EPA Brownfields grants are one of the few federal programs where a city, a tribe, or a 501(c)(3) can pull six- and seven-figure awards to study and clean up land that no private buyer will touch. The catch is that “Brownfields grants” isn’t one program. It’s four, with very different dollar limits, eligibility rules, and timelines — and the rules change from cycle to cycle in ways that catch first-time applicants off guard. FY27 brings lower caps, the return of a 20% cost share on Cleanup and RLF grants, and no Multipurpose round.
This piece is a four-track decoder. Instead of repeating EPA’s overview, we map each Brownfields track to who it’s for, how much you can actually request, and what the FY27 changes mean for your timeline.
The four-track summary for FY27, drawing on EPA’s Types of Brownfields Grant Funding and MARC grant application resources pages (EPA notes all amounts are subject to change):
- Assessment Grants — up to $500K (community-wide), $1M (coalition), or $1M (states/tribes), down from $1.5M and $2M for the last two in FY26. EPA estimates about 30, 13 and 12 awards. For inventorying and studying sites.
- Multipurpose Grants — no FY27 solicitation. In FY26 the track offered up to $1M to blend assessment plus cleanup in a defined area over five years.
- Cleanup Grants — up to $500K, with a single-site waiver to $650K that EPA will approve only on an extremely limited basis. EPA estimates about 28 awards totaling $14 million, down from roughly $107 million across about 36 awards in FY26. You must own the site, and FY27 recipients owe a 20% cost share.
- Job Training Grants — the FY27 cap is $300K, down from $500K; the FY27 round closed September 23, 2026. EPA awarded $12M to 25 grantees in February 2026.
- Revolving Loan Fund (RLF) Grants — there was no FY26 solicitation, and EPA anticipates an FY27 round in fall 2026: up to $1M per grant, about 10 awards and $10 million, with a 20% cost share.
EPA anticipates publishing the FY27 Assessment, Cleanup and RLF solicitations in fall 2026, with applications due about 60 calendar days after publication.
Why the Brownfields Program exists — and why it still matters
Brownfield sites are properties where redevelopment is held back by the real or suspected presence of hazardous substances, pollutants, contaminants, or petroleum. They are the gas stations that closed in 1992, the textile mills behind the river, the dry cleaners on Main Street that no buyer will touch because no one knows what’s in the soil. Congress created the modern program in 2002 with the Small Business Liability Relief and Brownfields Revitalization Act, expanded it in 2018 with the BUILD Act, and reinforced it in 2021 with the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA).
EPA reports that the program, which began in 1995, will have provided over $3 billion in grants once its FY26 awards are made, and that brownfields investments have leveraged more than $45 billion in cleanup and redevelopment and more than 228,900 jobs. That kind of leverage is unusual in federal environmental funding, and it’s why the program has survived every change of administration since George W. Bush. For local governments, states, tribes, and most 501(c)(3) nonprofits, Brownfields is often the only realistic federal money for the dirty-site-to-shovel-ready pipeline. The trick is knowing which of the four tracks your project actually fits.
Track 1 — Assessment Grants: study before you spend
Assessment Grants are the entry point. They pay for brownfield inventories, site assessments, community involvement, planning, and reuse studies. According to EPA’s Types of Funding page, the program offers three Assessment Grant flavors with different dollar ceilings:
- Community-wide Assessment Grants — up to $500,000, four-year performance period. The workhorse of the program.
- Assessment Coalition Grants — up to $1 million in FY27 (down from $1.5 million in FY26), awarded to a lead entity working with two to four non-lead members across at least three distinct municipalities or jurisdictions.
- Community-wide Assessment Grants for States and Tribes — up to $1 million in FY27 (down from $2 million in FY26), five-year performance period, restricted to states, federally recognized tribes, intertribal consortia, Alaska Native Corporations, and the Metlakatla Indian Community.
For FY26, EPA budgeted roughly $35 million for up to 70 Community-wide Assessment Grant awards. For FY27, EPA estimates about 30 Community-wide awards totaling $15 million, less than half the FY26 pool. That’s still about half a million dollars per award, which is a real ceiling — if your project needs more than community-wide can deliver, you should be looking at the Coalition or States/Tribes variants. EPA also caps site assessments at $200,000 per site per grant.
