Faculty Support on Grants: Effort and Summer Salary
When applying for grants, full-time faculty can only request effort/release time and/or summer salary to compensate for time spent on grant activities in the budget, in compliance with CUNY policy.
Summer Salary
Faculty can be paid summer salary during June, July and/or August for summer grant activities. Budgeted summer salary can be charged to a RFCUNY grant. RFCUNY transfers funds to CUNY to pay faculty members via regular CUNY payroll. When a faculty member submits a CUNY Summer Multiple Position form, it must include RFCUNY grant amount(s). The total amount of monthly summer salary a faculty member can receive cannot exceed 1/9 of their annual salary. Faculty must include RFCUNY summer salary in their 1/9 calculation since RFCUNY summer salary is paid via CUNY. Faculty can only be supported with summer salary for summer grant activities. There is no time shifting – summer salary cannot be paid for academic year activities only summer activities. OSP has a summer salary process for charging RFCUNY grants salary. OSP does not handle, or review Summer Multiple Position forms. The Summer Multiple Position form should be submitted to the department chairperson, forms are forwarded to the dean’s office and finally to OFSR.
Effort/ Release Time
Faculty cannot be paid for grant activities during the academic year. Faculty can request a percentage of effort in grant proposals. The percentage of effort is the percentage of time faculty will devote to the project and is budgeted as the percentage of the faculty member’s academic year salary for a one budget year. Sponsor budgets typically request effort to be represented by a percentage and person months. Person months is the calculation of time in a month based upon the percentage. For example, if a full-time faculty on a 9-month schedule will spend 4% of their time/effort on project, it is .36 person months (9 x .04=.36).
Sponsors can limit or require a specific amount of credit, person months, or percentage of effort on a grant. City Tech faculty may use effort for release time at rate of 2.8% per credit. Each CUNY college has their own calculation for percentage of effort.
City Tech effort
| Credits | Effort Percent | Person Months |
| 1 credit | 2.8% | .25 |
| 2 credits | 5.6% | .50 |
| 3 credits | 8.3% | .75 |
| 4 credits | 11% | 1.0 |
If effort/release time is budgeted and approved on a grant. OSP will send a CUNY Staff Effort Notice Form (SEN) to grant Principal Investigator for signature to charge the RFCUNY grant account. OSP does not request or verify release time with departments or schools.