Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA)

A Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) is NIH’s legacy umbrella term for a formal, published solicitation of grant or cooperative agreement applications in a defined area — the document type that tells applicants what an Institute or Center will fund, who is eligible, and how to apply. Every NIH FOA falls into one of two families: a standing, recurring Program Announcement (PA) — including Parent Announcements, PARs, and PAS — or a one-time Request for Applications (RFA) with dedicated set-aside funds. As of April 2023, NIH itself no longer calls these documents FOAs going forward; it uses Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) instead, aligning with government-wide terminology. “FOA” and “NOFO” refer to the same underlying document type, and both terms remain in active use — “FOA” because it is still embedded throughout NIH’s own long-standing policy text and years of legacy announcement numbers, “NOFO” because it is the current, forward-looking term.

FOA vs. NOFO: a renamed umbrella term, not a new document type

NIH Guide Notice NOT-OD-23-109 (“Updates to Funding Opportunity Terminology,” released April 21, 2023) states that, effective immediately, NIH would use “notice of funding opportunity (NOFO)” instead of “funding opportunity announcement (FOA)” to refer to formal announcements of the availability of federal financial assistance — explicitly to align with the Uniform Guidance’s own terminology at 2 CFR Part 200. The shift went federal-government-wide the following year: OMB’s April 2024 revision to 2 CFR Part 200 (per OMB Memorandum M-24-11) standardized “Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO)” as the common term across all federal grant-making agencies — replacing agency-specific labels such as FOA (NIH), NOFA, and SGA — effective for awards issued on or after October 1, 2024, along with a required plain-language NOFO template at 2 CFR Part 200, Appendix I.

Nothing about what the document actually is changed in this rename. NIH’s own Grants Policy Statement, section 2.3.5, still uses “Types of Funding Opportunity Announcements (FOAs)” as its section header, and every legacy PA/PAR/PAS/RFA numbering convention (e.g., PA-24-XXX, RFA-CA-26-XXX) is unchanged. A research administrator working from an older FOA and a newer NOFO for the same mechanism family is reading the same kind of document under two different names, issued in two different eras — not two different things.

The two sub-types every NIH FOA/NOFO falls into

Per NIH Grants Policy Statement 2.3.5, every NIH FOA/NOFO belongs to one of two families, and the family determines how an applicant should plan a submission:

• Program Announcement (PA) — a standing, ongoing invitation for applications on a defined topic. No dedicated pot of money is set aside for the announcement specifically; applications compete against the Institute or Center’s general appropriated funds. PAs use NIH’s standard, recurring submission due dates and go through NIH’s normal two-tier peer review (a Center for Scientific Review study section, then Institute Advisory Council). Two named variants exist within the PA family: a PAR carries special receipt, referral, and/or review considerations (sometimes routed to an Institute-convened panel instead of a standing study section), and a PAS is a PA that does carry set-aside funds while still using standard recurring due dates.
• Request for Applications (RFA) — a one-time solicitation issued when an Institute or Center wants to direct funding toward a specific programmatic priority. An RFA states the estimated total funds committed and the estimated number of awards, usually specifies a single application receipt date, and is typically reviewed by a Scientific Review Group convened specifically for that competition (often a Special Emphasis Panel) rather than a standing study section.

The practical difference for a research administrator: an RFA’s funding is finite, pre-committed, and tied to a receipt date that will not recur — miss it, and there is no “next cycle” for that specific competition unless the Institute chooses to reissue a similar RFA later under a new number. A PA-family announcement, by contrast, is a standing invitation — missing one due date simply means applying at NIH’s next standard cycle. For the full mechanics of how an RFA specifically works — its set-aside funding structure, single receipt date, and dedicated review pathway — see CASRAI’s guide on the NIH RFA (Request for Applications).

Where FOAs/NOFOs are published — and a change taking effect in FY2026

Historically, every NIH FOA/NOFO has been published in the NIH Guide for Grants and Contracts and mirrored on Grants.gov, the government-wide portal used across federal grant-making agencies. That is changing: per NIH Guide notice NOT-OD-25-143 (released August 14, 2025), beginning in fiscal year 2026 NIH will stop posting NOFOs in the NIH Guide for Grants and Contracts. Grants.gov becomes NIH’s single official source for active and expired grant and cooperative agreement funding opportunities going forward (searchable via Grants.gov’s Classic or newer Simpler search interfaces), and NOFOs will no longer appear in the NIH Guide’s weekly Table of Contents email. The NIH Guide itself does not disappear — it continues to carry policy and informational notices (the NOT-OD-series notices, including the two cited in this article) — but it stops being a place to find the funding-opportunity postings themselves. Anyone bookmarking or scripting against the NIH Guide’s funding-opportunity listings specifically should plan to migrate that workflow to Grants.gov for FY2026 postings onward.

Why this matters for a research administrator

Because “FOA” and “NOFO” are the same document type under two names, the operational question that actually matters when reading one is not which label it uses, but which of the two sub-types it is: does it carry set-aside funds and a single receipt date (RFA-shaped) or a standing invitation with recurring due dates (PA-shaped)? Every FOA/NOFO states its own answer near the top of the document — the estimated total funding and number of awards for a set-aside announcement, or a reference to NIH’s standard due dates for a recurring one. Reading that section correctly, rather than assuming from the announcement’s age or acronym alone, is what determines whether a missed date is recoverable.

Counter-example

An NIH Guide Notice (a NOT-XX-###–numbered item, such as the two cited above) is not itself an FOA/NOFO. Notices announce policy changes, provide clarifications, extend deadlines, or signal intent to publish a future funding opportunity — they are not, themselves, a solicitation an applicant submits an application against. Only a PA, PAR, PAS, or RFA (pre-2023 usage) — or their post-2023 NOFO equivalents — is an actual funding-opportunity solicitation.

Related terms

See CASRAI’s guide to the NIH RFA (Request for Applications) for RFA-specific mechanics, and the Grants Management pillar for the broader funding-lifecycle and international research-administration context this term sits within.