Dear colleague,
Good news in our fringe rate fight: federal and non-federal grants will get equal access to funds from the state budget for the 2025–26 fiscal year to offset New Jersey’s inflated fringe benefit rate—see the proposed rates in the chart below.
The administration announced last Friday in a message to research faculty that they were ending their previous misguided policy of only applying offsetting funds to federal grants—leaving Rutgers researchers with non-federal grants to pay a fringe rate two or three times higher than peer institutions.
Thanks to our Board of Governors faculty representative Heather Pierce for her work on negotiating new terms with management and to all of our members for working hard within the union and in shared governance spaces to keep this issue relevant at a time when federal research funding is under attack.
For those of you who need a refresher: the “fringe rate” is the money taken from every grant at Rutgers to pay for employee benefits such as health insurance and retirement. New Jersey’s fringe rate has been one of the highest in the country in recent years because the state requires Rutgers to pay for faculty and staff retirement benefits at the much higher rate set for the Public Employees Retirement System (PERS)—a pension plan that researchers at Rutgers aren’t even eligible for!
While we’ve fallen just short of winning a permanent legislative fix for the inflated fringe rate, over the past several years, Governor Murphy has set aside additional funding to help Rutgers and other state public universities be “more competitive for federal, state, and privately funded research grants,” as the governor said in his budget address last year.
We want to thank all of you who worked to draw attention to the administration’s misapplication of the state budget language and funding in the current fiscal year—especially our faculty, postdoc, graduate assistant, and staff researchers—as well as our University Senators, Faculty council members and leaders on each campus. We will continue fighting for a permanent fix to the inflated fringe rate, which threatens all research in NJ universities. But this is progress!
Here are the percentage rates that the university has submitted pending federal approval:
| Sponsored (grant-funded positions) | Non-Sponsored (all other positions) | |
| Faculty/Staff | 33.19% | 65.67% |
| Postdocs | 18.92% | 40.49% |
| GA/TAs | 22.00% | 32.63% |
| House Staff | 21.95% | 38.24% |
(Note: These figures are for the base rates—for the full rate, add 7.65% for FICA/Medicare.)
As you can see in the chart above, we have a fix on grant-funded positions, pending federal approval of the rates, but we still have work to do on bringing down the artificially high state fringe rate that applies to all other positions at the university.
- Members across our union locals will testify and rally at the NJ legislature’s public hearing on next year’s state budget on Wednesday, March 26, at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) in Newark. We’ll be speaking out for increased state funding for higher education and against federal cuts to research and threats to curriculum, student aid, and free speech. Click here for more details on time and place and to RSVP.
- Add your name to a petition (if you haven’t already) calling on the Rutgers administration to protect our whole community in the face of the Trump administration’s assault. We need to work together to defend our university!
In solidarity,
Rutgers AAUP-AFT and AAUP-BHSNJ