College of Engineering Cost Sharing Policy

August 1, 2024

When proposals are required to include cost share or matching funds follow these steps to create a budget:

1. Build the budget, including cost share, in the Federal Funds requested column.
2. When the budget is completed, send it to the PI for approval and ask the PI for any available sources they have that can be used as cost share (i.e., startup funds, professorship, PII from previous awards, etc.).
3. When the PI responds, you can start moving cost from the Federal Funds requested column to the Cost Share column in the following order:

• • Third-party dollars if available. This commitment should be documented in the budget development process.
  • Subcontractors (if applicable and allowed) should contribute at the same required cost share percentage according to their portion of the funding. The Letter of commitment should include the federal request amount and Cost share amount.
  • In-kind such as Faculty salary/benefits, IDC loss (if allowed), and IDC on Cost Shared costs.
    1. Faculty-time: Departments can commit faculty research time.  For most faculty members, the department pays their salary 9 months of the year, and the faculty member’s PRS (Position Responsibility Statement) specifies that some of that time is dedicated to research. If a faculty member’s PRS is 33% research, then they have 3 months of research time.  That amount of salary and benefits can be counted as cost share.
       1. NOTE: Remind the PI to be attentive to their time commitment on grants.  They should not commit 100% of their research time to projects, because this would leave them no time to do something new and unexpected or to write the next grant.  They should commit the amount of time that they intend to spend on the project.
       2. NOTE: Faculty engaged in a higher level of research may buy back one or more course teaching for 12.5% of their academic year salary per course paid for from a salary-saving budget.
    2. Amount of commitment: Generally in-kind time is approximately equal to the time funded by the budget, not more than 1 month, but can occasionally be slightly higher when the cost share requirement is high.
       1. NOTE: Requested time should be in even increments, such as 10%, 15%, 20%, etc. Departments sign off on this portion of the cost-share document.
  • PI incentive generally must used up to 75% of PII for materials & supplies, travel, publications, equipment, or support for the postdoc, project administration, or GRAs (including tuition). Under specific situation up to 100% of PII may have to be used to meet the cost share requirements.
  • COE Sources – Once the PI has contributed the first 75% of the PI incentive, COE will match the first 75% of the PII as needed. If additional support is needed beyond this ERI staff will coordinate with the COE ADR to figure out how to meet the rest of the needs.

4. Send the completed budget with cost share, and guidelines to Arun for approval. In the email, Include the required amount of cost share, the total requested amount from COE if any, the sponsor’s name, PI’s name, and the due date.
5. On the Streamlyne, the PI incentive used as cost share must be reflected as the incentive percentage for the Principal Investigator. If 75% of the PI incentive is used as cost share, ¾ of 15% must be given to the PI, the rest can be divided among the investigators according to their contribution to the project.
6. If the proposal is led by research professors and they need salary support, PI can use part of PII for cost share as his salary. This can be half of the PII for salary + benefits and the other half of PII for another purpose.

Non-mandatory cost share must be specifically approved by the COE ADR.