Postdoc Numbers Hit a Record High, but Has Postdoc Tracking Kept Pace?
Ask a Faculty Affairs team how many tenured faculty their institution has, and the answer usually arrives the same day. Ask how many postdocs there are, and the answer can depend on whom you call. The research office may have one number, a department administrator another, and HR a third, because each counts something slightly different.
I want to make a narrow argument here. Postdocs are a large and growing group of research appointees; they are concentrated in the medical and biomedical fields that many of you support, and the records behind their appointments are often held together by habit rather than by a system. Postdocs may report through your office, a research office, or an office of postdoctoral affairs. Wherever they sit, a request for a number can reach Faculty Affairs, usually from a provost, a research dean, or a board member who wants a quick answer.
The Postdoc Population Is at a Record High
What the Federal Data Shows
The National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics reports that the number of postdocs rose 6.1% between 2023 and 2024, from 65,850 to 69,877, the highest figure ever reported to its annual graduate student and postdoc survey. The previous high was 66,247 in 2019. Counts then fell from 2020 through 2022 before rising in each of the last two survey cycles. That recent rebound means any process sized for a flat population may now be carrying more appointments than it was designed for.
Why Medical Schools Feel This Most
The same federal data shows where postdocs are concentrated. In 2024, biological and biomedical sciences (20,234 postdocs) and clinical medicine (17,919) were the two largest fields, and together they accounted for 54.6% of all postdoctoral employment. Postdoc appointments in the health fields grew 9.6% in the latest year. For Faculty Affairs staff at medical schools and academic medical centers, this is not a peripheral population. It is a large and growing part of the research workforce, alongside a record 35,142 doctorate-holding nonfaculty researchers reported to the same survey. Many of these postdocs work in labs led by faculty whose own appointments, grants, and promotion timelines your office already tracks, which makes the postdoc record a natural companion to the faculty record rather than a separate project.
The data also shows that 58.3% of postdocs held temporary visas in 2024. I raise that only as an operational point: for many of these appointments, start dates, end dates, and extensions often have to line up with visa documentation, which makes accurate dates matter more than they do for most faculty records.
A Population Institutions Have Struggled to Count
The difficulty of counting postdocs is well documented. Science, in its coverage of the federal survey, once observed that universities, despite their pride in data collection, had shown “an amazing lack of curiosity” about how many postdocs worked on their own campuses. The same article recalls that the University of California had to produce a firm headcount in 2005 because it was designing a systemwide health insurance plan for postdocs, and that a 2012 NIH workforce task force reported very little reliable data on postdoc numbers, partly because titles change as postdocs progress through their training.
A national postdoc survey study published in eLife reached a similar conclusion. Its authors attributed gaps in basic counts to inconsistent job titles, postdoc mobility between institutions, and what they call the “ad hoc nature of institutional postdoctoral administration.” These sources span several years, and federal counts have improved. I cannot tell you how any individual institution stands today. But the causes they describe are structural, and they are worth testing in your own office: if leadership asked for your postdoc headcount by department tomorrow, how many sources would you need to check?
Why Postdocs Fall Outside the Usual Faculty Systems
Postdocs occupy an awkward position. They are not students and not faculty; they are usually appointed for a defined term, and many are paid from grants rather than from an institutional faculty line. Their records often end up spread across departments, a research office, HR, and sometimes a dedicated postdoc office, each holding the piece it needs. None of those offices is doing anything wrong. The difficulty is that no single one of them holds the whole record.
| Typical Faculty Appointment | Typical Postdoc Appointment | |
| Appointment length | Open-ended or tied to a tenure timeline | Term-limited, with defined end dates and extensions |
| Funding | Institutional line, often with grant support | Frequently grant-funded, and funding can change during the appointment |
| Title | Standardized ranks | Varies by department and institution |
| Where the record lives | Faculty Affairs and HR | A mix of departments, research office, HR, and postdoc office |
| Documentation | Standard appointment paperwork | Often includes visa and funding documentation |
These differences help explain why a system designed around the tenure-track lifecycle can handle postdocs awkwardly by default.
