The Go/No-Go Decision

A go/no-go decision is a scored, recorded judgment on whether to spend staff time on a grant application. Score hard eligibility as a pass/fail gate, then weigh fit, competitive position, cost share, capacity, and expected value against the fully loaded hours the application will cost.

Current figures — verified 2026-08-11

Item	Value	Source
NIH research project grant success rate	13.0% (FY2025), from 18.5% (FY2024) and 21.3% (FY2023)	NIH Extramural Nexus
NSF competitive-proposal funding rate, FY2025 (all competitively reviewed proposals)	19% — 8,377 awards from 43,532 proposals evaluated	NSF FY2025 Agency Financial Report
Organizations winning at least one award, by volume submitted (2026 edition)	64.5% at one application; 89.4% at three to five; 93.3% at six to ten	GrantStation, 2026 State of Grantseeking Report
Median largest individual award (2026 edition)	$90,000 overall; $500,000 federal; $25,000 community foundation	GrantStation, 2026 State of Grantseeking Report
Circulated estimate of hours per proposal	15–20 hours foundation; up to or over 100 hours federal	Instrumentl, compiling Charity Science
Single Audit threshold	$1,000,000 in federal awards expended per fiscal year	2 CFR 200.501

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 Report an outdated figure

Key takeaways

• Hard eligibility is a gate, not a score. Fail it and stop.
• Expected value is award size times realistic win probability, minus loaded hours.
• Post-award compliance load belongs in the decision, not after it.
• Record every no. The trend data is the point.
• Enthusiasm from leadership is an input, never an override.

What is a go/no-go decision in grant seeking?

A go/no-go decision is the documented gate between identifying a funding opportunity and committing staff hours to writing an application. Within the practice of finding and qualifying funding, the go/no-go decision converts an open-ended “should we try?” into a scored judgment with a named decision-maker, a written rationale, and a record that survives whether the answer is yes or no.

The decision sits inside a broader grant pipeline between qualification and production. Qualification asks whether the organization is legally allowed to apply. The go/no-go decision asks whether it should — a different question with a different answer set.

Timing matters more than most shops admit. A go/no-go decision made after two weeks of drafting is not a decision; it is a rationalization of sunk cost. The useful moment is early — for federal programs, ideally before the notice of funding opportunity posts, since agencies generally make opportunities available for the minimum period set in the Uniform Guidance (2 CFR 200.204) and that window is short relative to the work.

The go/no-go decision is also the only point in grant seeking where saying no is cheap. Every later exit costs the hours already spent, plus the credibility of whoever asked for them.

Which conditions should end a grant pursuit immediately?

Six conditions should end a grant pursuit regardless of enthusiasm, funding pressure, or who suggested it. Each is a gate, scored pass/fail, evaluated before any scoring rubric is opened. A failed gate is not a low score to be offset by strength elsewhere.

1. Applicant type does not match. The notice names eligible entities. An organization outside that list does not become eligible by explaining itself well. See grant eligibility for how eligibility statements are constructed.
2. Registrations are not active and cannot be made active in time. Federal submission requires an active SAM.gov entity registration, and a lapse is not waivable at the deadline.
3. The required cost share cannot be documented. Cost share must be verifiable from the recipient’s records and meet the same standards as federal costs (2 CFR 200.306). A verbal pledge is not a match.
4. The work does not exist and would be invented for the money. Programs designed backward from a funding opportunity fail at implementation, not at review.
5. The organization cannot survive the payment terms. Many awards reimburse after expenditure (2 CFR 200.305), which means fronting payroll for months.
6. Post-award obligations exceed post-award capacity. An award that pushes federal expenditures over the Single Audit threshold brings an audit requirement with it (2 CFR 200.501).

The sixth gate is the one most organizations skip. A small award that triggers an audit, a subrecipient monitoring obligation, and quarterly financial reporting can cost more to administer than it delivers.

How do you score a go/no-go decision?

Score a go/no-go decision on seven weighted dimensions after the eligibility gates pass, using a 1–5 scale with written anchors so two people scoring the same opportunity land within a point of each other. Publish the weights. A rubric with hidden weights is a preference wearing a spreadsheet.

The table below shows a working rubric for a go/no-go decision, with suggested weights and the anchor that defines a top score. Adjust weights to the organization’s situation, but change them between decisions, never during one.

