Grant Acceptance Rates: What Funders Actually Publish

A foundation in Texas publishes four numbers on its application page that almost no other foundation publishes at all. They are its acceptance rates: 1.5% in 2024, 4.8% in 2023, 4.7% in 2022, and 7.8% in 2021.

Read them in order and the arithmetic is uncomfortable: the share of applications that became grants fell by roughly four-fifths in three years.

That ratio is the one piece of information grant listings systematically do not carry. A listing gives you the award range, the deadline, the eligible applicant types and the subject areas. It is built to describe the prize, almost never the denominator — how many other organizations are reaching for the same money.

A small number of funders publish the denominator anyway. Five of them are indexed as open right now, and they disclose it in four structurally different ways.

What a Published Rate Actually Says

An acceptance rate is a historical ratio, not a forecast. It tells you how many applications a funder converted to grants in a past cycle, which lets you estimate the cost of applying against the size of the pool — nothing more. It is not a prediction about your application, and a low rate is a reason to price the work, not to assume an outcome.

That distinction matters, because the four disclosure types below support very different decisions.

The One Foundation That Prints Its Odds

Per the Dudley T. Dougherty Foundation Grant Program record, the foundation runs a paperless online proposal process and lists historical acceptance rates of 1.5% (2024), 4.8% (2023), 4.7% (2022) and 7.8% (2021). The record does not state an award range, so what a grant is worth here is a question for the listing rather than the index.

The mechanics around that number matter as much as the number. Applicants complete a three-step form in one sitting — the record is explicit that there is no account, and so no way to save and return. They attach a 501(c)(3) determination letter plus up to eight supporting documents. Each organization may submit only one application, and the record states that the newest replaces the older. Results go out by email by early January, and the deadline on the record is October 31, 2026.

Stack those facts and a practical rule falls out. At a 1.5% historical rate, the expensive mistake is not losing — losing is the ordinary case. The expensive mistake is spending three days drafting in a form that cannot save, then submitting a second, better version that silently replaces the first. The record also notes that the portal for 2026 grants was expected to reopen by end of Q1 2026 while carrying an October 31, 2026 deadline — the kind of internal tension that gets resolved on the funder’s own page and nowhere else.

What the published rate buys is not discouragement. It is the ability to decide how many staff hours this application is worth before spending the first one.

A Grants Table You Can Divide

The second disclosure type is rarer in spirit and more useful in practice: the funder publishes what it actually did, and lets you do the division.

Per the Achelis and Bodman Foundation record, the foundation made 127 grants totaling $6,500,000 in 2025, typically ranging from $25,000 to $100,000 per grant, with amounts in historical documents ranging from $5,000 to $500,000. The record then breaks 2025 down by category:

Divide, and the stated range stops being one range. An Arts & Culture grant averaged about $35,300; a Health grant averaged about $103,300. That is a 2.9x difference inside a single foundation whose published band reads “$25,000 to $100,000,” and the Health average sits above the top of that band. Employment, with four grants, averaged about $51,300 — a category where the entire annual commitment was $205,000, so the realistic question is not what the ceiling is but whether a fifth grant exists at all.

Two honest notes about this table. The category totals sum exactly to the stated $6,500,000, but the category counts sum to 129 grants against a stated 127 — a two-grant discrepancy inside the record’s own figures, which is a reason to treat the dollar columns as firmer than the counts and to confirm either against the foundation’s published list. And an average is not an offer: it describes what a cohort received, not what a proposal is worth.

Still, this is the disclosure that changes the most behaviour. A listing reading “$25,000 to $100,000” invites every applicant to ask for $100,000. The table says that in five of seven categories, the average grant was under $56,000.

The Counter-Case: $100,000, Divided 48 Ways

The third type pairs a total with a recipient count, which produces an average directly.

Per the CFNSV Competitive Grants Program record, the Community Foundation of the Northern Shenandoah Valley awarded a record $100,000 in grants to 48 nonprofits in a Spring cycle, as reported in its 2025 Impact Report. The record gives the program’s award range as $2,000 to $8,000.

A hundred thousand dollars divided by forty-eight organizations is about $2,083 — which lands at the very bottom of the published $2,000 to $8,000 band. The ceiling in the listing is nearly four times the realized average. Neither figure is wrong; they answer different questions. The band answers what the most this program has given is. The average answers what it actually gave, last time, to a typical recipient.

The record carries a second structural fact that reframes the program. Most CFNSV grants are non-competitive, with donors or fund advisers designating the recipients. The competitive program runs annually from five named funds — the Boxley-Fox Endowment Fund, Chain of Checks, the Cochran Family Youth Fund, the Community Future Fund, and the Paul and Martha Rees Fund — and nonprofits are notified of opportunities through the CFNSV grant portal as they arise. The eligible area is the City of Winchester and the Counties of Clarke, Frederick and Warren in Virginia.

So the competitive pool is a minority of the foundation’s giving, divided into small pieces across many organizations. That is a legitimate strategy — spread support widely in a defined region — and it is invisible in an award range.

When the Number Is the Door Closing

The fourth type publishes a total precisely so that you do not apply.

Per the Women’s Foundation of Montana record, the foundation will award more than $500,000 in 2026 through an invitation-only cycle, prioritizing renewal funding for current grantees in order to provide stable, sustained support to organizations advancing women and girls across Montana. Current grantees reach their application and grant history through the online portal. The record states plainly that there is no open application process for new applicants in this cycle.

