Professors making "additional" income from Grants/Funding?

[McPsychy]

I was wondering if anyone knows how much professors (which I know depend on the field) can make from grants and other types of funding they receive for research on top of their university salaries? I saw that this is can be a common theme, but also heard there is typically restriction or rules in the grant that state how much a professor can receive, how much is allocated to GA's or RA's, etc. Of course this will differ on the amount of funding or grant amount, but wanted to hear how much extra faculty can add to their salaries.

 

FYI* I am going to probably work as a faculty member either in a Psychology department or Education/Educational Psychology department with my research interests.

 

[Eigen]

Please don't double post topics. 

 

As a reply, income from grants isn't, technically, "additional" income. 

 

Most professors that are being paid in a supplemental fashion from grants are only getting part-year salaries from the institution where they work. 

 

IE, you have a 9 month salary, the grant pays for the last 3 months. If you're looking for commonly used terms, grant income is considered "soft" money and the regular salary is "hard" money. 

 

Some institutions, especially medical schools, have way more "soft money" requirements than others- ie, they may only pay a few months of your salary each year, and you're expected to find the rest elsewhere. 

 

As to allocations- it's not "rules" so much, as what's requested when you write the grant. Each written grant will have an exact budget of funds, per year- how much is going to salaries (the PI, any co-PIs, other collaborators, post-docs, research techs, grad students) how much is going to regular supplies, instrumentation, equipment, conference travel, etc. 

 

And then you have to spend accordingly from the grant. You can't budget for a ton of equipment, decide not to buy it, and then spend the surplus on hiring another grad student. 

[mpheels]

Everything Eigen said... I will also add that are rules about including raises in a grant. Grant budgets have to use current salaries and project effort of investigators and staff. Generally, you can include annual cost of living increases in the 1%-3% range. You can also typically bump salaries by 5% in the first year because it is assumed you will go through more than one COL cycle by the time the grant is actually funded. If one of the investigators already has 90% of their effort earmarked for existing projects, you can only put them in for 10% (or they can reduce their effort on the other projects). There are ways to get around it, like listing staff at TBD at a higher salary than existing staff, but then you risk losing the competitive edge of established research support staff written into the grant. Institutions are required to keep track of the distribution of effort for faculty and staff paid through federal funds. Each institution has their own system, but the bottom line is that you can't use grant funds to pay yourself above and beyond a 12 month, full time salary.