Modified total direct cost

The base most negotiated indirect cost rates are applied to: total direct costs minus equipment, capital expenditure, rent, tuition, participant support, and the part of each subaward over $50,000. Applying a rate to the wrong base is the most expensive arithmetic error in a grant budget.

Part of the GrantTrove grant funding glossary — one entry for every field the catalogue stores.

Also called MTDC

In detail

The exclusions exist so that a rate does not multiply against a single large purchase. A $500,000 piece of equipment inside the base would recover more overhead than the organisation actually incurs on it, which is why it is out.

The subaward rule is the one most often missed. The first $50,000 of each subaward is in the base and everything above it is out — per subaward, not per project — so a project with four subawards has four separate $50,000 slices in the base.

Against total direct cost

They differ by the exclusions above, and on an equipment-heavy project they differ enormously. An indirect rate negotiated against MTDC and applied to TDC produces a recovery larger than the agreement allows, and the discrepancy surfaces at closeout rather than at submission. Neither figure is a field on an opportunity record: both belong to an application.

How GrantTrove stores it

  • We hold no rate and no base. The nearest fields are `amount_min`, `amount_max` and `amount_total_pool`, and none of them is either.
  • Where a notice caps the indirect rate a programme will pay, that cap is a sentence in the notice; the record links the notice rather than restating it as a field we would then be asserting.

Common questions

Is MTDC the same everywhere?

The exclusion list in 2 CFR 200 is standard, but a specific negotiated agreement can define its own base. The agreement governs.

Does the $50,000 subaward rule apply per project?

Per subaward. Four subawards mean four slices of $50,000 in the base.

Do you store the base a programme requires?

No. It is stated in the notice and in your own negotiated agreement, and a field that was empty most of the time would read as "no restriction".