Health benefits are important in countries such as the United States, where there is no national health service. But US postdocs who win funding from sources outside their university often lose benefits and subsidized health insurance, as their institutions don't consider them employees, and the sponsoring institutions don't always provide enough funds to cover benefits.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is boosting health-insurance funding for its 7,000 National Research Service award-holders. Good news for NIH-funded postdocs, but the problem goes wider. Benefit options vary greatly among society, government and foundation funders.

According to the 2005 Sigma Xi Postdoc Survey, only a third of postdocs are classified as employees. Still, 97% said their institutions made health benefits available to them, and 82% said families could be included.

But this doesn't reflect a plan's quality, cost or convenience. When Eric Tytell began his NIH fellowship at the University of Maryland, he was told the university's insurance came with so much red tape that if he had any other option, he should take it. He became a dependant on his wife's plan. Adam Breier at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had to switch doctors and health plans when he received an NIH fellowship midway through his postdoc; the price of his former plan “was no longer realistic”.

Institutions have got better at finding ways to cover non-employee postdocs, says Chris Blagden, a board member of the National Postdoctoral Association. Confronted with postdocs' reluctance to accept NIH fellowships, Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, decided to give the same benefits regardless of funding source, says administrator Rachel Begley. Postdocs are a young, healthy and temporary population, so treating them separately from faculty members and staff means institutions can offer a comprehensive package at a lower cost, says Mary Anne Timmins of the biomedical postdoc programme at the University of Pennsylvania. The University of California has created a separate benefit programme for postdocs on its ten campuses.

But Blagden warns that no solution can fit all institutions, and fixing one problem can cause others. Foreign postdocs who aren't classed as employees can face visa troubles, for example. And postdocs have to look out for themselves, he says. “You have to be aware that the institution doesn't always give you the best choice.”