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PhysStipendRankings: PhD Stipend Rankings

PhysStipendRankings is a stipend-based ranking of top-paying Physics departments in US. We may implement support for other countries and you are welcomed to contribute! For a real academic ranking, please refer to U.S.News, etc.

  • Stipend is the annual, 12-month, pre-tax allowance graciously granted by the institution.
    Note that some departments do not have guaranteed summer funding, and we are currently working to collect such data.
    Departments with summer funding guarentee are tagged with a summer label. For now, the list is not complete.
  • Fees are annual non-reimbursible tariffs (including health insurance) reclaimed by said institution.
  • Living cost is calculated based on the MIT Living Wage Calculator for the institution's city.
We hope you find PhysStipendRankings useful towards getting your institution to pay a living wage.

We have received a lot of comments that the living cost calculated by the MIT Living Cost Calculator does not really reflect the real living cost in multiple areas. We are considering alternative metrics and data sources. If you are aware of something we can use, please feel free to submit issues or pull requests on GitHub.

Rank Private schools in 🟪. Public schools in 🟩.
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#        Institution                            Stipend ($)       Fees ($)       Living Cost ($)       After Fees & Living ($)


This ranking is part informational and part satire, designed to democratize information on how PhD students in physics and related areas are paid for their labor – inadequately, in most cases.

Most of the frontend code of this website is from CSRankings, and we intentionally used the same template. The code of this website can be found at https://github.com/PhysStipendRankings/PhysStipendRankings, and the data presented can be found as a CSV file here.

Contributing: Everyone is welcomed to submit patches or report the stipend via pull requests. Another option to submit valuable datapoints is through this Google Form. Also, feel free to submit issues on GitHub.

Plan for the Future: We have a list of items that we plan to prioritize in our efforts to improve this website. All contributions are welcomed. Please leave us a message if you want to implement one of these features. The following is the ranked order of importance:

  • Gathering data for summer funding guarantees. We plan to incorporate a feature that allows users to exclude non-guaranteed funds when calculating the stipends.
  • Highlighting universities that offer 100% appointments during the summer, e.g. UW, instead of the typical 50% appointments.
  • Adding a verification system for stipends, where we can confirm the details of the stipend with an offer letter or paystub record, and displaying a checkmark in the "Stipend" column to indicate that the stipend is verified.
  • Add alternative sources of living cost. In the future, users should have the ability to choose between different sources of living cost while ranking.

Disclaimer: PhysStipendRankings is designed to highlight stipend situations across various institutions, based on user-submitted information. We try our best to verify their accuracy, but we cannot guarantee they are correct or up-to-date.
We are also aware that while the MIT Living Wage Calculator is useful for comparing costs of living across the country, it has its limitations. There are two issues flagged by our users:

  • Data is often unavailable for the precise district in which the university is located. In such cases, we use data for the county or wider metro area. This often skews the estimate lower. For instance, UC San Diego is located in La Jolla, one of the most expensive districts in the US, but we resort to using figures for the wider San Diego county. Same goes for Princeton vs. Mercer County, etc.
  • The Calculator states that the estimates are what is required "to cover the costs of their family's basic needs where they live". However, how much one needs to sustain onself is subjective, and users have reported that they can live on much less.
Ultimately, while we hope you find this information useful, this should not be used as the primary basis for grad school decisions. We advocate users to do their own research before making life decisions.

PhysStipendRankings is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. The frontend (i.e., CSS and HTML) of this website is based on CSRankings, a work at https://github.com/emeryberger/CSrankings. The copyright of CSRankings is owned by Emery Berger. The copyright of the non-CSRankings part of PhysStipendRankings is owned by its contributors.