An eligibility check compares a specific grant’s published criteria against your organization profile and returns a structured verdict before you invest in an application.
What you get back
A verdict — eligible, conditional, or ineligible.
A per-criterion breakdown — each requirement marked met, not met, or unknown, with detail on why. The “unknown” ones are the useful part; they are where the listing does not say enough to decide.
Unresolved questions — the things you still have to answer yourself, usually about internal facts OpenGrants has no way to know.
Read the “conditional” verdict carefully
Conditional is the most common and most useful result. It generally means you clear the hard gates but something is undetermined — a registration you may not hold, a cost-share you may not be able to meet, a partnership requirement.
Treat conditional as a to-do list, not a rejection.
It is informational, not authoritative
This is AI-derived from the grant’s text. It is a fast first filter that saves you from writing applications you were never eligible for — it is not a legal determination.
Always verify against the official listing before you commit real time. Where the two disagree, the funder’s own notice governs, every time.
Requirements
You need a grant ID from a search or match result — eligibility checks run against real records, not descriptions. You also need a stored organization profile, or you can pass one inline for a single check.
Eligibility checks require OpenGrants Pro.
The bigger point
The most common reason grant applications fail is that the applicant was never eligible. That is diagnosable in advance, and it is cheap to diagnose. Running a check before you start writing is the highest-return two minutes in the whole process.