One operational detail that trips up returning applicants: under FY27 rules, current EPA Assessment Grant and Multipurpose Grant recipients have to demonstrate that at least 70% of each existing cooperative agreement had been drawn down by October 1, 2026 (60% for current States/Tribes Assessment recipients), to be eligible to apply for a new Assessment or Coalition award. That’s a hard threshold buried in the guidelines, and “almost 70%” is not 70%.
Track 2 — Multipurpose Grants: assessment and cleanup in one envelope
There is no Multipurpose round in FY27. EPA’s application resources page says plainly: “A solicitation for Multipurpose Grants will not be issued in FY 2027.” This section describes the product as it ran in FY26, so you can plan around a future round.
The Multipurpose Grant is the most flexible product EPA’s Office of Brownfields and Land Revitalization (OBLR) sells. In FY26 an eligible entity could apply for up to $1 million to run a range of assessment and cleanup activities — plus planning and additional community engagement — at one or more brownfield sites in a single defined project area. The performance period is up to five years, the same as the States/Tribes Assessment and RLF grants.
What makes Multipurpose distinctive is that you don’t have to pick a lane up front. A typical Assessment Grant pays for studying sites you might eventually clean up. A typical Cleanup Grant pays for remediating a single site you already own and have already assessed. Multipurpose lets a city or a nonprofit walk all the way from “we think this corridor has problems” to “we cleaned three of these properties,” all under one cooperative agreement.
The tradeoff is the proposed project area. Multipurpose applicants have to define a target area up front and commit to working only inside it, which makes the grant less useful for organizations whose work is scattered across a region. For most economic-development authorities pursuing a single distressed corridor, that constraint is a feature, not a bug. In FY27, the same corridor work has to go through separate Assessment and Cleanup applications.
Track 3 — Cleanup Grants: where the remediation money lives
Cleanup Grants are the big-ticket track. They fund the actual remediation work — soil removal, groundwater treatment, structural demolition, lead and asbestos abatement — at brownfield sites the applicant already owns. In the FY26 cycle that closed on January 28, 2026, applicants could request up to $500,000 or up to $4 million, and EPA made roughly $107 million available across approximately 36 cleanup awards. FY27 is much smaller: applicants may request up to $500,000 to address one or more sites, an applicant addressing a single site may request a waiver up to $650,000 that EPA will approve only on an extremely limited basis, and EPA estimates about 28 awards totaling $14 million.
Three FY27 rules are worth singling out:
The 20% cost share is back. In FY27, EPA will fund Brownfields grants solely from its annual appropriations, and Cleanup Grant recipients must provide a 20% cost share. Local governments with populations of 50,000 or fewer, tribes, eligible tribal entities and nonprofits may ask EPA to waive it based on hardship. EPA files this under its “return to annual appropriation statutory requirements,” so a returning applicant should not assume last cycle’s budget structure carries over.
The site characterization rule. Cleanup Grant applicants have always had to show that their site is sufficiently characterized for remediation to begin. In FY26 that meant affirming characterization would be finished by June 15, 2026 and getting an updated letter from the state or tribal environmental authority. For FY27, applicants no longer need that authority’s letter on site characterization; instead they must affirm that an Environmental Professional (as defined in 40 CFR 312.10) has certified the site is characterized well enough for remediation to begin. They still need a letter from the state or tribal environmental authority acknowledging their intent to apply. A capable environmental consultant on retainer is no longer optional for this track.
One application per cycle. Applicants may submit only one Cleanup Grant application per competition cycle. That makes site selection a strategic decision, not a procurement decision. Many first-time applicants try to bundle two or three properties into a single Cleanup application; that’s allowed (up to the $500,000 cap in FY27), but it means you only get one shot per year to make the case for your whole portfolio.
If you’re new to the federal funding landscape and want a primer on the broader ecosystem of programs your organization can stack alongside Brownfields, the OpenGrants federal grants hub is a useful starting point for mapping adjacent dollars from HUD, DOT, and USDA.
