A charity in Britain finds the capital programme it has been looking for. The project is a building — exactly what the funder pays for. The organisation is a registered charity, which is what the funder requires. The budget clears the minimum. Then one sentence in the guidelines ends it.
Per the Wolfson Foundation’s funding FAQs as indexed, applicants that lease a building generally need at least 15 years remaining on the lease.
Not a lease. Fifteen years of lease. The organisation has eight.
That sentence is doing something unusual, and it is worth naming precisely, because it is not the eligibility rule most guidelines reads are looking for. It does not ask what kind of organisation you are. It does not ask where you are, what you want to build, or how much you need. It asks how long you will still be there — and then it answers in years.
The Short Version
On capital grants the operative eligibility test is often a duration, not a status: years remaining on your lease, years you must keep the building affordable, months before you break ground, months your director has been in post. A duration is invisible to every search filter, and unlike a county line, it is frequently negotiable before you apply.
Why Facilities Money Asks a Time Question
The logic is straightforward. A funder paying for a programme buys twelve months of activity. A funder paying for a roof, a lift, a building or a parcel of land buys something with a thirty-year life, inside an organisation it does not own and cannot control. So the underwriting question stops being is this a good project and becomes will the public benefit still exist when the asset is halfway through its life. Every rule below is a different answer to that question.
What makes this family hard to work with is not that the rules are unreasonable. It is that a duration does not live in any field a grant index can filter on. Award size, deadline, geography and applicant type all have columns. “Fifteen years remaining on your lease” is a fact about your filing cabinet, not about the grant — so across the 43,000+ open opportunities currently in the OpenGrants index (verified 2026-10-13), no search returns the ones you fail on this basis. You find out by reading.
The six records below ask the time question on four different clocks.
Clock One: Years You Must Already Have
The first clock has already run before you open the application, which makes it the most expensive kind to discover late.
Wolfson states the rule twice, in two separate indexed records, which is itself a signal about how load-bearing it is. The Foundation’s Stage 1 guidance says applications for leased sites generally require a minimum of 15 years remaining on the lease. The Funding for Places FAQ repeats it for applicants leasing a building.
The surrounding terms explain why fifteen years and not five. Per the records: funding is primarily for capital projects — buildings and equipment — and explicitly not for land or property purchase, feasibility studies, or projects costing under £15,000. The minimum grant size is £15,000, varying by programme. Overheads, admin costs and VAT are not eligible costs. Priority goes to large-scale, transformational capital projects rather than routine maintenance. Applicants must be charities or organisations with charitable status or the equivalent, and over 95% of funding is awarded within the UK, including eligible charities in the Channel Islands and Isle of Man.
Read that list as one instrument and the lease rule is the only part that makes sense. A funder that declines routine maintenance in favour of transformational work, and declines to pay the VAT on it, is buying permanence. Fifteen years is its estimate of how long permanence takes to show up.
The process terms matter for the same reason. Per the records, Stage 1 is submitted online and assessed on a rolling basis, trustee decisions are made twice yearly at June and December meetings, and there is a minimum of five months between a Stage 1 submission and a funding decision. Applicants must show project cost, funds raised and shortfall, and may be asked for match funding at Stage 2.
If the lease is what stands between you and eligibility, that calendar is the argument for fixing it now rather than after a rejection: a renegotiation taking a quarter still lands inside the next cycle.
Clock Two: Months You Must Already Have Served
The second clock is the one almost nobody checks, because it is not a fact about the organisation at all. It is a fact about a person.
Per the S. Mark Taper Foundation’s 2026 Capital Letter of Inquiry as indexed, eligibility excludes organisations that received an SMT Foundation grant in the past three calendar years — a re-eligibility rule of a familiar kind — or whose CEO/ED has served less than 12 months.
Sit with the second clause. An organisation can satisfy every other condition in that record and still be ineligible because of a hiring date — and the other conditions are not light. Per the record: the minimum request is $100,000; LOIs go through the Foundation’s grants portal, with no email or hard copy accepted; the primary service area must be Los Angeles, Imperial, Riverside, San Bernardino or Ventura County; and a primary programme area must be selected from Arts, Civic Affairs, Education, Environment, Health or Social Services.
The documentation list reads like a capital lender’s file: organisational and demographic details, a capital project budget, fundraising status, a construction and completion timeline, board-approved naming opportunities, a list of grants received, a board list, an organisational budget, audited financials, an IRS determination letter, and a California Franchise Tax Board entity status letter.
An organisation that can assemble that file is not a fragile one, which is the point of the tenure rule: the Foundation is screening not for competence but for a signed-off plan that will survive the person who signed it. A capital campaign and a leadership transition tend to arrive together, and this record prices that correlation at twelve months.
If your executive director started this year, this program is a diary entry rather than an application — and the date it opens is one you can calculate exactly.
Clock Three: Years You Must Promise Forward
The third clock starts at the award and runs for decades. Here the duration is not a filter on who may apply; it is the consideration the applicant gives back.
Per the Charleston County Land Acquisition Grant for Affordable Housing as indexed, the program assists with acquiring land for affordable and workforce housing across Charleston County — rental and for-sale housing, single-family residences, townhomes, multi-family developments and adaptive reuse. Projects must serve households earning up to 120% of area median income, and must maintain a minimum 20-year affordability period, with additional points awarded for commitments of 30 years or longer.
