How the Wellcome Trust Spends its Money

The most recent Wellcome Trust annual report showed healthy returns on our investment portfolio, which should allow us to spend in excess of £4 billion in the period 2014-2019. But where do we spend our money? Today, we are releasing the latest data on our grants portfolio and institutional application rates. Alyson Fox, Head of Grants Management at the Wellcome Trust, explains why it’s important for us to be so open…

Anyone who has applied to the Wellcome Trust for funding will know that our assessment process is rigorous and challenging, but it is also important to us that it is open and transparent.

As part of our continued commitment to openness, we are (for the second year running) publishing a range of infographics that show data on our recent funding decisions and our active portfolio of research. We are proud of our varied portfolio and we think that it is important to be transparent about what we fund.

The current value of our active funding portfolio comes in at more than £2.5 billion. Through our broad variety of schemes, funding individuals or teams of researchers, over 10,000 people are employed on Wellcome Trust grants.

Our funding is not limited to the UK, but in fact reaches 77 different countries. There are 424 different organisations (in the UK and overseas) that currently hold Wellcome Trust grants.

To explore the data for yourself, you can look at all of our grant spending infographics on the Wellcome Trust website. We hope that you find this information useful, and we hope to make this data even more accessible in future.

You can find all the infographics on the Grants Management pages of the Wellcome Trust website. If you’re interested in applying for Wellcome Trust funding you can check out the wide-range of funding we offer across science, the humanities and social sciences, and public engagement.