NIH application review

Check your NIH application package before eRA does.

eRA and Grants.gov enforce rules that have nothing to do with the quality of your science — filename length, duplicate attachments, file formats. Recensa checks the finished package against those rules, and against itself, before you submit.

Run a free check

Published, literal, checkable

Checks against the rules you specify
Your NOFO governs
Word & PDF
Runs at 11pm

The rules are published, literal, and checkable

These are NIH/eRA and Grants.gov rules. They are not judgment calls — and they are exactly the sort of thing a machine should check and a human shouldn't have to, at 11pm, the night before a deadline. Recensa checks the finished package against them.

Attachment filenames are capped at 50 characters. eRA systems enforce a long-standing 50-character limit.
Only certain characters are permitted in filenames — A–Z, a–z, 0–9, underscore, hyphen, space, period. Other characters are not accepted by eRA Commons.
Attachment filenames must be unique. All attachment filenames within the application must be unique; Grants.gov instructs applicants not to attach two documents with the same name.
Attachments must be PDF, with a valid extension. Compressed formats (ZIP, RAR, Adobe Portfolio) are not accepted.
Project titles are capped at 200 characters.

The formatting rules are just as literal.

Text in attachments must be 11 points or larger. Smaller text is permitted inside figures, graphs, diagrams, and charts only if it stays legible at 100%. Type density cannot exceed 15 characters per linear inch including spaces, and line spacing cannot exceed six lines per vertical inch.

Every page needs margins of at least half an inch on all four sides, with no applicant-supplied content inside them. Page size cannot exceed letter. PDFs must be flattened, and must not be encrypted or password-protected in a way that stops NIH systems from processing them. A zero-byte attachment is unacceptable.

NIH states the consequence plainly: attachments that don't follow these requirements can trigger submission errors, or cause an application to be withdrawn from funding consideration.

Working through your package by hand? The NIH submission checklist walks every one of these rules in order.

Your NOFO governs.

Programs impose additional or different requirements — page limits in particular vary substantially, and what counts toward a limit (covers, forms, appendices) is program-specific. Recensa checks against the rules you specify. We do not guess at your NOFO.

Rules cited reflect published eRA Commons and Grants.gov guidance; confirm the current NOFO before you submit.

The portal gap

An application can pass the portal and still be withdrawn.

This isn't hypothetical. NIH's policy notice on complete and compliant applications gives the example itself: placeholder attachments pass eRA's system-enforced validations, and applications containing them are incomplete and will be withdrawn.

Paraphrased from NIH's application guide and policy notice NOT-OD-26-025 — not a verbatim quotation. Verify requirements against your current NOFO.

eRA checks many standard page-limit requirements — but not every requirement attached to a specific funding opportunity, and limits measured in lines of text aren't systematically enforced at all. System validations don't replace the checks NIH staff perform after submission. NIH's guidance is direct: don't rely on them alone.

The responsibility sits with you. NIH expects applicants to examine every element of the assembled application and correct problems before the deadline — and finding a problem afterward doesn't help. Correcting an on-time submission is not an accepted reason for a late application, and post-submission materials aren't meant for fixing errors you discover later.

That is the gap Recensa checks before the application leaves your hands.

And the errors inside the application

Beyond the portal rules, Recensa checks the application against itself: figures that don't match across documents, references to appendices that aren't there, budget arithmetic that doesn't sum, and terminology that drifts between sections. Each finding is tied to its evidence.

Figures that don't match across documents

The budget narrative says $412,000. The SF-424 says $421,000. Both look right on their own page.

References to appendices that aren't there

The narrative cites Appendix D; the package has A through C.

Budget arithmetic that doesn't sum

Recomputed, not estimated.

Terminology that drifts

The program is “the Initiative” in the abstract and “the Project” in the workplan.

The independent-reviewer problem

Standard guidance for federal applications is to build a compliance checklist from the NOFO and have someone other than the primary writer check the package against it. Recensa approaches the submitted package as finished evidence rather than continuing the drafting process — which is the whole point of that pass, and it's available at 11pm.

What's in scope

Recensa reviews the package. It does not confirm your SAM.gov registration or UEI, submit on your behalf, determine eligibility, or judge whether the science is compelling. Those are outside the document — and outside what a document checker can honestly claim.

Check the package before the portal does

Upload your finished NIH application package and see the filename, format, and internal-consistency findings before you submit. The Internal Check is free.