NIH FORMS-I Application Changes: What Every Grant Applicant Needs to Know

What Is FORMS-I and When Does It Apply?

FORMS-I is NIH's current generation of application forms, released in December 2025 and required for any submission with a due date on or after January 25, 2025. If you submitted before that cutoff, you used FORMS-H. Everything from here forward runs on FORMS-I, whether your institution's grants office has updated its internal templates or not.

The transition wasn't just a version number bump. FORMS-I reflects a wave of policy changes that NIH had been moving toward since 2023, some driven by executive-branch priorities around diversity programs, others by a broader effort to simplify what reviewers are asked to evaluate and what applicants are required to produce. Both of those threads converged in the December 2025 release.

Why does this matter right now? Because the most common problem I see in applications during a forms transition is recycled outlines. A PI adapts last cycle's application, a department circulates a template that hasn't been checked in eighteen months, and suddenly an application includes a Diversity Plan that reviewers are explicitly told not to read. That won't sink your score directly, but it wastes pages, signals that your team didn't verify the instructions, and occasionally confuses a reviewer who isn't sure whether the section should count. None of that is the position you want to be in.

The Attachments That Were Removed

The highest-profile removals in FORMS-I are the diversity-related sections. The Diversity Plan attachment — which some NIH programs had required applicants to produce as a standalone document — is no longer required. Reviewers are explicitly instructed not to evaluate it, and it cannot be considered in funding decisions. The same rule applies to Recruitment Plans to Enhance Diversity. If you include either, reviewers will skip past them. Including them won't trigger an administrative return, but there's no benefit to doing so, and you're burning space that could go toward content that actually scores.

The PEDP — the Postdoctoral and Early Postdoctoral Professional Development Program plan, which some training grant FOAs had required — has also been removed. Reviewers are told not to evaluate PEDP plans even if an applicant submits one. If you were planning to write a detailed PEDP as part of your training grant application this cycle, redirect that effort. The time is better spent on the narrative sections that reviewers are still required to score.

Program Goals is another attachment that's gone. For applicants who routinely attached a brief Program Goals document to T32 or institutional training grant applications, that slot no longer exists in the FORMS-I package. If you're preparing a competitive renewal and you have an old application in front of you as a reference, treat the attachment list as unreliable. Always go to the current FOA to confirm what attachments it requires, and cross-reference against the FORMS-I general guide.

Training Grant Applications Got a Streamlined Structure

If you're writing a T32, F30, F31, or other training application, the FORMS-I changes are more structural than they are for research grants. Several subsections of the Research Training Plan have been consolidated. The former sections 5 (Respective Contributions) and 6 (Selection of Sponsor and Organization) are gone — not renamed, gone. The content those sections were designed to capture has to find a home in the remaining narrative, which means you may need to restructure how you present the mentor-trainee relationship and the rationale for your training environment. This isn't just trimming a header; you have to think about where that argument now lives.

The training grant data tables have also been revised. Tables 6a, 6b, and 7 — which previously included columns for calculating percentage of underrepresented minorities in the training pool — have been updated to remove those calculations. If you're submitting a competitive T32 renewal, your tables will look different from what you submitted in prior cycles, and that means a direct year-over-year comparison in the data section will require some contextual explanation. Before you finalize the renewal application, it's worth a call to your program officer to ask how they expect you to handle that comparison and what they need to see in the tables to track program progress.

The Description of Candidate's Contribution to Program Goals — a section that fellowship applicants sometimes used to do real narrative work — is also removed. If you built that section into your argument for why you were a strong candidate for a particular training program, you now need to make that case in the personal statement and research plan. The content doesn't disappear; it just has to be absorbed into sections that are still scored.

What Reviewers Will and Won't Score

Under FORMS-I, reviewers are operating with updated guidance that reflects these removals. They're not supposed to comment on a missing Diversity Plan, because there is no Diversity Plan to comment on. They're not supposed to score the PEDP. In theory, the absence of these sections is unremarkable to any reviewer who has read the updated instructions.

In practice, reviewer behavior takes a cycle or two to fully align with new instructions. If you submitted in the first few cycles after January 2025 and received a summary statement that commented on the absence of a section you're not required to include, that's worth raising with your program officer. It's not automatic grounds for an appeal, but it's information that belongs in your next conversation with them. Going forward, reviewer training on FORMS-I should make these edge cases rarer.

What reviewers are still evaluating is the core scientific content: Research Strategy, Specific Aims, Approach, Significance, Innovation, Investigator. The rigor and reproducibility criteria remain. Your biosketch remains as important as it's always been. FORMS-I didn't simplify the scientific review; it removed some administrative and programmatic attachments that had accumulated around it. That's the right frame for thinking about what these changes actually mean for how you write.

Updating Your Application Workflow for FORMS-I

The most common mistake during a forms transition is trusting templates that haven't been updated. Your department's grants office may have a template last verified in a FORMS-H cycle. Your mentor may have shared an older application structure that still lists a Diversity Plan slot. Neither of those is a safe starting point without verification. Compare what your template includes against what the FOA and the current FORMS-I How to Apply guide actually ask for.

The fastest way to confirm your package is correct: look for the Competition ID in the application package downloaded from Grants.gov. If it reads 'FORMS-I', you're on the right version. This sounds obvious, but Grants.gov sometimes serves different package versions depending on when a funding opportunity was first posted, and mismatches do cause submission errors downstream. One check early in the process saves a very frustrating phone call to your grants office the night before the deadline. Also confirm the page limits in the FORMS-I guide — when an attachment is removed, the page budget sometimes shifts in adjacent sections, and you want to fill that space rather than leave it.

Where Uncertainty Still Lives

FORMS-I is mandatory, but individual funding opportunity announcements can still layer requirements on top of the general defaults. An RFA or PAR can specify additional attachments, modified page limits, or different review criteria that override the general guide. Always read the full FOA before assuming the general FORMS-I instructions tell you everything. The FOA is the governing document for that specific competition; the general guide is the baseline.

The downstream effects on study section behavior and on how training grant renewals will be compared against prior submissions are still becoming clear. If your application is a competitive renewal and the prior submission included sections that no longer exist, your program officer is the right person to ask about continuity expectations. They handle these transitions constantly and usually have straightforward guidance on what they need to see. When in doubt, ask before you write rather than after you've committed to a structure.

Frequently Asked Questions