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[ziggymo]

Hi,

I am new to the forum, but thought this would be a good place to ask what the norm is with postdoc positions. I have an interview this week and need to know how appropriate it is to negotiate salary. On the postdoc page for the University it states that the beginning salary with no experience is based on NIH guidelines i.e., $37K. I would come in at this level.  Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks

[quest]

If they listed the start value as based on NIH guidelines they probably don't have very much room to negotiate. The $37K is probably as far as they can go in salary, but they can probably list you as staff and include benefits. I am guessing if it is NIH you are either health or biosciences related, and for an academic postdoc that is actually better than average.

[ziggymo]

bump

[onlyanne]

You can always try negotiating, but there's probably not much wiggle room above NIH guidelines.

However, other common post-doc benefits are more typically negotiated for:

travel money to conferences
bonus from the supervisor if/when you get your own grant
computer & software

[pasdemaison]

It's extremely unlikely that you'd be able to negotiate salary off the NIH scale.  If the position is grant-funded by the federal government the university has no flexibility.  What's more asking about it ticks a lot of people off because it suggests you don't know the basic ground rules of grant funding, and people who don't know what is and isn't legal can cause problems for PIs and the university later. 

With postdocs your best move is to try to negotiate the term of the appointment (longer is better), travel money (ideally a couple of conferences each year and maybe an international trip), hardware and software (there are some very crappy machines in most universities) and the best available workspace.  I'm in a university with hundreds of postdocs and have never known anyone to get a bonus from a supervisor upon receipt of their own grant.  Contracts and grants would immediately flag that as an inappropriate expense.

I was a postdoc for three years before starting my faculty appointment.  My conclusion after that experience was that the salary level was basically irrelevant.  Your goal with a postdoc is to get a good supervisor who will give you a couple of protected years to do nothing but research and the resources you need to accomplish this.