Track 4 — Job Training Grants: the often-overlooked workforce track
The Brownfields Job Training Grant funds organizations that recruit, train, and place workers for environmental cleanup and revitalization work. FY26 awards were up to $500,000; for FY27, EPA’s answers to applicant questions on its FY27 Job Training page put the cap at $300,000. The FY27 round closed September 23, 2026, and EPA expects to notify successful applicants early in calendar year 2027. The program is open to local governments, tribal entities, 501(c)(3) nonprofits, certain workforce investment boards and labor unions, and the universe of educational institutions captured by EPA’s “other nonprofit organization” category.
In February 2026, EPA selected 25 organizations to share $12 million in Job Training awards, including the Kalispel Tribe of Indians, the Port of Oakland, Coalfield Development Corporation, and PathStone. Across the program’s history, 23,400 individuals have completed Brownfields Job Training, more than 17,400 have been placed in environmental careers, and the average starting wage over the last five years is approximately $23 per hour.
For workforce-focused nonprofits, this is one of the highest-leverage federal training grants in the environmental sector, and it pairs naturally with cleanup work happening locally — graduates of a Job Training program in city X are exactly the people doing the remediation labor on EPA-funded sites in city X.
The Revolving Loan Fund pause — and the FY27 return
According to the FY26 Frequently Asked Questions document EPA posted in November 2025, “A solicitation for new Revolving Loan Fund Grants will not be issued in FY26. EPA expects to issue the next solicitation for Revolving Loan Fund Grants in FY27.”
The RLF track lets a recipient capitalize a revolving loan fund and deploy loans and subgrants for cleanup work, with repayments cycling back in. The FY26 pause stung for established cleanup programs with a site pipeline, and it is now ending: EPA’s MARC resources page lists FY27 RLF Grants among the solicitations it anticipates issuing in fall 2026, with grants of up to $1 million, about 10 awards and $10 million in total. RLF recipients owe a 20% cost share, which applicants can petition EPA to waive if it would place an undue hardship on them. Until that round opens, the workarounds are a Cleanup Grant for priority sites (capped at $500,000 in FY27) or the supplemental funding pathway already open to existing RLF Cooperative Agreement recipients; a Multipurpose Grant is not an option in FY27.
For organizations comparing federal cleanup capital against private financing and tax credits, our explainer on small business grants and adjacent funding covers the broader non-dilutive picture.
Who is actually eligible — and who is not
Eligibility for Brownfields Grants traces back to CERCLA § 104(k) and the rules EPA publishes for each grant type. The clean version:
Eligible across all MARC tracks: general-purpose units of local government (counties, cities, towns, school districts, special districts, councils of governments, public housing agencies, regional government entities), states, federally recognized tribes outside Alaska, Alaska Native Regional and Village Corporations, the Metlakatla Indian Community, and 501(c)(3) nonprofits — plus LLCs and limited partnerships whose managing members are all 501(c)(3) organizations.
Cleanup, Job Training, Technical Assistance, and Training and Research only: “other nonprofit organizations” under 2 CFR § 200.1, including nonprofit colleges and universities without a 501(c)(3) letter.
Ineligible: individuals, for-profit organizations, and 501(c)(4) organizations that lobby the federal government. Cleanup Grant applicants must also own the site and must demonstrate a CERCLA liability protection (bona fide prospective purchaser, contiguous property owner, or innocent landowner), since owners of contaminated property can otherwise be CERCLA-liable themselves.
For nonprofits running cleanup-adjacent community development work, OpenGrants’ nonprofit grants hub tracks the broader set of funders whose missions overlap with Brownfields-style reuse projects.
How to actually compete — the application reality
EPA’s MARC application is a heavy lift, but the failure modes are predictable. A few things separate applications that get funded from applications that don’t:
Threshold criteria are a yes/no gate, not a score. Each grant type has a set of minimum requirements — applicant eligibility, site eligibility, ownership and authority to act, community engagement plan. Miss one and EPA reviewers don’t even open the narrative. The pre-recorded “Minimum Grant Requirements” videos for each FY26 grant type are required watching before you start writing.