Dimension	Weight	Score of 5 means
Program fit	20%	Work already exists with outcome data
Funder fit	20%	Organization resembles recent grantees
Competitive position	15%	Named advantage over likely applicants
Relationship and signal	15%	Program officer contact was encouraging
Expected value per hour	15%	Award size justifies the loaded hours
Compliance load	10%	Light reporting, no new audit exposure
Confirmed capacity	5%	Named people, calendar holds in place

Two dimensions deserve more attention than they usually get. Competitive position is answerable with public data rather than intuition: prior awards under the same program are visible in free grant and funder data sources, including agency award databases and federal spending records. Relationship status is measurable too — a pre-application conversation that happened is a different score from one that was attempted.

Set a threshold before scoring. A common structure is a go above 70, a conditional go between 55 and 70 pending a specific fix, and a no below 55. Deciding the threshold after seeing the score defeats the instrument.

How do you calculate the expected value of a grant application?

Expected value for a grant application is the award amount multiplied by a realistic win probability, compared against the fully loaded cost of the hours required to apply. Use published win rates for the specific funder type, not an organizational average, and use loaded labor cost, not salary.

Work an example. An organization considers a federal discretionary program with a three-year award averaging $250,000 per year. Staff estimate 120 hours of combined program, finance, and writing time. Loaded labor runs $75 per hour, so the application costs roughly $9,000 to produce. If the realistic win probability is 15%, the expected value is $112,500 against $9,000 of cost — a strong ratio, even before counting the reusable content the effort produces.

Now change one input. If the same 120 hours are spent on a program whose success rate resembles current federal research competitions, where NIH research project grant success rates have fallen sharply across recent fiscal years (see current figures above), the expected value drops by more than half. The award size did not change. The probability did.

Three errors distort the arithmetic. First, using an organizational win rate instead of a program-specific one — win rate is dominated by funder competitiveness, not writer skill, and federal agencies publish the program-level numbers directly through NIH success rate tables and NSF by the Numbers. Second, counting only the grant writer’s hours and ignoring the executive director, finance staff, and program lead. Third, excluding the administration cost of the award if won, which is a real and recurring line.

Expected value is a screen, not an oracle. It ranks pursuits against each other. It does not predict any single outcome.

Who makes the go/no-go call, and how do you say no?

The go/no-go call belongs to a single named executive sponsor who does not write the proposal, informed by scores from the program lead, the finance lead, and whoever will manage the award. Separating the decider from the writer is the entire point; a writer scoring their own pursuit is grading their own homework.

Saying no to leadership is an organizational design problem, not a courage problem. The rubric solves it. When a board member arrives with a foundation where they know someone, the relationship dimension scores a 5 and the answer to the board member is that their contribution was recorded and weighted — it simply did not offset a program-fit score of 2. A relationship is a factor. It is not a gate.

Compensation structure shapes the decision too. The Grant Professionals Association Code of Ethics directs members not to accept percentage-based compensation tied to grant awards, and the reason is a go/no-go reason: paying on outcome pushes the pursuit toward whatever is winnable rather than whatever the organization should run.

Record every decision, especially the noes. The constraint a go/no-go decision actually rations is staff time, and GrantStation’s survey of grantseeking organizations reports that “lack of time and/or staff has remained the most frequently cited grantseeking challenge since the first State of Grantseeking™ report in 2012” (GrantStation, The 2026 State of Grantseeking Report). Opportunity cost is invisible unless the alternatives are written down.

A written go/no-go record needs six fields: opportunity name and number, date scored, scores by dimension, decision, decision-maker, and the one condition that would change the answer. That last field converts a no into a watch item for the next cycle.

What goes wrong in go/no-go decisions?

Five failure modes account for most bad go/no-go decisions, and none of them are about proposal quality. Each is a process defect that produces predictable losses across a year of pursuits.

• No gate at all. Opportunities enter production because someone forwarded an email. The organization discovers the mismatch during the budget build.
• Scoring after investment. The rubric is applied at 40% draft, when the honest answer has already become expensive.
• Volume treated as strategy. Survey data shows organizations submitting three to five applications win at least one far more often than single-application organizations (see current figures above). The finding argues for a qualified portfolio, not for indiscriminate submission.
• Compliance load excluded. The decision counts the revenue and ignores the reimbursement cash flow, the reporting cadence, and the audit exposure.
• Noes discarded. Only wins get logged, so the organization cannot see that it declines every opportunity requiring cost share — a pattern worth fixing at the balance sheet, not the rubric.

A sixth pattern deserves separate mention: treating a decline as a permanent no. Federal resubmission data shows revised applications fare substantially better than first attempts, and the strongest predictor of eventual funding is the score on the first submission (NIH Open Mike). A go/no-go decision on a resubmission should read the review record, not the calendar.

