Faculty Incentive Program

Faculty Incentive Program

Faculty members may be eligible to receive incentive payments for charging time and effort to extramural sources.

By mutual consent with the Department Head, a faculty member can use funding from external sources (“buying out”) to pay a portion of their salary, and thus become eligible for an incentive bonus; as follows:

• Grants that carry full F&A (44%) will result in a bonus of 40% of the salary saved.
• Buy out from all other sources will result in a bonus of 20% of the salary saved.

The percentage of salary “bought out” shall not exceed the following for any given semester:

• 60% for faculty on nine-month contracts

Due to recent changes of the WKU F&A Rate Agreement, WKU no longer allows Department Heads to include Annual Year effort on external grants. Therefore, Department Heads are not eligible for FIP, since they will not have Annual Year effort on the grant.

Department Heads can still earn up to 1-month of otherwise uncommitted effort during the summer.

Bonuses are paid by the College into the faculty member’s paycheck after the semester in question. They are subject to IRS and other withholdings.

Note: Faculty are eligible for FIP payments for external funding awarded before 12/31/23.

No FIP payments beyond FY24, for new or continuing grants, will be issued. 

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