The Policies Exist. The Gap Is Tracking Them.
Postdoc compensation is not a policy vacuum. NIH publishes postdoctoral stipend levels for its National Research Service Awards, with eight levels based on years of postdoctoral experience, and reissues them regularly. The fiscal year 2026 levels were released in March 2026, and many institutions use them as the basis for their own postdoc pay policies. Lehigh University, for example, aligns its minimum postdoc salaries with the NIH levels and raised its institutional minimums by 2% in April 2026 to match the new federal figures.
The policy side, in other words, is largely in place. The operational challenge is that pay depends on experience level and the reference levels move, so the record has to show where each postdoc stands against policy at any given moment. That requires knowing each person’s experience level, when it changes, when the appointment ends, and which award supports it. When that information lives in separate spreadsheets, a simple question about compliance with your own policy turns into a reconciliation exercise.
What Your Policy Defines | What the Record Needs to Show |
| Pay tied to years of postdoctoral experience | Each postdoc’s experience level and the date it changes |
| Periodic updates to reference pay levels | Which appointments are affected when the minimum moves |
| Term limits and extensions | Start date, end date, and any approved extension |
| Funding source | The award supporting the appointment and its end date |
| Supervision | The principal investigator or mentor responsible for the appointee |
Key Takeaway: The rules for postdoc appointments are usually already written. What is often missing is a record that shows, at any moment, how each appointment stands against them.
What Poor Postdoc Tracking Costs an Institution
The requests are ordinary. A provost wants to know how many postdocs the institution supports. A research dean needs to know which appointments end this year. A board member asks how the postdoc population has changed. At a medical school, the same questions arrive from department chairs managing lab capacity and from leaders planning research growth. Each one is simple to ask and slow to answer when the record is fragmented, and the same staff usually do the reconciling while already managing the rest of the faculty lifecycle.
There is also a quieter cost. Postdocs are early-career researchers, and some will later be considered for faculty positions. When their appointment history lives in a clean, connected record, that history is a head start. When it lives in scattered files, staff must reconstruct it. Neither situation is a crisis, but the second consumes staff time that could go elsewhere and makes reporting on the research workforce harder than it needs to be.
A useful first step requires no new tools. Write down the five questions about postdocs that leadership asks most often, and next to each one, note how many offices you would have to contact to answer it. The offices on that list, and its length, show where the record is fragmented. They also give you a concrete case to make when you ask for support to fix it, because the cost is visible in hours rather than in principle.
Bringing Postdocs Into the Same System as Everyone Else
At Mountain Pass, we built SmartPath around a simple idea: the system should adapt to the way your institution works, not the other way around. For postdocs, that starts with configuration. Your term limits, extension rules, and approval paths can be modeled as a postdoc appointment type, with workflows that route each appointment and reappointment through the offices your policy names, whether that is a department, a research office, HR, or the provost’s office.
Because SmartPath keeps the underlying data structured, the details your policy depends on become fields rather than footnotes: experience level, appointment dates, funding source, and supervising faculty. Dashboards show where every appointment stands, and reminders can prompt action ahead of end dates and pay-level changes. When a provost, dean, or board member asks for a number, the answer comes from the record instead of from a round of emails. And because the same platform supports faculty workflows, you can see postdocs alongside faculty and other appointees rather than in a separate silo. SmartPath is designed to automate policy-driven workflows across the offices that touch these appointments, including HR, the provost’s office, and credentialing, for postdocs, staff, and graduate students as well as faculty.
Want to see how postdoc appointments could be tracked at your institution?
Sources cited in this post:
- National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, Postdoctoral Appointments Rise While Graduate Enrollment Slows (NSF 26-308, February 2026)
- Science, The GSS Discovers 10 Percent More U.S. Postdocs
- eLife, United States National Postdoc Survey results and the interaction of gender, career choice and mentor impact
- Duke University, summary of NIH notice NOT-OD-26-044 on NRSA stipends for fiscal year 2026
- Lehigh University, Postdoctoral Compensation Policy