Frequently asked questions

How long should a go/no-go decision take?

A go/no-go decision on a familiar funder should take under an hour once the rubric exists — twenty minutes to gather eligibility facts, twenty to score, twenty to record. First-time federal programs take longer because the eligibility gates require reading the notice closely. If scoring takes a full day, the rubric has too many dimensions.

What win rate should you assume for a new funder?

Use the funder’s own published rate when one exists, and the funder-type benchmark when it does not. Federal research agencies publish success and funding rates directly. For private funders with no published data, prior grantee lists give a crude denominator. Assume the low end; optimism in the probability input is the most common source of bad expected-value math.

Does a program officer conversation change the score?

A program officer conversation changes the relationship and funder-fit dimensions, sometimes substantially, because it converts guesses about program priorities into stated ones. It does not change eligibility gates. A discouraging conversation is itself decisive information and should usually end the pursuit rather than prompt a harder push.

Should small organizations apply for federal grants at all?

Small organizations should apply for federal grants when the award justifies the administrative build it requires, since federal awards carry the largest median award sizes and the heaviest compliance obligations. The go/no-go question for a first federal pursuit is whether the organization can staff reporting, reimbursement cash flow, and potential audit — not whether it can write well.

How do you handle an opportunity with a very short deadline?

Score it against the same rubric and add a hard capacity check on the submission mechanics. Short-deadline opportunities fail on registration status and internal approval routing far more often than on narrative quality. If registrations are current and content exists in reusable form, a short window is survivable; if either is untrue, the answer is no.

What if the organization needs the money badly?

Financial pressure changes the weight on expected value but not the eligibility gates. An organization that applies while ineligible spends hours it cannot spare on an application that will be screened out administratively. Pressure is a reason to tighten the rubric and raise pursuit volume among qualified opportunities, not to suspend the rubric.

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
• Cost Share and Matching Requirements

Sources

1. National Institutes of Health, “Fiscal Year 2025 By the Numbers: Extramural Grant Investments in Research,” NIH Extramural Nexus, March 12, 2026. https://grants.nih.gov/news-events/nih-extramural-nexus-news/2026/03/fiscal-year-2025-by-the-numbers-extramural-grant-investments-in-research (accessed 2026-08-11)
2. National Institutes of Health, “NIH Success Rates,” RePORT. https://report.nih.gov/funding/nih-budget-and-spending-data-past-fiscal-years/success-rates (accessed 2026-08-11)
3. U.S. National Science Foundation, FY 2025 Agency Financial Report (competitive proposal, award, and funding-rate trends, Table 1.1). https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/FY-2025-Agency-Financial-Report_0.pdf (accessed 2026-08-11)
4. U.S. National Science Foundation, “NSF by the Numbers.” https://www.nsf.gov/about/about-nsf-by-the-numbers (accessed 2026-08-11)
5. GrantStation, The 2026 State of Grantseeking Report (n=1,354; reports on grantseeking during 2025). https://grantstation.com/sites/default/files/imageLibrary/SoG/2026/2026%20State%20of%20Grantseeking%20Report.pdf (accessed 2026-08-11)
6. Instrumentl, “Grant Statistics and Trends,” compiling Charity Science estimates of hours per proposal. https://www.instrumentl.com/blog/grant-statistics-and-trends (accessed 2026-08-11)
7. Legal Information Institute, 2 CFR § 200.204, Notices of funding opportunities. https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/2/200.204 (accessed 2026-08-11)
8. Legal Information Institute, 2 CFR § 200.305, Federal payment. https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/2/200.305 (accessed 2026-08-11)
9. Legal Information Institute, 2 CFR § 200.306, Cost sharing or matching. https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/2/200.306 (accessed 2026-08-11)
10. Legal Information Institute, 2 CFR § 200.501, Audit requirements. https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/2/200.501 (accessed 2026-08-11)
11. National Institutes of Health, “Resubmissions Revisited: Funded Resubmission Applications and Their Initial Peer Review Scores,” Open Mike, February 17, 2017. https://nexus.od.nih.gov/all/2017/02/17/resubmissions-revisited-funded-resubmission-applications-and-their-initial-peer-review-scores/ (accessed 2026-08-11)
12. Grant Professionals Association, “Ethical Considerations within the Grant Profession,” November 28, 2023. https://grantprofessionals.org/news/657998/Ethical-Considerations-within-the-Grant-Profession.htm (accessed 2026-08-11)
13. U.S. General Services Administration, SAM.gov Entity Registration. https://sam.gov/content/entity-registration (accessed 2026-08-11)