Indirect cost rate
The percentage an organisation applies to a cost base to recover costs that keep it running but cannot be charged to one project — rent, accounting, IT. It belongs to the applicant and its agreement, and no amount field on a record is one.
Part of the GrantTrove grant funding glossary — one entry for every field the catalogue stores.
Also called Indirect costs · Overhead rate · F&A rate · De minimis rate
In detail
Two numbers decide what is actually recovered, and both have to be right: the rate, and the base it is applied to. A rate negotiated against modified total direct costs but applied to total direct costs produces a larger figure than the agreement allows, and the difference surfaces at closeout rather than at submission.
Programmes frequently cap the rate below whatever an organisation has negotiated, and some disallow indirect costs altogether. The cap is stated in the notice, in prose, usually in a single sentence among the budget instructions.
Against the award ceiling
A ceiling is the largest award a programme will make. A rate is the share of a budget an applicant may recover. A programme with a $400,000 ceiling and a 10 percent indirect cap does not hand a $400,000 project $40,000 of overhead on top: the cap applies inside the ceiling, not above it. The record stores the ceiling and never the rate.
How GrantTrove stores it
- The money fields on a record are `amount_min`, `amount_max`, `amount_typical` and `amount_total_pool` — captioned “Award floor”, “Award ceiling (per project)”, “Typical award” and “Program pool (total)”. None of them is an indirect rate, and none is a computed recoverable total.
- Where a notice’s wording qualifies a figure, the wording is kept beside it in `amount_note` rather than folded into the number. The record page also states plainly that a line-item cost table, where a programme publishes one, is not parsed.
Common questions
Is the de minimis rate stored anywhere?
No. It is a rate an applicant may elect under 2 CFR 200 when it has no negotiated agreement. It is a property of the applicant, not of a programme, so there is no field for it here.
Why do programmes cap indirect costs?
To push more of the award into the funded activity. Whether that is realistic is an argument between funders and grantees, and not one a database can settle.
Where would I find the cap for a programme?
In the notice, which every record links. We do not extract it: a field that was empty most of the time would read as “no cap”, which is the false reading the three-state rule exists to prevent.