Free Grant and Funder Data Sources

Free grant data lives across federal portals, state grant sites, and public tax filings. Grants.gov and SAM.gov carry federal opportunities and program listings, USAspending and agency award databases carry award history, and IRS Form 990 filings carry foundation giving. Coverage of small and local funders is poor.

Current figures — verified 2026-08-11

Item	Value	Source
Grants.gov bulk database extract	one full XML export of the opportunity database per day	Grants.gov XML Extract
USAspending fiscal-year award archive	new full and delta files uploaded by the 15th of each month	USAspending Award Data Archive
IRS Form 990 e-file XML coverage	annual releases with per-year CSV index files, 2019 forward	IRS Form 990 series downloads
IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search bulk files	updated monthly	IRS TEOS bulk data
Public inspection period for exempt organization returns	three years from the return due date, including extensions	IRS public disclosure guidance
Candid complimentary premium access	nonprofits under $1M in annual revenue or expenses with a current Gold Seal	Candid
Challenge.gov platform	sunset March 30, 2026; content moved to USA.gov and GSA.gov	Challenge.gov

These figures change. Verify against the linked source before relying on them. Report an outdated figure

Key takeaways

• Federal opportunity data is complete and free; everything else is partial.
• Assistance listings describe programs; Grants.gov lists the competitions.
• Award history tells you who a funder actually funds.
• IRS filings are the free substitute for a foundation directory.
• State, local, corporate, and small foundation coverage is genuinely thin.

What counts as a free grant data source?

A free grant data source is any publicly accessible dataset describing funding opportunities, funding programs, or funders — at no cost and without a subscription. Free sources fall into four families: opportunity listings, program catalogs, award history, and funder financial disclosures. Each answers a different question, and confusing them wastes time.

Opportunity listings tell you what is open now. Program catalogs tell you what a program is, who runs it, and whether it recurs. Award history tells you who actually received money and how much. Funder financial disclosures tell you what a private funder gave away and to whom. Within finding and qualifying funding, a workable search uses all four rather than treating a single portal as the map.

One boundary is worth drawing before the directory. The sources below cover funding opportunity and funder information — where money is and who controls it. Data for the need a proposal argues, meaning population, health, education, labor, and housing statistics, is a separate set of sources covered in public data sources for needs statements.

Free sources share a structural bias: they are excellent where a federal statute requires disclosure and weak everywhere else. That single fact explains most of the coverage gaps in free grant data.

Where do you find federal funding opportunities for free?

Federal funding opportunities are published free and government-wide, primarily through Grants.gov for competitions and SAM.gov for the underlying program catalog. Neither requires payment, and both expose bulk data as well as a search interface.

Five federal sources carry the bulk of the opportunity picture:

• Grants.gov Search Grants — the government-wide index of discretionary funding opportunities, filterable by opportunity status (forecasted, posted, closed, archived), agency, eligibility, category, and assistance listing number. Results export to CSV. Its limit is scope: Grants.gov carries federal discretionary opportunities, not formula funds, not state programs, and not the agency-specific systems where many applications are actually completed.
• Grants.gov saved searches and subscriptions — email notification on a stored set of search criteria, plus alerts on changes to a specific opportunity. The function that converts search into monitoring.
• Grants.gov XML Extract — a full daily export of the opportunity database for anyone building their own pipeline. Good for reproducible screening; unnecessary for a single applicant.
• SAM.gov Assistance Listings — the authoritative catalog of federal assistance programs. SAM.gov describes them precisely: “Assistance listings are detailed public descriptions of federal programs that provide grants, loans, scholarships, insurance, and other types of assistance awards.” Each carries an Assistance Listing Number in XX.XXX form, where the first two digits identify the administering agency.
• SBIR.gov — open and closed solicitations across every participating agency, plus a funding planner showing which agencies open in which months. The single best free view of the SBIR and STTR track.

Agency forecast pages and agency-specific announcement systems supplement all of the above, because an agency often publishes a planned competition on its own site before the government-wide listing appears. Federal prize and challenge competitions moved off a dedicated platform and are now listed through general government channels (see current figures above).

What does free federal grant award history data tell you?

Free federal grant award history data tells you who a program has actually funded, at what amounts, in what places, and for how long — which is the closest free proxy for competitive position that exists. Award history answers questions a notice never will: typical award size, the profile of successful applicants, and whether a program funds newcomers.

Three award databases cover most needs, and they overlap deliberately.

