Summer salary and the NSTP are independent programs, and the NSTP does not impact a faculty member’s decision to obtain summer salary.  If a faculty member chooses to participate in the NSTP, he/she may elect the number of months’ salary that best works in accordance with their funding amount and source.  Summer ninths are paid as a percentage of the TUCS rate.

Example: Professor X’s SBS is $90,000/academic year.  She has sufficient and eligible external funding (grants and unrestricted gifts) to participate in the NSTP at the maximum rate of 30 percent.  Professor X is in good standing with regard to all criteria.  Professor X currently pays herself two summer ninths through a grant, but can afford to pay herself an additional ninth through unrestricted gift funds.  What is her TUCS rate if she participates in the NSTP?

Participating faculty may receive administrative stipends.  Stipends may not be used to determine a faculty member’s SBS, nor may they be used to cover any portion of the NSC.  If a faculty member receives an administrative compensation in the form of summer-ninths, the participant may augment the summer ninth up to the TUCS rate by using their eligible, external funding.

In general, the TUCS rate for participating faculty may not be changed for any reason, including but not limited to mid-year salary scale adjustments, retroactive merit increases, or receipt of additional contract and grant funds.  Salary negotiated as part of a retention offer for participating faculty shall become effective on July 1 of the following year.  If a participant’s salary is raised effective October 1 (or any date other than July 1) due to a general range adjustment, salary increases or Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA), the NSC will be reduced, and the covered compensation increased, so that the TUCS remains unchanged for the fiscal year.

Sabbatical leave and other leaves with pay may be taken while participating in the NSTP.   Leave will be granted at the TUCS rate in effect during the leave period.

Faculty participating in the NSTP must participate for the entire year, or from July 1 to June 30.  Thus, if you plan to take unpaid leave at any time during the year of participation, you should not apply to participate in the NSTP.  If you decide to take unpaid leave after your NSTP participation has begun, your NSTP approval may be rescinded, and you may be asked to repay all NSC funds paid to you from the start date of your agreement.  Contingency funds may not be used for NSC repayment.

State funds (19xxx) may not be used to cover any portion of the NSC.  Overhead recovery funds and other specific state fund sources may be used to cover contingency fund obligations.

Schools/Units are responsible for managing funding of the NSTP, and must cover the negotiated salary.

The UCI Implementation Procedures require Schools/Units to establish a contingency fund at a minimum rate of 10 % (ten percent) to ensure coverage of such unforeseen obligations.  Schools/Units may establish a higher rate for the contingency fund at their discretion.  In the example above, Professor X’s contingency fund obligation is $2,700.00 at 10 percent of $27,000.00 (NSC).

The Dean may request to spend some of their surplus contingency funds so long as the school retains a minimum of 25 percent against their total current year liability or the highest paid liability of that year, whichever is greater. Deans interested in spending surplus contingency funds must submit a written memo to the Vice Provost of Academic Personnel who has authority to approve use of any contingency fund surplus.

Faculty who wish to participate in the NSTP must complete a NSTP Compensation Request.   You must be in compliance with all applicable UC policies, procedures, and training requirements, including: Patent Acknowledgment, Sexual Harassment Education, Training, Outside Professional Activities, and Lab Safety Training.  Please consult with your local CPO, Department Chair, and other School personnel for assistance in determining your compliance status.

Compensation requests consist of three parts, and must include a completed Requestor’s form, Fund Manager Certification form, and Department Chair approval form.

Paper submissions will not be accepted.  Incomplete requests will be returned to the requestor.

Before submitting a request for compensation, you should first consult with your fund manager(s), to ensure that you have sufficient funding for your request.  Next, you should consult with your Department Chair regarding your fulfillment of departmental commitments and expectations.  You should also consult with your School Environmental Health & Safety Coordinator to determine whether you are in compliance with required training, and if not, to coordinate steps for becoming compliant.  Finally, you should consult with your CPO if you have any other questions regarding processing your request.

Compensation requests must be completed, internally vetted and approved, and submitted electronically to Academic Personnel by no later than 5 pm on Friday, May 17, 2024.  Your School will have earlier deadlines for submission of your Requestor form so that they have sufficient time to complete the Fund Manager Certification form and the Department Chair approval form.

UCI ladder-rank, in-residence faculty, and lecturers in the security of employment series, holding at least 50 percent faculty appointments, and who do not belong to any excluded categories, may participate in the NSTP.  Participants must possess external funding consonant with their requests, and must meet good standing requirements.

Faculty members with part-time administrative appointments may participate in the NSTP; however, the percentage of the part-time professorial appointment will be used to determine the SBS, resulting NSC and TUCS.

Example:  Professor X’s SBS is $90,000/academic year.  Professor X’s academic appointment has been reduced to 75 percent because she currently holds a 25 percent administrative appointment for which she is compensated at the rate of $130,000/year.  Professor X has sufficient and eligible external funding in the form of grants and unrestricted gifts to participate in the NSTP at the maximum 30 percent rate.  Professor X is in good standing with regard to all criteria.  Professor X currently receives two summer ninths through a grant.

