Fringe Rate FAQs

The new benefit rates will not affect employees at all. The rates are only for the employer costs charged to the budgets. Employees will not have an impact to their paychecks.

Many researchers had multi-year awards and proposals that were approved at rates different than the consolidated rates. A one-time funding pool was used to address these issues, and the university completed review and assessment in the fall of 2015.

In order to better report the effort expended on grants and contracts, the new fringe rate will be charged to departments on the full salary during the contract period and not during the deferred payout periods. This will result in no departmental fringe charges for the first few and last few pay periods of each fiscal year for employees on deferred pay. Employee withholdings and deductions will continue as they do now on all 26 payrolls.

The composite fringe benefit rates are applied to all employees who are eligible for benefits regardless of whether they accept the benefit and regardless of which benefits options they elect.

Consolidated fringe benefit rates are applied based on the salary amount and rate group the employee falls into regardless of when the employee is appointed.

Federal regulations require fringe benefits to be charged by aggregating fringe benefit costs on the basis of institutionwide salaries and wages of the employees receiving the benefits. The CFR rate is an average of all the benefits applicable to employees within rate groups based on attributes of the employees who fall into that group.

The benefit cost for an employee is the applicable rate multiplied by gross salary. If the appointment percentage is lower, the salary is lower and, thus, the benefit cost will be lower, even if the employee receives full benefits. This is considerably simpler to calculate and also reduces benefit expenses for part-time employees as compared to the old method of calculating benefit costs.

Once CFRs are implemented, we cannot mix between charging actual costs and composite benefit rates.

The composite benefit rates represent the percentage that will be applied to the employee salary. This amount will be charged to the account for fringe benefit costs regardless of the actual costs to the university. New expense codes have been established for each of the consolidated fringe benefit rate groups (faculty, staff and student). Below is a table of the employee classes for each rate group and the associated account code.

Departments are not responsible for any difference between the current benefit rates and the actual costs of its employees, and this will continue to be the case under the new consolidated fringe benefit rate structure. 

The Division of Finance will complete a year-end reconciliation between actual benefit costs incurred by the university with the amount charged using the composite benefit rates. Any over- or under-recovery will be reflected in future year rates.

This averaging concept for fringe benefits is permitted per the U.S. Office of Management and Budget Circular A-21 and the Uniform Guidance, which allow for fringe benefits to be charged by allocating a pool of fringe benefit costs on the basis of institutionwide salaries and wages of the employees receiving the benefits.

The fringe benefit rate that will be charged to your accounts will be adjusted each fiscal year, so the first payroll feed in July will have had the new rates charged to them. If you are budgeting for a project that crosses fiscal years, then you will need to adjust the fringe benefit rates for the employees accordingly.

Please contact cfrquestions@uidaho.edu with any questions not addressed here.