Source	Covers	Best used for
USAspending.gov	All federal awards, all agencies	Award amounts by recipient, place, program
NIH RePORTER	NIH-funded projects and publications	Project abstracts, program officers, panels
NSF Award Search	NSF awards since 1989	Program-level funding patterns, PI history

USAspending is the official open data source for federal spending, including grants, and supports filtered custom downloads, prepared full-fiscal-year archives, and a public API. Its strength is completeness across agencies; its weakness is that a grant record shows the transaction, not the project.

NIH RePORTER is the opposite trade. It carries project abstracts, the administering institute, and — through its Matchmaker function — the likely program officials and review panels for a described project. NIH also publishes bulk administrative files through ExPORTER for anyone analyzing portfolios at scale.

NSF Award Search covers NSF-funded projects back to 1989 with searchable principal investigator, institution, program, and directorate fields. Reading five funded abstracts in a target program before writing is the cheapest competitive research available, and it directly informs the go/no-go decision.

Where do you find state and local grant data for free?

State grant data is free where a state has built a central portal and effectively invisible where it has not. There is no national index of state programs, so the reliable method is to find each relevant state’s portal individually and monitor it.

California illustrates the pattern that works. The California Grants Portal exists because of statute: the Grant Information Act of 2018 required the State Library to build a single website “that provides a centralized location … to find state grant opportunities,” and a later amendment required state grantmakers to submit post-award data as well (California Grants Portal). Where a state has passed a comparable transparency requirement, the portal is complete. Where it has not, opportunities live on individual agency pages.

Four search patterns find state and local opportunities without a subscription. First, check whether the state runs a central grants portal, commonly at a grants.<state>.gov or state-library-hosted address. Second, go directly to the state agency that administers the relevant policy area, since many state programs are pass-through federal funds administered by a single department. Third, check the state open data portal, usually at data.<state>.gov, where grant award files are often published even when opportunities are not. Fourth, for local funding, check city and county websites and regional councils of government, which rarely appear in any aggregated source.

Pass-through matters here. A substantial share of what organizations experience as “state grants” is federal money administered by a state agency, which means the federal assistance listing and its compliance requirements still apply. Details on that structure are in state and local government grants.

Where do you find free foundation and private funder data?

Free foundation data comes from tax filings, because exempt organizations must make their annual returns available for public inspection (IRS public disclosure guidance). Private foundations file Form 990-PF, which includes the grants they paid and the recipients that received them.

Four free routes into foundation data cover most research needs:

• IRS Form 990 series downloads — machine-readable XML of electronically filed returns, organized by year with index files. The raw source, best for building datasets rather than answering one question.
• IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search bulk data — exemption status, Publication 78 eligibility, and the automatic revocation list. The right place to verify that a funder or a partner is what it claims to be.
• ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer — the IRS filings rendered searchable, including full-text search across filings and multi-year financial summaries. The fastest free path from a foundation’s name to its grants-paid schedule.
• Candid’s partner locations — free in-person access to Candid’s subscription research tools at libraries and nonprofit resource centers across the country, plus complimentary premium access for smaller nonprofits meeting published criteria (see current figures above).

The funder’s own website remains a primary source and is frequently underused. Published guidelines, grantee lists, annual reports, and board rosters are free, current, and authoritative in a way that a tax filing filed months after the fact is not. Method for reading the filings themselves is covered in researching a funder with Form 990.

What are free grant data sources bad at?

Free grant data sources are bad at everything a federal disclosure statute does not require: state opportunity coverage outside portal states, local government funding, corporate giving programs, and the long tail of small private foundations. The gap is structural, not a matter of anyone being lazy about it.

Five specific limits shape how far free sources can be pushed:

• Timeliness in tax data. Form 990 filings describe a completed tax year and become public months afterward, so a foundation’s published grants list always describes past behavior.
• No corporate coverage. Corporate giving programs run through business units rather than private foundations file nothing comparable, so their programs appear only on company websites.
• Fragmentation below the federal level. State portals are per-state, city and county funding is per-jurisdiction, and no free source aggregates them.
• Eligibility is unstructured. Free listings carry eligibility as prose, not as fields, so machine filtering against an organization’s actual profile is unreliable.
• Opportunity and funder data live apart. Award history sits in one system, opportunity listings in another, and funder financials in a third, with no shared identifier across them.

