The Helmholtz Association’s annual budget consists of core financing and third-party funding. Ninety percent of core financing is provided by the federal government and 10 percent comes from the federal states in which the member centres are located. The centres raise around 30 percent of the total budget themselves in the form of third-party funding. The Annual Report shows these core-financed and third-party-financed costs for the 2011 reporting period. Due to the Helmholtz Association’s strategic focus on six research fields, total costs are broken down according to research field and centre. This overview is supplemented by information on the number of staff members, expressed as full-time equivalents (for both the centres and research fields). The overview also includes the 46 million euros in costs attributable to the Helmholtz institutes and the Helmholtz Association’s share of the German Centres for Health Research. The contribution to the third-party funding amounts to 0.9 million euros. The core concept behind programme-oriented funding is the provision of financing on the basis of strategic reviews. The advantage of linking funding to research programmes is that it allows scientists to enter into crossinstitutional and cross-disciplinary collaborations. For the five-year duration of the programmes, the level of funding is based on the results of the strategic programme reviews. Additional funding for so-called non-programmelinked research is made available to Helmholtz centres so that they can address new scientific topics, implement new research approaches, expand expertise and prepare for important strategic projects. The level of this funding is tied to the success of the centres in the review process and amounts to 20 percent of the total programme funding acquired. If the centres choose to use this funding to advance innovative approaches within the existing research programmes, the funding is directly allocated to the costs of the respective programmes. If the centres use the funding to initiate new projects and develop new thematic fields, it is reported separately under the heading of non-programme-linked research.