GRANT GRAPH · the independent grant data index

How federal grant money actually works: 2,000 programs, 4,512 opportunities a year, 1,199 open today

There are three different numbers behind the phrase "federal grants," and mixing them up is why searching for one is so frustrating. Right now 1,199 funding opportunities are open, 928 of them accept nonprofit applicants, and 381 of those are National Institutes of Health research grants. Counted from the federal government's own data on 2026-08-03.

📅 Every figure on this page is counted from the grants.gov API and IRS filings and was current on 2026-08-03. This page regenerates daily.

Layer 1: programs (about 2,000 of them)

The federal government runs roughly two thousand assistance programs, catalogued as Assistance Listings. Most of the money in them never becomes something you can apply for. Programs like SNAP or Title I education funding are formula programs: the money is distributed automatically to states and territories by a formula written into law. A nonprofit cannot apply to a formula program. If you have ever been told "the federal government spends billions on hunger" and then found nothing to apply to, this is why. Both statements are true at the same time.

Layer 2: the yearly flow (about 4,512 opportunities a year)

The programs that are competitive publish specific funding opportunities, each with its own deadline. Across 690 agencies and sub-agencies, recent full years looked like this:

Our archive holds 83,071 opportunities in total, going back two decades. That is the pool of things that have ever been open, not the pool you can apply to today.

Layer 3: open right now (1,199, and fewer than you think)

Today, 1,199 funding opportunities are posted and 519 more are forecast. That number gets quoted as though it is the size of your opportunity. It is not, and here is the arithmetic nobody publishes:

So the honest answer for a community nonprofit that does not run a research program is that the federal field is closer to 387 opportunities than to 1,199. That is not a complaint about the government. It is what the data says, and it explains why generic "grants for nonprofits" lists feel useless: they are counting layer 3 without filtering it.

A footnote worth knowing: 124 of the currently open opportunities have no close date at all. They are effectively rolling, and they sit in listings for years.

Where the money actually is, for most nonprofits

Private foundations. We extract every grant reported on IRS Form 990 filings: currently 2,472,900 grants totaling $227.6 billion from 100,995 funders, filed by the funders themselves. For most community organizations that is where the realistic money lives, and unlike federal listings it is searchable by what the funder has actually paid for before. Our cause pages show both sides for each cause: what is open federally today, and who has actually written checks.

What this page does not say

• Formula programs are not worthless to nonprofits. The money often arrives through a state agency or a pass-through grant. It just is not something you apply for at the federal level.
• The nonprofit-eligible count is derived from each opportunity's stated applicant types. Some listings are vague about eligibility, and we count vague as potentially eligible rather than excluding it.
• The research cut is a keyword read of opportunity text, not an official classification. It is a scale indicator, not a precise line.
• Filings include corrections: voided checks, returned grants and corpus-distribution adjustments appear as negative amounts and are counted as filed. They are a fraction of a percent of the total.
• Counts move daily as opportunities open and close. The date on this page is the date.

Grant Graph is an independent, free index built from public data: the grants.gov API and IRS Form 990 series e-file releases. It is not affiliated with grants.gov or any federal agency. Every figure here is reproducible from those sources.