# Travel, lodging and meals reimbursed as a standard line in every trial budget

Source: https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-tr1-travel-lodging-in-every-budget/  
OnCo record `idea-tr1-travel-lodging-in-every-budget` (Idea). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

People should not have to pay to be in a trial. Sponsors would routinely cover travel, hotel and food costs, paid up front rather than claimed back, which is already accepted by regulators as fair rather than coercive.

## Summary

Every trial budget includes a participant-cost line administered by a third party, prepaid where possible, covering travel, parking, lodging, meals and a companion. The FDA's position is that reimbursement for expenses is not undue influence. Charities such as the Lazarex Cancer Foundation have shown that covering these costs raises enrolment among low-income patients; the idea is to make sponsor funding of it universal, with ethics committees expecting it.

## Fields

- Kind: Idea
- Last checked: 2026-09-08
- Hypothesis: Trials with prepaid participant-cost coverage will enrol a larger share of patients from low-income postcodes and have lower dropout than matched trials without it.
- Rationale: Out-of-pocket costs are a documented barrier and fall hardest on poorer and minority patients. Reimbursement is cheap relative to per-patient trial cost.
- Proposed test: Sponsor-level natural experiment: compare enrolment demographics and retention before and after a portfolio-wide reimbursement policy, adjusting for indication.
- Maturity: being-tested-at-scale
- Actor: industry

## Sources

- FDA: Payment and Reimbursement to Research Subjects: https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidance-documents/payment-and-reimbursement-research-subjects
- Lazarex Cancer Foundation: https://lazarex.org/

## Connected records

- bottlenecks: [Trials do not represent the people who get cancer](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-trial-diversity/), [Trials enrol too few, too slowly](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-trial-enrolment/)

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