Find the federal grants you're actually eligible for

PlainGrants indexes the active federal grant and assistance programs catalogued in the System for Award Management (SAM.gov) Assistance Listings, formerly the CFDA, plus the open funding opportunities posted on Grants.gov. 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 catalogued on SAM.gov and searchable through Grants.gov.

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), which publishes the recipient name, award amount, award date, performance period, place of performance, and program identifier. PlainGrants does not ingest or link to that award-recipient history; we index program eligibility and open funding opportunities from SAM.gov and Grants.gov. To see who has actually received funding under a given CFDA number, search that number directly on USAspending.gov.

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. 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.