Domanov says that finding generous fellowship programmes requires more effort and means not only researching career-advancement schemes but also being aware of issues such as potential taxes, top-ups and benefits. He advises fellows to begin their search for such programmes at least a year before their existing fellowship expires. Domanov, who is secretary-general of the Marie Curie Fellows Association, says that the association can help postdocs through the confusion. It provides useful information on salaries, allowances, taxes and pensions to postdocs in Europe and European postdocs working abroad — not just to Marie Curie fellows. "There are opportunities if one is willing to spend some time in research for funding."
Follow the leader
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."
Schaffer says that increasing stipends would incur trade-offs that many would find unsatisfactory. Budget constraints — the $29-billion NIH budget has remained relatively flat since 2005 — mean that there would be either more postdoc positions with low stipends or fewer fellowships with higher compensation.
Last year, the NPA started to lobby the US Congress for higher stipends. The association's executive director, Cathee Johnson-Phillips, has since advocated for a bigger overall NIH budget, which looks likely to happen under US President Barack Obama's economic stimulus plan (see Nature 457, 364–365; 2009), in the hope that it will translate into higher postdoc salaries. However, Maxine Singer, author of a 2000 National Academies of Science report, entitled Enhancing the Postdoc Experience for Scientists and Engineers, and president emeritus of the Carnegie Institution in Washington DC, warns that large budget rises don't necessarily translate into higher stipends for all postdocs — some receive more of the pot than others. She says that conditions need to improve for postdocs in the life sciences particularly — they should be receiving higher stipends and spending less time in their role. "In other fields, stipends for postdocs have been higher," she explains.
Phil Perlman, a grants officer at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland, says that using the NRSA as a benchmark is a relatively new phenomenon. "There was a time when the NIH was not the benchmark," Perlman says. "The NRSA stipends were well below the market. If you got an NRSA, you took a salary cut."
Perlman says that he isn't sure that now is the right time to boost the NRSA level. At present, the stipends include mandatory raises "that are quite large and don't have any evaluation of performance". He thinks that before it revisits the baseline stipend level, the NIH should implement some performance standards and stop handing out automatic raises. And other funders around the world should look to market forces, not to the NRSA, to establish their own stipend levels, he says. "Right now, I don't know how much of an economic case they can make for increasing their baseline," Perlman says.
