NIH Proposes Changes to Peer Review Reporting Outcomes

By: Galen Cobb
Thursday, August 27, 2026
On August 14, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) released a Request for Information (NOT-OD-26-088) seeking feedback on proposed changes to how the agency reports outcomes from peer review of grant applications. The proposal builds on NIH's Unified Funding Strategy, announced in November 2025, which directs Institutes, Centers, and Offices (ICOs) to weigh peer review outcomes alongside agency priorities and budgets, rather than relying on funding paylines tied to numerical scores.

Under current practice, discussed applications receive a final overall impact score, averaged from all voting reviewers, along with a percentile ranking where applicable. The proposed changes would replace these reporting outcomes with one of three categorical designations for each discussed application:

• Most Competitive: top 25 percent of final overall impact scores
• Competitive: 26-50 percent of final overall impact scores
• Not Discussed: scores outside the top 50 percent, or applications not discussed

All other review procedures would remain unchanged, including written critiques, resumes of discussion, and individual criterion/factor scores from assigned reviewers. Reviewers would still enter individual overall impact scores, and a final score would still be calculated internally to assign a category, but that underlying score and any percentile would no longer be released to the principal investigator, applicant institution, program staff, or Advisory Councils.

NIH is accepting public comments on the proposed changes through October 13, 2026. Comments can be submitted via this webform.