New F&A Rate Agreement with FY 2010 Fringe Benefit Rate
Prior F&A Rate Agreement with FY 2009 Fringe Benefit Rate 
Prior F&A Rate Agreement with prior Fringe Benefit Rate

The stated Purpose of OMB Circular A-21 is to establish principles for determining costs applicable to grants, contracts, and other agreements with educational institutions. The principles are designed to provide that the Federal Government bear its fair share of total costs, determined in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. The Circular goes on to detail the principles, describe costing methodologies, and define allowable versus unallowable costs. A-21 is the federal government's handbook for proper grant administration.

The Facilities and Administrative Rate Agreement (F&A), often referred to as Indirect Costs, is the process of recovering the portion of costs that support sponsored projects, but are not directly charged to sponsored funds. The administrative portion covers costs of such offices as:
The Facilities portion covers costs such as:
The process of calculating the F&A Rate is to sum these indirect costs and divide by the base. The base is defined as the major functions of an educational institution. A-21 identifies those functions as 1) Instruction and Departmental Research, 2) Organized Research, 3) Other Sponsored Activity, and 4) Other Institutional Activity. So simply put the F&A is calculated by:
For questions regarding cost studies, please contact Julie Ford at 215-895-2947, jjf47@drexel.edu or Tim Devine at 215-895-6053, tjd39@drexel.edu.