Stipend, Scholarship, Fellowship, or Grant

Stipends, scholarships, fellowships, and grants are meant to support personal scholarly activities. These income payments are often grouped together, for tax purposes, as "non-service fellowship" income. This may include also health insurance paid on behalf of non-employees and "reimbursements" for travel or other expenses that have not been deemed genuine University business expenses (i.e. in direct support of University research or scholarship).

Correctly distinguishing between income and business expense reimbursements has important ramifications for tax withholding and reporting as well as for the actual payment procedure.

  • Fellowship Payments and Reimbursements for Students and Non-employee Postdocs/Fellows
  • If a scholarship recipient is a degree candidate at Harvard University, and all or part of the award has been set aside for qualified tuition and course related fees, the scholarship is not reportable.
  • Scholarships and fellowships issued to resident aliens (including funds that exceed tuition and related expenses) do not require tax withholding when payments is issued. These payments may still be reportable to the U.S. tax authorities as "gross income" to when filing tax returns, and might also subject to taxation. In these cases, no tax reporting document (W-2, 1042-S, nor 1099) will be issued by Harvard. The individual should use information from personal pay records to report this income.
  • Nonresident aliens on an F, J, M, or Q visa are subject to a 14% tax withholding rate on non-service fellowship/ scholarship income, in the absence of a claimed tax treaty. Those on other visa types will incur a 30% withholding rate. These tax withholding requirements are only applied to non-qualified fellowships/ scholarships, such as non-employee health insurance, housing, childcare, travel reimbursements related to personal research. Additionally, this income will be reported on a 1042-S.

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