Cost Sharing for Investigators

What is Cost Sharing?

• Cost Share or matching means that portion of project or program costs not borne by the funding agency.
• It includes all contributions, including cash and in-kind, that a recipient makes to an award. This means the government does not fully reimburse the performer for all allowable costs associated with the specific effort.

What is Cost Sharing?

• Cost sharing effort is included in the calculation of total committed effort. Effort is defined as the portion of time spent on a particular activity expressed as a percentage of the individual’s total activity for the institution.

What is Cost Sharing?

• Cost Sharing is auditable and must be allowable under cost principles and verifiable to records. Cost sharing costs must occur during the life of the project.

What is Cost Sharing?

• If the award is federal, only acceptable non-federal costs qualify as cost sharing and must conform to other necessary and reasonable provisions to accomplish the program objectives.

Cost Share Must Be:

• Allowable: Acceptable per the agreement, regulations, and public laws.
• Reasonable: A prudent person would have purchased this item and paid this price.
• Allocable: Can be assigned to the activity on some reasonable basis.

Example of Cost Sharing

• Personnel listed on the project budget (showing % effort) for whom no salary is requested in the budget, or if salary is requested, it is less than what is needed to pay for the entire % effort.
• In addition the fringe benefits and indirect costs associated with those costs, would be considered cost sharing.

Sources of Cost Sharing

• University Funds
• Unrecovered Facilities and Administration (F&A) costs
• Third party contributions
• Other sponsored project (non-federal)

Mandatory Cost Sharing

• Mandatory cost sharing is required by sponsor as a condition of obtaining an award. It must be included or a proposal will receive no consideration by the sponsor.

Voluntary Committed Cost Sharing

• Voluntary Committed Cost Sharing represents resources offered by the university (documented and quantified in the proposal) when it is not a specific sponsor requirement. It becomes a binding commitment which the university must provide as part of the performance of the sponsored agreement.

Uncommitted Voluntary Cost Sharing

• When a faculty and/or senior researchers donate effort to sponsored agreements over and above that which is committed and budgeted for in a sponsored agreement as either sponsor paid or cost shared.