Federal Grant
Eligibility Finder

PlainGrants indexes the active federal grant and assistance programs catalogued in the System for Award Management (SAM.gov) Assistance Listings, formerly the CFDA. This includes formula grants, project grants, cooperative agreements, direct payments for specified or unrestricted use, direct loans, guaranteed loans, insurance, and the use of property, facilities, or equipment. We do not list state, local, or private foundation grants — only the federal programs that are searchable through Grants.gov and tracked through USAspending.gov post-award.

Eligibility is set by each individual program and varies widely. Common eligible-applicant categories include state and local governments, federally recognized tribes, public and private institutions of higher education, public and private nonprofit organizations, for-profit small businesses, and individuals (rare for direct discretionary grants). Most federal grants are restricted to organizations rather than individuals. Each program page surfaces the eligible-applicant types defined in the program announcement.

Once a federal agency awards a grant, it must report the award and any sub-awards to USAspending.gov under the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act (FFATA). USAspending publishes the recipient name, award amount, award date, performance period, place of performance, and program identifier. PlainGrants links each program to its USAspending award history so users can see which organizations have actually received funding under the program, not just which are theoretically eligible.

Most discretionary federal grants are applied for through Grants.gov, which serves as the central federal grant-application portal. The applicant organization must first register with SAM.gov to receive a Unique Entity Identifier (UEI) — this can take several weeks. Once registered, the organization downloads the application package for the specific opportunity, completes the SF-424 family of forms plus program-specific narratives, and submits before the published deadline. Some programs (formula grants to states, for example) follow a different process specified in the program announcement.

Active assistance listings are maintained continuously on SAM.gov. Open funding opportunities are listed on Grants.gov as they are announced — typically with 30 to 90 days from posting to deadline. PlainGrants refreshes the program catalog on a regular ETL schedule and surfaces source-snapshot dates on each page. Award records on USAspending lag the actual obligation date by approximately 30 days. Newly announced programs may take a refresh cycle to appear.

CFDA stands for Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance — the predecessor name for what is now the SAM.gov Assistance Listings catalog. Each federal assistance program has a unique CFDA number (now also called an Assistance Listing Number) in the format XX.XXX, where the prefix identifies the agency. For example, all USDA programs begin with 10. The number is the canonical identifier used in award reporting, regulatory filings, and inter-agency referencing. The CFDA naming persists in plenty of legacy documentation even after the SAM.gov rebrand.