NIH Is Retiring the K99/R00. Meet PA-28-048, the KT1/R00 Mentored Career Transition Award, and the October 12, 2027 Deadline

Academic PIs and NIH-funded postdocs have until an estimated October 12, 2027 to file the first application under PA-28-048, the Mentored Career Transition Award (KT1/R00), whose Grants.gov forecast — opportunity 363569 — posted on August 13 and quietly retires the K99/R00 as researchers have known it.

That sentence is doing a lot of work, so here is the plain version: the career-development ladder that American biomedical science has been climbing for two decades is being renumbered, and the announcement arrived not as a press release but as four forecast records on Grants.gov.

The Forecast That Landed on August 13

The primary document is Grants.gov opportunity 363569, posted August 13, 2026 by the National Institutes of Health under agency code HHS-NIH11 and CFDA 93.113. It is a forecast, not a live synopsis — there is no application package yet, and no button to push.

The dates in the record are the story. Estimated synopsis posting: July 13, 2027. Estimated application due date: October 12, 2027. Estimated award date and project start: July 1, 2028. Fiscal year: 2028. Cost sharing: none. The listed contact is not an institute program office but the NIH Division of Biomedical Research Workforce (NIHTrain@mail.nih.gov), which tells you this is a trans-NIH policy action rather than one institute's initiative. Non-domestic entities are not eligible to apply; foreign components of domestic awards remain allowed.

The program description is short enough to quote in full: "The biphasic award will provide up to 5 years of support in two phases. The initial, mentored career development phase will provide 1-2 years of support for needed career development to facilitate a timely transition of promising postdoctoral researchers from their mentored postdoctoral research positions to independent, tenure-track or equivalent research-intensive faculty positions. The second phase will provide up to 3 years of independent research support, contingent on satisfactory progress during the first phase and an approved, independent, tenure-track (or equivalent) faculty position."

Read that against the K99/R00 and you will find no substantive difference. One to two mentored years, up to three independent years, phase two contingent on landing a faculty job. The mechanism is intact. The activity code is not.

Three Siblings Posted the Same Morning

PA-28-048 did not arrive alone. Three more NIH forecasts carry the same August 13 posting date, the same July 13, 2027 synopsis estimate, the same October 12, 2027 due date, the same July 1, 2028 start, the same Division of Biomedical Research Workforce contact, and the same CFDA number:

• PA-28-020 — Mentored Research Scientist Career Development Award (KR1). Up to five years of protected time under an experienced mentor, for candidates with research doctoral degrees. This is the K01 lane.
• PA-28-047 — Mentored Clinician Research Scientist Career Development Award (KC1). The same five-year structure, explicitly for candidates with clinical doctoral degrees. This absorbs the territory currently split between K08 and K23.
• PA-28-049 — Established Clinician Investigator Award to Support Mentoring (KS1). Protected time for senior clinician investigators to mentor early-career clinician scientists. That is the K24, renamed.

A search of NIH's forecasted opportunities returns no other PA-28-series career-development parents. Four codes — KR1, KC1, KT1/R00, KS1 — are being positioned to carry the individual mentored K portfolio that currently runs across a dozen-plus activity codes and roughly twice as many parent announcements, because most of them exist in paired "Clinical Trial Required" and "Clinical Trial Not Allowed" versions.

NOT-OD-26-098 Is the Document Your Research Office Should Have Circulated

The forecasts are the artifact. The policy is NOT-OD-26-098, "Notice of NIH Updates to Career Development (K) Award Programs," released August 12, 2026 by the NIH Office of the Director — one day before the Grants.gov records appeared.

The notice consolidates individual K announcements into a streamlined set of parent NOFOs organized by program type, and it includes a crosswalk table mapping current activity codes and NOFOs to their new equivalents. Three provisions matter more than the renaming:

Every current K activity-code NOFO expires July 13, 2027, with the exception of K00, K12, K43, and K76. That is not a soft sunset. It is the same date the new parents are estimated to post.

