About Research Block Grants

The Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) manages six programmes to support research and research training in Australian Higher Education Providers (HEPs):

Important Note: Payments are made to HEPs who administer the schemes on behalf of DEST. Individual students or researchers need to approach their HEP to obtain funding support.

How Research Block Grant are authorised

The programmes are established by the Higher Education Support Act 2003 (HESA) You are now leaving the DEST website and can only fund eligible HEPs listed in Table A or Table B of HESA, Division 16. HEPs receive a single annual funding amount (block) for each scheme and are responsible for administering the programmes on behalf of DEST within broad guidelines. The guidelines and conditions of grant can be found on the programme web pages listed above.

How Research Block Grants are calculated

Funding for each programme is calculated by a formula using some combination of the following inputs:

Research student total load
Research student total completions
Research income
Research publications
Previous programme payments

Important Note: The formulae calculate each HEP’s percentage share of the total available funds - they do not assign dollar values to the inputs and aggregate them to determine funding.

Detailed information on all the programme formulae can be found on the Research Block Grants Calculation Methodology page.

All data inputs are sourced from the Higher Education Research Data Collection or the Higher Education Student Data Collection. Further information on these collections, current and historical data used in calculations and other data can be found at the Research Block Grants Data page.

Frequently Asked Questions