Those gaps are the reason aggregate search products exist. Commercial platforms, including OpenGrants, assemble state, local, corporate, and small-foundation opportunities that no single free source publishes, and normalize eligibility into filterable fields. That is a real service and it is also the honest description of the category: paid tools buy coverage and structure, not access to secret opportunities. Every federal opportunity in any commercial database is available free at its government source.

Frequently asked questions

Is Grants.gov the only place to find federal grants?

Grants.gov indexes federal discretionary funding opportunities government-wide, but it is not complete. Formula and block grants flow to states without a competition, agencies post forecasts and program-specific announcements on their own sites first, and many agencies require the substantive application in a separate system. Use Grants.gov as the index, then go to the agency.

What is an assistance listing number?

An assistance listing number is the unique XX.XXX identifier assigned to a federal assistance program in SAM.gov’s Assistance Listings, formerly known as the CFDA number. The first two digits identify the administering agency. The number is the key that connects an opportunity, an award record, an audit schedule, and a program’s compliance requirements.

Can you find out who received a grant you lost?

Federal award recipients are public. USAspending publishes recipients and amounts across all agencies, and research agencies publish project-level detail including abstracts. Foundation grantees are public in the funder’s Form 990 filings, though with a lag. Reviewer scores and comments are generally not public.

Are there free alternatives to a paid foundation directory?

The free substitute for a paid foundation directory is the combination of IRS filings, a filing search interface such as ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, and free in-person access to subscription tools at partner libraries. The tradeoff is time: free sources require searching funder by funder rather than filtering a structured database.

How current is free grant data?

Federal opportunity data is effectively current, since agencies publish to the government-wide portal as opportunities open and the bulk extract regenerates daily. Award history lags by weeks to months depending on the system. Foundation tax data lags by a year or more. Match the source’s latency to the question being asked.

Do you need to pay for grant data to win grants?

No. Every federal funding opportunity is published free at its government source, and foundation filings are public by law. Paid tools reduce search time and add coverage where free sources are thin. The decision is an operating one about staff hours, not a question of access.

Related topics

• Finding and Qualifying Funding — the hub covering search strategy, funder research, and pipeline discipline
• How to Search for Grants
• How to Read a NOFO
• Grant Timing and the Funding Calendar
• Building a Grant Pipeline

Sources

1. Grants.gov, Search Grants; Connect (subscriptions and saved searches); XML Extract. https://www.grants.gov/search-grants · https://www.grants.gov/connect · https://www.grants.gov/xml-extract (accessed 2026-08-11)
2. U.S. General Services Administration, SAM.gov Assistance Listings. https://sam.gov/content/assistance-listings (accessed 2026-08-11)
3. U.S. Small Business Administration, SBIR/STTR Funding Opportunities and funding planner. https://www.sbir.gov/topics (accessed 2026-08-11)
4. U.S. Department of the Treasury, USAspending.gov, including the Award Data Archive and public API. https://www.usaspending.gov/ · https://www.usaspending.gov/download_center/award_data_archive · https://api.usaspending.gov/ (accessed 2026-08-11)
5. National Institutes of Health, RePORTER and ExPORTER bulk data. https://reporter.nih.gov/ · https://reporter.nih.gov/exporter (accessed 2026-08-11)
6. U.S. National Science Foundation, Award Search Overview. https://www.nsf.gov/funding/award-search (accessed 2026-08-11)
7. California State Library, California Grants Portal, “About This Site.” https://www.grants.ca.gov/about-this-site (accessed 2026-08-11)
8. Internal Revenue Service, Form 990 series downloads. https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/form-990-series-downloads (accessed 2026-08-11)
9. Internal Revenue Service, Tax Exempt Organization Search bulk data downloads. https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/tax-exempt-organization-search-bulk-data-downloads (accessed 2026-08-11)
10. Internal Revenue Service, “Public disclosure and availability of exempt organizations returns and applications: Documents subject to public disclosure.” https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/public-disclosure-and-availability-of-exempt-organizations-returns-and-applications-documents-subject-to-public-disclosure (accessed 2026-08-11)
11. ProPublica, Nonprofit Explorer. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/ (accessed 2026-08-11)
12. Candid, “Candid near you” partner locations and “How can I access Candid products without a subscription?” https://candid.org/find-us · https://learning.candid.org/free-access-to-foundation-directory/273922 (accessed 2026-08-11)
13. Challenge.gov, platform transition notice. https://www.challenge.gov/ (accessed 2026-08-11)