What does PPIE cost? Real numbers for budgeting

Ranges, before we explain them

A single advisory session with six to eight contributors, run properly: roughly £1,500–£2,500 if you are running it yourself and counting your own time honestly. Delivered by us as part of a wider piece, it sits inside our PPIE service, which starts from £4,500.

Involvement across an application — a discovery session, protocol review, and a materials review: roughly £3,500–£6,000 in-house; from £4,500 as a delivered package.

A standing contributor panel for a funded study, meeting three or four times a year with support between meetings: roughly £4,000–£8,000 a year in direct costs, more where the group is large or the access needs are substantial. As a delivered programme, from £8,500.

A full co-design or co-production programme, where contributors shape the work rather than review it: from £8,500, and commonly £14,000+ where it runs across a multi-year study.

These are UK figures at 2026 rates, and they assume contributors are paid properly. If a number you have been given is well below these, the usual reason is that somebody's time has been left out of it.

What is actually in the number

Contributor payment. The part everyone remembers. NIHR publishes guidance on rates for public contributors, and around £27.50–£30 an hour is the common working figure for involvement activity, with higher rates for more demanding roles. Pay for preparation time too, not only the meeting: asking someone to read a protocol before a session is asking for two hours, not one.

Facilitation and researcher time. Almost always the largest line, and almost always the one left out. A two-hour session is roughly a day and a half of somebody's time once you count recruitment, briefing, preparing materials, running it, and writing up what changed. If that time is not costed, the involvement will be squeezed into the gaps of an already-full job, which is how PPIE plans quietly stop happening.

Accessible materials. Easy read versions, translation, interpreters, BSL, large print, captioning. Budget these as their own line rather than folding them into miscellaneous, because a plan that cannot pay for them is a plan that will exclude the people it most needs.

Travel, venue and access support. Including carers and personal assistants, and including paying travel up front rather than reimbursing weeks later. For in-person sessions, venue and refreshments are a real cost; for remote ones, expect to lend or fund data and devices for some contributors.

Coordination and administration. Scheduling, reminders, processing payments, keeping records for the impact report. Unglamorous, and consistently underestimated. Payment processing in particular can be surprisingly slow inside a university or trust finance system, and someone has to chase it.

The four things that actually drive cost

1. How hard the people are to reach. This is the biggest single factor and the one most often missed. Involving people already on an established panel is cheap. Involving people who are not on any panel — because they are unwell, unwaged, digitally excluded, or have good reason not to trust research — means partnership work with community organisations, and that work is real and should be paid for. Our page on inclusive research recruitment covers what that involves.

2. How many times you meet. One session is a consultation. Four sessions across a study is involvement. The second costs roughly four times the first in contributor payment and rather more in coordination, and it is the difference reviewers notice.

3. Depth of influence. Reviewing something already drafted is cheaper than shaping it from the start. Co-production, where contributors hold real decision-making power, costs the most and takes the longest, because it requires training, support, and a genuine willingness to have plans changed.

4. Access needs. A group needing interpreters, easy read materials, and carer support costs meaningfully more per session than one that does not. This is not an overhead to minimise; it is the cost of the involvement being real.

If this is going into a grant

For NIHR and most UK funders, PPIE costs are eligible and expected, and they belong in their own clearly labelled budget line matching the activity in your involvement plan. A plan describing four contributor meetings with a budget that could fund one is a discrepancy reviewers do spot.

Two specifics worth getting right. Budget for the whole funded study, not just the application stage: involvement that stops at submission reads as involvement done for the submission. And do not bury contributor payment inside staff costs, which reads to a reviewer as contributors not being paid at all.

We cover the components and the sanity checks in budgeting for PPIE in NIHR grant applications, which comes with a free one-page checklist, and how to write the section the budget has to match in writing the PPIE section of an NIHR application.

Working out your own figure

Start from activity, not from a total. Decide how many sessions, with how many people, at what depth, and with what access needs. Then price each of the five components above against that. A figure built this way survives challenge; a figure picked because it looks proportionate does not.

If you want a starting point rather than a blank spreadsheet, our cost calculator gives a ballpark for PPIE in about two minutes, built from the same published pricing our service pages carry. It is an estimate to budget against, not a quote, and no email is needed to see a number.

And if the number comes out higher than the budget you have, the useful move is usually to reduce scope rather than to underpay. Fewer sessions done properly will produce more, and evidence better, than a larger programme that cannot pay its contributors or its facilitator.