This is a disclosure doing real work. Half a million dollars is large enough to pull an organization into a week of proposal drafting, and the same paragraph that names it says the money is not addressable this year. Publishing both the size of the pot and the closure of the door saves every ineligible applicant the cost of finding out the slow way.

The Funder Who Says the Denominator Is Unknown

The last record is the most candid of the five, and it publishes no figure at all.

Per the Community Grants Program record, the Coffeyville Area Community Foundation runs a single annual spring cycle for 501(c)(3) nonprofits serving the Coffeyville, Kansas area. Applications are accepted in March and awards announced by May, with the exact deadline announced at the start of each cycle. Projects are evaluated on impact, need and application strength.

And then the sentence that most funders leave unwritten: there is no set dollar limit on awards; amounts vary by cycle depending on available funds and the number of applicants.

That is the denominator, named as a variable with no value yet. It is more honest than a fixed range, because it says out loud what is true at nearly every funder here — the award is a function of how many others showed up. Coffeyville just tells you in advance.

What to Do With a Number You Finally Have

Four disclosure types, four different next actions:

• A published acceptance rate (Dougherty) is an input to a budgeting decision. Decide the hours before you start, and protect the submission — on a form that cannot save, and where a resubmission replaces the prior one, the process risk is larger than the drafting risk.
• A grants-made table (Achelis and Bodman) is an input to the ask. Compute the average for your category, not the foundation’s overall band, and check whether your category received four grants or forty-seven.
• A total paired with a count (CFNSV) is an input to expectations and effort. An average near the floor of the published range means a wide, shallow program — worth applying to, not worth a flagship-sized proposal.
• A total with a closed door (Women’s Foundation of Montana) is an input to the calendar. There is nothing to write this cycle; the action is to track when the cycle reopens.

Where no number is published — the overwhelming majority of listings — Coffeyville’s phrasing is the right default: available funds divided by however many organizations apply.

One caution worth stating plainly. None of these figures predicts an outcome for any particular applicant, and a funder’s history is not a commitment. OpenGrants does not guarantee funding outcomes; results vary by organization and opportunity. What published arithmetic changes is the quality of the decision you make before writing, which is the part you control.

Finding the Funders Who Show Their Work

This is not a filter you can apply in any grant database, including ours. No listing field records “publishes its acceptance rate,” because almost no funder supplies one. The disclosures above live in prose — on a grants-made page, inside an impact report, in a sentence on an application page.

What a broad index does is put those pages in front of you. The OpenGrants index covers federal programs from Grants.gov, SAM.gov and SBIR/STTR alongside state and local programs, private foundations and corporate giving, refreshed daily (OpenGrants data, verified August 10, 2026), spanning more than 43,000 open opportunities (OpenGrants data, verified October 13, 2026). The practical habit is to read the funder’s own pages around a listing — grants made, impact report, FAQ — because that is where the arithmetic hides when it exists at all.

The funder directory is the right entry point when the question is about an organization rather than a single program, and more record-level reads like this one sit under funding profiles. For the mechanics of sizing a request once you have the numbers, the knowledge base and our tips and resources cover budget and ask construction.

Search the OpenGrants index at ops.opengrants.io and read the funder page behind every listing you shortlist.

Common Questions

Is a 1.5% acceptance rate unusually low for a private foundation? There is no reliable benchmark to compare it against, because this foundation is one of the very few publishing the figure at all. What the record supports is an internal comparison: at this funder, the rate was 7.8% in 2021 and 1.5% in 2024. Comparing it to an industry average would mean inventing one.

If a listing shows a $25,000 to $100,000 range, is it wrong to ask for $100,000? Not wrong, but the range alone is weak evidence for the size of the ask. Where a funder publishes its grants-made table, the per-category average is the better guide — and at Achelis and Bodman that average ran from roughly $27,300 in one category to roughly $103,300 in another, a spread the single band conceals.

Why would a funder publish numbers that make it look hard to get funded? The records suggest two reasons. One is to save applicants wasted effort, which is explicit at the Women’s Foundation of Montana, where the published total arrives attached to a closed application process. The other is simple transparency about a competitive process — Coffeyville states that award size depends on available funds and the number of applicants, which is a description of its mechanics, not a discouragement.

Can I estimate a funder’s acceptance rate if it does not publish one? Not from the listing. You can sometimes estimate the average grant from a published total and recipient count, as with the CFNSV figure of $100,000 across 48 nonprofits, but an average tells you nothing about how many organizations applied and were declined. Treat the two as separate facts and do not derive one from the other.

The Bottom Line

Five open records publish something almost no listing carries: the arithmetic behind the award. One foundation prints a four-year acceptance rate that fell from 7.8% to 1.5%. One prints a full grants-made table whose category averages range from roughly $27,300 to roughly $103,300 inside a stated $25,000 to $100,000 band — and whose own category counts sum to 129 against a stated 127. One reports $100,000 spread across 48 nonprofits, putting the realized average at the floor of its published range. One publishes half a million dollars alongside a closed door. One states that award size depends on how many organizations apply, which is the quiet truth at all of them.

Award ranges describe the ceiling. Published arithmetic describes the floor. When a funder gives you both, read the second one first.