No.  Participating faculty must be in “good standing,” which means they must fulfill their normal teaching and service responsibilities.  Teaching workload can only be reduced through course releases that are normally granted to a faculty member for fulfilling an administrative role/university service and should be mutually support by the department chair and dean. Course buyouts are not allowed to reduce teaching workload during NSTP participation. Please refer to the UCI implementation procedures for details on how good standing criteria is met.

Not necessarily.  NSTP participants must continue to fulfill research support responsibilities and staffing (e.g., postdocs and staff research positions).  Participants may not terminate the employment of supported staff in order to increase available funding for an NSC.  Proposed layoffs connected to any fund source used to support an NSTP request or under the control of an NSTP requestor, will be subject to additional review.

Possibly.  NSTP participants must continue to fulfill support obligations for current and incoming graduate students, including those for tuition and benefits, and graduate student employment.  Participants must document how they will fulfill those obligations, and explain reductions in research support and/or deviations from prior year funding.   Significant changes will subject a request to additional scrutiny.

On December 26, 2014, the White House Office of Management & Budget (OMB) released new federal regulations: “Uniform Administrative Requirements, Cost Principles, & Audit Requirements for Federal Awards.” The NSTP was designed to comply with the predecessor regulations found in OMB Circular A-21. To do so, effort for salaries charged to sponsored projects funded by Federal sources must be accurately and appropriately calculated and certified, and may not exceed 100%.

You should consult with your fund manager to determine the limits of your available funding and the NSTP 30 percent cap.  You should also take in to consideration your projected expenditures during the year of participation, as well as additional costs of participation, such as summer salary, incremental increases on summer salary, and benefits costs.

External resources are any fund source that are not State-appropriated general funds (19xxx), UC general funds, Chancellor Fellow’s funds, Opportunity funds, Overhead Recovery funds, student tuition funds, or other internal sources.  These funds may not be used to support any portion of the NSC.  External funds may include extramural grant funds, endowment or gift income, professional degree fees, self-supporting degree fees, and contract and grant support. Funds must be verified/in hand prior to June 30 of the current fiscal year, stable, and sufficient to cover related benefit costs.

Yes.  In the aggregate, funding must be sufficient to cover NSC and incremental costs resulting from NSTP participation (contingency fund obligation, benefits, etc.) for the agreement period, or from July 1 to June 30.

State funds (19xxx) may not be used to cover any portion of the NSC.  Overhead recovery funds and other specific state funds sources may; however, be used to cover contingency fund obligations.

UCI does not consider Faculty Start-up funds as an appropriate source for NTSP payments for at least two reasons:

• They do have a state fund characteristic.
• Campus units earn and manage Faculty Start-up funds in various ways based on the campus allocation model and so not all faculty or departments have consistent access or purview for Faculty Start-up funds and making them a funds source for NTSP is likely to create inequities.

The eligible funds that can be used to pay the contingency are start-up, unrestricted external funds such as gift funds. If released base-salary is used, it must be replaced by an eligible external fund source. Contract and grant funds may not be used for this purpose. 

The NSTP requires that funds be available, and “awarded and deposited to a UCI account prior to June 30 of the current fiscal year” in order to be considered for the following year’s negotiation.  This means that the award must be “in hand”.  UCI-approved pre-award spending will not be considered “an award in hand” for purposes of the NSTP.

Funds awarded after the salary increment has been negotiated may be considered eligible compensation for the following academic year.  For example, Professor A enters an NSC agreement for AY 2023-2024, which begins on July 1, 2023.  In October 2023, she receives a large award that she would like to have considered for NSC.  The October 2023 award is not eligible compensation for AY 2023-2024, but is eligible compensation for AY 2024-25. 

Cap gap funding must be included in the annual salary negotiation proposal. Participants of the NSTP must fully fund their cap gap during the academic year in order to participate in the program. Cap gap funding for the summer salary is encouraged but optional. State-appropriated general funds may not be used to fund the cap.

Please refer to question 11, above.  You will still need to complete the NSTP Compensation Request, along with supporting documentation from your fund manager and department chair.

We strongly recommend that all NSTP requestors meet with their fund managers to engage in a thorough review of all fund sources and expenditures against the same to ensure that you have a complete financial picture of available resources.  Your fund manager is expected to have the best vantage point to determine your available funding, along with access to supporting data and records.  Fund managers play a very important role in helping to ensure that external resources are managed effectively and that fund overages do not occur.  Fund managers are required to sign off on all NSTP requests, and should never be placed in a position that could compromise their ability to engage in conservative financial administration.  We urge NSTP participants to have regular and candid discussions with fund managers and other knowledgeable department personnel, such as MSOs and Department Chairs, to obtain a full and accurate determination of your available funding.  Because of the extensive accounting practices required by the University and funding agencies, financial assumptions should be supported by empirical evidence to prevent misunderstandings or overpayments.  For example, if you wish to request a 30 percent NSC, but your fund manager advises that you should only request 15 percent, you and your fund manager should review the relevant accounts to determine the basis of the discrepancy and to reach a mutual understanding on the appropriate NSC to request.

