Basics of Benefits and Salary

Types of Postdoc Appointments:

  1. Employee Postdocs (paid from Harvard faculty grant/Harvard fellowship)
  2. Spindee Postdocs (paid by an external source, but money is routed through Harvard)
  3. Research Associates (usually like Employee postdoc, but have been a postdoc >3years)
  4. External/visiting Postdocs (paid directly by an external source, but have a Harvard affiliation)

Benefits
Am I “benefits-eligible”?
Postdocs fall into two general categories: benefits eligible and non-benefits eligible. As a general rule, if your paycheck comes directly from Harvard, you are probably benefits eligible. If your paycheck does not come from Harvard, you are not benefits eligible. Categories 1-3 above are benefits eligible. If you are not benefits eligible, you will not receive health/dental insurance or other benefits from Harvard. To be benefits eligible, you must be paid at least $15,000 through Harvard (17.5h/week).

Benefits for “benefits-eligible” postdocs
If you are benefits-eligible, you must sign up for your benefits within 30 days of starting your employment. Contact the benefits office for more information.

Benefits change depending on whether you are an employee or stipendee postdoc. You can read about your benefits here or watch videos on them here.

Benefits for “non-benefits-eligible” postdocs
As you must have health insurance in MA, if you are not benefits eligible, you must make sure that you either purchase health insurance on your own (see here for options) or are provided health insurance through another source (e.g., a spouse or your funding agency). Unfortunately, most other benefits offered to Harvard postdocs by Harvard are only available to benefits-eligible employees, including the child-care scholarship, commuter benefits, life insurance, or disability benefits. However, some (minor) benefits are available to all Harvard affiliates, so it is always worth asking.

List of Common Funding Sources and Resulting Benefits Status:
Funders that pay through Harvard:
If you are funded by these sources, you will likely remain benefits eligible.
Harvard internal fellowships (e.g., Harvard College Fellows, Data Science Initiative)
National Institutes of Health
Helen Hay Whitney Foundation
Life Science Research Foundation
Jane Coffin Childs Foundation
Damon Runyon Cancer Foundation
Human Frontier Science Program

Funders that pay awardees directly:
If you are funded by these sources, you are likely not benefits eligible.
National Science Foundation
Howard Hughes Medical Institute (but you should get benefits through HHMI)
EMBO
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)
Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF)
NASA Postdoctoral Fellowship Program
DOE ARPA-E Postdoctoral Fellowship Program
Marie Sklodowska-Curie Global fellowship (will be employed by foreign university)
Fulbright

Recommendations on Salary and Benefits from the FAS PDA
Please note that these are our recommendations, and do not reflect official university policy. That said, the position of the FAS PDA is that fair salary and benefits is an equity issue: not everyone can afford to spend years with low or unstable salary and benefits, and this prevents some people from staying on the academic track.
Therefore, we encourage postdocs to ask for more than the mandated minimums when negotiating salary and benefits with your faculty advisor. We note that Harvard FAS has among the lowest salary requirements, with, to name a few, Stanford, Columbia, Rockefeller, Harvard Medical School, Intramural NIH, and Yale, all having higher postdoc salary minimum scales. Furthermore, the cost of living in Cambridge is among the highest in the country. It’s becoming increasingly difficult for faculty to hire postdocs, so we recommend asking for what you need! It is entirely reasonable to negotiate your salary and doesn’t mean you love your work any less. Please reach out at faspda@fas.harvard.edu if you want to talk through salary and benefits negotiation.

Salary
The Harvard FAS PDA recommends that postdocs are paid at minimum according to the Harvard Medical School postdoc salary scale. The HMS scale is higher than the FAS scale, despite the fact that postdocs live in the same geographic location with the same high cost of living. The NIH NRSA scale is set for the entire country and does not take into account cost of living. We therefore recommend that, like at HMS, postdocs at Harvard FAS be paid higher salaries to account for the higher cost of living in this area.

Benefits
We recommend that all postdocs be provided benefits through their employer. Postdocs should not have to buy health insurance on their own, as this is extremely unusual for a full time job. We recommend that if a postdoc is not benefits-eligible and does not have access to benefits from their funder, that their faculty advisor either pay them the minimum amount to confer benefits eligibility ($15,000) (preferred) or raise their salary to account for the additional cost of paying for benefits out of pocket.