The narrative is scored against published ranking criteria. Project description, community need, community engagement, programmatic capability, leveraging plan, and budget — each carries a point value, and EPA publishes the rubric. Strong applications map paragraph-by-paragraph to the criteria. Community engagement in particular is read for evidence of meaningful involvement from people who live near the site, not pro forma support letters.
For organizations without an in-house grant writer who has done MARC work before, the OpenGrants grant writer marketplace is one place to find practitioners with regional EPA experience.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can a for-profit business apply for EPA Brownfields grants directly?
No. For-profit organizations are statutorily ineligible to apply for any EPA Brownfields grant. A private developer can still benefit from the program indirectly — by partnering with a local government or nonprofit that is the formal applicant, or by acquiring a site after cleanup is complete — but the grant award itself goes to an eligible entity. If you’re a private developer trying to make a brownfield site pencil out, the right move is usually to bring a city or 501(c)(3) into the deal early.
How long does it take to get an EPA Brownfields grant after applying?
EPA’s MARC competition typically opens in the fall. For FY27, EPA anticipates publishing the Assessment, Cleanup and RLF solicitations in fall 2026, with applications due about 60 calendar days after publication. In the FY26 cycle, applications were due January 28, 2026 and EPA announced selections in June 2026, with cooperative agreements negotiated and finalized over the following months, so plan on the better part of a year from application to drawdown. Cleanup Grants can take longer because of the site characterization and environmental review requirements that have to land before EPA will execute the award.
Are Brownfields Grants the same as Superfund?
No. Brownfields and Superfund are both CERCLA-anchored programs, but they target different problems. Superfund handles the worst contaminated sites on the National Priorities List, with EPA leading cleanup and pursuing responsible parties. Brownfields targets the much larger universe of moderately contaminated properties — often urban infill, former gas stations, light industrial — where the goal is to enable productive reuse rather than to litigate. Sites listed or proposed for listing on the National Priorities List are not eligible for Brownfields grant funding.
What if my site is contaminated only by petroleum, not hazardous substances?
Petroleum-contaminated sites are eligible. The 2002 statute and subsequent amendments explicitly include sites contaminated by petroleum or a petroleum product, alongside hazardous substances, pollutants, and contaminants. Mine-scarred lands and sites contaminated by controlled substances are also explicitly eligible.
Why didn’t EPA open an RLF competition in FY26?
EPA’s FY26 guidelines and FAQ confirmed that no new Revolving Loan Fund Grant solicitation would be issued that fiscal year, with the next RLF competition expected in FY27. EPA hasn’t published a detailed rationale, but the program shifts year to year as Congressional appropriations move. EPA now anticipates issuing the FY27 RLF solicitation in fall 2026, with grants of up to $1 million, about 10 awards and a 20% cost share. Organizations that need cleanup capital before then should pursue Cleanup Grants directly or work through existing RLF cooperative agreement recipients in their state.
Bottom line: pick a track before you pick a consultant
Most first-time Brownfields applicants make the same mistake — they hire a writer before they’ve decided which track they’re pursuing. The four MARC tracks are different products. A Community-wide Assessment narrative is not a Cleanup narrative with the names changed. A Coalition Grant requires an MOU among three or more jurisdictions that needs to exist before you write the application, not after. A Multipurpose Grant, when EPA offers one, requires a defined project area in your community’s planning record; there is no Multipurpose round in FY27.
Decide which track fits your project first, then build the team around that track’s requirements. If you’ve owned a single contaminated property for years and the assessment is done, you’re a Cleanup applicant, and in FY27 you need a plan for the 20% cost share. If you’re a city trying to inventory a corridor, you’re an Assessment applicant this cycle. If you’re a workforce nonprofit in a disadvantaged community, you’re a Job Training applicant — and you should apply in the same cycles as the Cleanup applicants in your region, because their projects are your placement pipeline.
When you’re ready to identify the specific Notices of Funding Opportunity for Brownfields and the adjacent federal, state, and local programs you should be stacking, OpenGrants’ grant discovery database tracks active and forecasted opportunities so you can build a calendar instead of chasing one deadline at a time. Brownfields is also one lane in our living economic development grants guide, which sets it next to the EDA, HUD and USDA economic development programs open now.