The following will be considered in determining whether an NSTP requestor is in good standing:  (i) whether there was satisfactory advancement at the last on-cycle review, (ii) whether the requestor has fulfilled their approved teaching load, (iii) whether the requestor has fulfilled obligations to provide research support (including to graduate students), (iv) whether the requestor has fulfilled appropriate University service obligations; (v) whether the requestor’s research contracts and grants are current with regard to reporting requirements; and (vi) whether the requestor has complied with all University reporting and training requirements (including laboratory safety).

It is the expectation that every faculty member who submits a request does so in good faith that they are in good standing with regard to the criteria set forth above.  Faculty seeking to participate in the NSTP should review their compliance with all relevant guidelines before submitting a request.  The submission process requires that they verify that they have met all good standing requirements.  Your department chair will be asked to verify your good standing regarding teaching, research supervision and service.  In addition, an Academic Senate NSTP Review Committee will review requests to determine whether good standing criteria have been met.

No, those rules continue to apply in exactly the same way. If, for example, part of the negotiated salary is based on overload teaching in a self-supporting program, the appropriate number of consulting days must be forfeited in accordance with APM 025.

Possible reasons for a request to be denied include insufficient funding, non-availability of resources (i.e., fund will arrive after July 1), or good standing criteria not met.

No.  SBSs will not change as a result of the NSTP.

For participating faculty, the NSC is not considered “covered compensation” for purposes of UCRP. Only the scale-based portion of the faculty member’s salary is considered “covered compensation” for UCRP, and figures into the calculation of retirement benefits.

No.  The NSTP is a trial program, requested by the UC Systemwide Provost.  The first phase of NSTP began in place only at the Irvine, Los Angeles, and San Diego campuses. Davis, Riverside, and Santa Cruz joined the trial program during Phase 2 which began on  July 1, 2018.

The extremely high cost of living in certain regions of Southern California — especially Los Angeles, Orange, and San Diego Counties — has made it extremely difficult to recruit and retain faculty at these campuses.   The NSTP represents an effort to create compensation incentives for faculty without placing additional strain on limited State budget resources.

Phase one of the NSTP began on July 1, 2013. Phase two of the NSTP began on July 1, 2018. A systemwide joint Senate-Administration Taskforce has made its recommendation to institutionalize the program into Academic Personnel Manual (APM) policy and create a permanent negotiated salary plan. UC Office of the President has authorized the extension of Phase 2 of the NSTP into fiscal year 2024-25 to provide sufficient time to give careful consideration of the systemwide comments and draft policy.

In many ways, the NSTP resembles the HSCP, with both sharing the concept of a negotiated salary component.  Unlike the HSCP, NSTP participation is voluntary.  Likewise, faculty who elect to participate in the NSTP are not required to contribute all outside income (e.g., consulting).  Faculty members may not participate in both the NSTP and the HSCP.  Faculty members with more than a 50 percent appointment in an HSCP eligible program must participate in the HSCP.

The following Schools/Units have reported their intent to participate in the NSTP:

• Claire Trevor School of the Arts
• School of Biological Sciences
• The Paul Merage School of Business
• School of Education
• The Henry Samueli School of Engineering
• School of Humanities
• Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences
• School of Law
• Sue & Bill Gross School of  Nursing
• Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences
• School of Physical Sciences
• Program in Public Health
• School of Social Ecology
• School of Social Sciences

Information regarding the NSTP can be found on the Office of Academic Personnel website at https://ap.uci.edu/compensation/nstp/.  Background information regarding the pilot may be found on the Systemwide Academic website at http://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/underreview/NegotiatedSalaryPlan_Pilot_Packet4Review.pdf.   You may also contact your local Chief Personnel Office (CPO), or Academic Personnel at acadpers@uci.edu

On behalf of the Provost/Executive Vice Chancellor, the VPAP will collect data on participating departments with regard to (i) funding – i.e., tracking how NSTP external funding is being utilized by type, and use of NSTP funds; and (ii) demographics of NSTP participants, including but not limited to faculty rank and step, gender, race/ethnicity; salary, including off-scale, summer-ninths, and negotiated amount; teaching loads; graduate student and post-doc support by department and individual.  In addition, information may be collected as yet identified issues that pertain to the effectiveness of the NSTP.

The trial program, whose initial five-year pilot began in FY 2013-14 as phase one has been approved for phase two for an additional four years beginning July 1, 2018. Three types of data will be collected by UCOP in a series of reports to allow adequate review of the program:

• Basic Data (people, funding, faculty responsibilities);
• Data on recruitment, retention, and review, and
• Survey data involving queries to faculty, academic administrators, and CAP members on their level of satisfaction with the NSTP.

There was a full review at the end of the third year of phase two.  A systemwide joint Senate-Administration Taskforce has made its recommendation to institutionalize the program into Academic Personnel Manual (APM) policy and create a permanent negotiated salary plan. UC Office of the President has authorized the extension of Phase 2 of the NSTP into fiscal year 2024-25 to provide sufficient time to give careful consideration of the systemwide comments and draft policy.