New due dates begin October 12, 2027. NIH's standard K receipt dates are February 12, June 12, and October 12. Line those up against a July 13, 2027 expiration and the arithmetic is uncomfortable: the last routine deadline under the codes you know is June 12, 2027, and the next one under the codes you don't is October 12, 2027. Anyone whose K99 or K08 resubmission would naturally land in that window is looking at a four-month hole where their mechanism does not exist in either form.

K awards will no longer support clinical trials. NIH will stop issuing "Independent Clinical Trial Required" K NOFOs, and K funds may not be used to support the conduct of a clinical trial, a clinical trial feasibility study, or an ancillary study to an existing trial. Separately, K applications will no longer require a Data Management and Sharing plan.

The Clinical Trial Rule Is the Change That Will Actually Reshape Careers

The renaming will generate the most hallway conversation and the least real disruption. Codes are labels; review criteria, budget caps, and eligibility windows are what determine who gets funded.

The clinical trial provision is different in kind. A meaningful share of K08 and K23 awardees have used the mentored phase to run a small trial — a pilot, a feasibility study, an ancillary arm bolted onto a larger trial already underway. That was the point for many clinician-scientists: protected time plus enough money to generate the trial experience an R01 reviewer wants to see. Under the new framework, that path closes. The KC1 will fund the career development and the research training; it will not fund the trial.

Clinician-scientists on that trajectory now need a second funding source running in parallel — an institutional pilot award, a foundation grant, a departmental commitment, an R21 — and they need it identified before the application, not after. Reviewers will ask how the candidate gains trial experience when the award cannot pay for a trial. "My institution will figure it out" is not an answer that survives study section.

What the Forecast Deliberately Does Not Say

There is no award ceiling, no floor, and no estimated number of awards in the PA-28-048 record. Those numbers arrive with the full announcement in July 2027, and individual institutes will continue to set their own caps.

For calibration, the current K99/R00 pays up to roughly $100,000 per year in the mentored phase — commonly $75,000 in salary plus $25,000 in research development support — and up to $249,000 per year in total costs for up to three years in the R00 phase. Do not budget your 2028 lab startup on the assumption that KT1/R00 matches those figures. In a fiscal environment where NIH's discretionary base has been contested for three consecutive appropriations cycles, a restructuring is exactly the moment an agency adjusts per-award economics without a separate announcement. Assume parity if you like, but verify it in July 2027 before you sign anything with a department chair.

Building a Deadline Calendar That Survives the Gap

The tactical response is straightforward and has a hard date on it.

If you are a postdoc who intends to apply for a K99, submit under the current parent by June 12, 2027. A first submission in February 2027 gives you one resubmission slot before the codes turn over; a first submission in June 2027 gives you none. If your work involves a clinical trial component, submit under the existing "Clinical Trial Required" announcements while they exist, because after July 13, 2027 that option is gone from the K portfolio entirely.

If you are a department chair or training director, the crosswalk in NOT-OD-26-098 needs to be reconciled against your internal K-application pipeline this fall, not next summer. Institutional review committees, mock study sections, and internal deadlines are all built around code names that expire in eleven months.

And if the last year has taught federal researchers anything, it is that a single-agency deadline calendar is a liability. NSF's CAREER program — the closest structural analogue on the other side of the federal research house — runs one deadline per year, in late July, and rewards a fundamentally different proposal architecture built around integrating research and education. Our breakdown of how to position for NSF CAREER is worth reading alongside this one, because pre-tenure faculty who are eligible for both should be sequencing them deliberately rather than defaulting to whichever agency funded their postdoc.

The KT1/R00 is not a smaller opportunity than the K99/R00. It is the same opportunity with a new label, a harder line around clinical trials, and a four-month window in 2027 where the ladder has a missing rung. The researchers who get hurt will be the ones who found out in June.

Next step: Search active NIH career development and mentored K awards on Granted to see which current-code announcements are still accepting applications before the July 13, 2027 expiration — and set a reminder for the July 2027 synopsis posting of PA-28-048.