# Indirect Cost Rate **Status: stub — expand.** The **indirect cost rate** — called the facilities and administrative (F&A) rate in the research world — is the negotiated percentage a grant recipient may charge against direct costs to cover the shared expenses that make the funded work possible but cannot be assigned to any one project: buildings and their maintenance, utilities, libraries, data infrastructure, compliance and financial administration, and the cost of meeting the federal government's own reporting and audit requirements. Rates are negotiated with a cognizant federal agency and vary widely; research universities and academic medical centers typically carry substantially higher rates than small nonprofits, reflecting laboratory and facility costs. Under 2 CFR Part 200 an entity without a negotiated rate may elect a de minimis rate instead. The rate is a recurring political target because it is easy to describe as overhead and hard to defend line by line. Attempts in 2025 to impose a flat cap across research agencies were challenged and enjoined; the pressure then moved into the negotiation process itself and into the proposed rewrite of the [[Uniform Guidance]]. The structural point is that a cap is not a cut to any single grant — it is a cut to the institution's capacity to host grants at all. ## See also - [[Federal Grant Lifecycle]] — the ASCII map: the rate attaches at stage 5 - [[Uniform Guidance]] · [[NIH]] · [[National Science Foundation]]