When Wonkhe looked at the UKRI guidance from the Secretary of State for 2025–26, the gist was fairly straightforward. The majority of funding would be maintained in cash terms (a real terms cut given inflation) – the exception being the research capital investment fund, where the capital headline figure was unchanged, but with £28m of HEI research capital (the one linked to QR and non-research council income) and £30m of HERC (the one linked to research council income) substituted with additional UKRI funding which cannot be used for capital investments (just maintenance).

We’ve just got the institution level allocations for 2025–26, which have been constructed by Research England according to DSIT’s previously stated requirements.

The big ask was the review of strategic institutional research funding (SIRF), which will continue through to 2030 – starting with the collection of evidence beginning this autumn. Otherwise RE is in the most part prioritising stability – keeping allocations predictable and (aside from reverting back to the norm after the QR research degree supervision and enhancing research culture anomalies last year) in accordance with previous work.

The changes to knowledge exchange funding (HEIF) are both already known about and applicable only to new entrants – the maximum a provider new to HEIF can get in the first year is £500,000.

But that said, there will be differences between this year’s allocations and those for 2024–25. The reason for this is straightforward and predicable – some parts of research funding are linked to research student numbers, research staff numbers, and research income; some parts of knowledge exchange funding are linked to knowledge transfer partnership data, HE-BCI data (the stuff that underpins KEF, not KEF itself!), and financial data.

Here’s a quick way to check what your provider will receive (assuming no further missives from the Secretary of State):

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[note: the capital allocations refer to the 2025–26 financial year (April to March), all other allocations refer to the 2025–26 academic year (August to July)]