That second half is the detail worth isolating. Twenty years is the eligibility floor; thirty is a scoring advantage. So duration here is not pass/fail at all — it is a competitive variable, and an applicant choosing between a twenty-year and a thirty-year covenant is choosing between a weaker application and a longer obligation. That is a real trade, and only a developer who knows what the extra decade costs can price it.
The same record carries a fourth clock, running the other way. Per the record, applicants must demonstrate that projects are not speculative and are ready to move forward in a timely manner, with vertical construction required to commence within 24 months of grant agreement execution. Funding comes from Charleston County Council’s allocation of Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds established by the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, and applicants must comply with all provisions of that Act as amended by the United States Department of the Treasury.
One record, three durations: two years to break ground, twenty years minimum to stay affordable, thirty to score better. None of them is the grant amount, which the record does not state at all.
The Clock That Runs Backwards
One record in this set inverts the whole pattern, and it is instructive precisely because it is the exception.
Per Baltimore County’s economic development financing page as indexed, the Grant for Revitalizing Office Workspaces (GROW) is a one-time grant for eligible businesses signing their first commercial lease in Baltimore County. It helps offset initial leasing expenses for Class A or Class B office or flex space, and the County awards funds on a first-come, first-served basis subject to fund availability and approval by the County Executive and the Baltimore County Council.
Every other record here rewards duration. This one requires its absence. History at the address disqualifies you; the program exists to buy a tenancy that does not exist yet, so the only eligible applicant is one with nothing to show.
Which corrects the instinct that longer is always better. The question is not “how long have I been here” but “what is this funder buying” — and a county filling empty office space is buying arrivals, not incumbents. The record states no amount and no deadline; first-come-first-served plus a Council approval step means the operative constraint is the queue, not a calendar.
When the Rule Is There But the Number Is Not
The last record carries the same concern, unquantified.
Per the Delaware Community Foundation’s capital grants page as indexed, DCF capital grants help strong nonprofit organisations in Delaware improve their facilities, and ideal projects go beyond basic repair or renovation, creating lasting, positive impact on the population or community served. Recent FY2024 recipients received grants ranging from $2,500 to $20,000, for projects including accessibility improvements, renovations, equipment purchases and construction.
“Lasting” is the same question Wolfson answers with fifteen years and Charleston with twenty. Here it carries no number, which changes what the applicant must do rather than removing the requirement. A stated term is something you check; an unstated one is something you argue. The burden moves into the narrative, and an applicant who addresses durability unprompted is answering a question the reviewer is holding anyway.
Note the scale signal too: $2,500–$20,000 for accessibility work, renovations and construction. On a capital budget that is a contribution, not a project — and the recent-awards range is how you learn that before writing to a ceiling that does not exist.
Working the Duration Tests First
The practical conclusion runs against the normal order of a guidelines read, and it is the one thing worth taking from this set.
Most eligibility bars are immovable: the county you serve, your entity type, the population you were founded to help. You read those first because failing them ends the matter.
Duration tests are different. A lease term is a conversation with a landlord. An affordability covenant is a term you choose. A director’s twelve-month anniversary is a date on a calendar. Of the six records here, four turn on a duration the applicant could change, extend or wait out — and in three of those the fix costs less than the application it makes possible.
So the sequence that works on facilities money: find the duration requirements before you cost the project. Ask what term the funder needs, compare it against the document in your filing cabinet, and treat the gap as a task rather than a verdict. Our knowledge base and the tips and resources archive cover the adjacent mechanics — match structures, allowable costs, the property interests that decide who may sign. The economic development funding hub is where the public-sector versions cluster, and the funding profile archive shows how differently funders draw the same-looking rule.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is a short lease a permanent disqualification?
Not usually, which is the point of reading the term early. Wolfson’s records say leased sites generally require a minimum of 15 years remaining — the word is in the record. A landlord willing to extend changes the fact the rule tests. Confirm the requirement with the funder before paying for a renegotiation.
Does a 20-year affordability covenant mean I have to hold the property for 20 years?
The Charleston record states a minimum 20-year affordability period and extra points for 30 years or longer; it does not state how the obligation travels if the property changes hands. That is a question for the county and for counsel, not one to infer from a listing.
Why would a funder care how long my executive director has been here?
The S. Mark Taper record states the exclusion — CEO/ED served less than 12 months — without stating a reason, so the honest answer is that the record does not say. What it does tell you is the remedy and its exact date.
How do I find capital programs that fit the lease I already have?
No index filters on your lease term, so the work is reading the records you already match on geography, applicant type and project scope, then checking the duration language first. OpenGrants indexes federal, state and local programs, private foundations and corporate giving, refreshed daily (verified 2026-08-10), with the funder’s own listing on each record so you read the governing text rather than a summary.
The Bottom Line
A capital funder is not buying your project. It is buying a stretch of time in a building it will never own, and the eligibility rule is how it checks that your hold on the asset outlasts what the money pays for. Fifteen years on a lease, twenty years of affordability, two years to break ground, twelve months in the chair, or an unnumbered “lasting” — same question, five grammars.
None appear in a search filter. All appear on the first page of the guidelines. And most, unusually for an eligibility bar, are things you can fix this quarter.
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