NIH Guide for Grants and Contracts

The NIH Guide for Grants and Contracts (grants.nih.gov/guide) is NIH's official publication of record for grants-related announcements: every NIH Institute, Center, and Office is required to publish its official Notices there, each assigned a unique NOT-prefixed number, and a weekly Table of Contents lists everything posted that week. Before FY2026 it was also the official channel for Notices of Funding Opportunity (NOFOs, formerly FOAs) themselves; since FY2026, per NOT-OD-25-143, new NOFOs are posted on Grants.gov instead, while the Guide continues to carry every other Notice type -- policy changes, administrative supplements, requests for information, correction notices, and pre-application announcements.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 18 Jul 2026

Worked examples

Is an instance

NOT-OD-25-143, "NIH Will Stop Posting Notices of Funding Opportunities in the NIH Guide for Grants and Contracts in FY2026," is itself a Notice published in the Guide -- it announces a policy change (where NOFOs will be posted going forward), which is exactly the kind of document the Guide exists to carry, as distinct from a NOFO/FOA an applicant would submit an application against.

Is an instance

NOT-OD-10-019, NIH's 2009 notice updating expectations for Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) instruction in training grants, is a long-standing example of a policy Notice: a research office cites the NOT-number directly (e.g., in an institutional RCR plan) the same way a statute or regulation is cited, because the Guide is the authoritative, permanently archived record of when and how NIH announced the policy.

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance

A specific funding opportunity number like RFA-CA-26-014 or PAR-25-333 is a Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO), not "an NIH Guide notice" in the operational sense used here -- and as of FY2026, new NOFOs are posted on Grants.gov rather than in the Guide at all (per NOT-OD-25-143), so a research office that watches only the Guide for new funding opportunities will now miss them; the Guide is still the right place to watch for the policy Notices that govern how those opportunities are administered, just not for the opportunities themselves.

The NIH Guide for Grants and Contracts is the National Institutes of Health’s official publication for announcing grants-related policy, administrative, and (historically) funding-opportunity information. It is published online at grants.nih.gov/guide, and every NIH Institute, Center, and Office (IC) is required to route its official announcements through it rather than announcing them elsewhere. For research administrators, it functions the way a government gazette or federal register does for other agencies: it is the dated, permanently archived, citable record of when NIH announced something, which matters whenever a policy’s effective date or notice number needs to be verified or cited.

What the Guide actually publishes: Notices

The core content type in the Guide is the Notice — a short, numbered announcement covering things like a change to review criteria, an update to allowable costs, an administrative supplement opportunity, a request for information (RFI), a correction to a previously published document, or (as with the example below) a change to NIH’s own publishing process. Notices are NOT primarily solicitations applicants apply against — that document type is the Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA), now called a Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO). The Guide’s relationship to NOFOs changed materially in FY2026 — see below.

The NOT-xx-xxx numbering convention

Every Notice gets a unique identifier in the pattern NOT-[IC code]-[fiscal year]-[sequence number] — for example, NOT-OD-25-143 is a Notice from the Office of the Director (OD), issued in fiscal year 2025, sequence number 143. Other common IC codes include CA (National Cancer Institute), AI (NIAID), HL (NHLBI), and GM (NIGMS), among others matching each Institute’s standard two-letter abbreviation. Older Notices predating the current convention sometimes appear without an IC code segment (e.g., NOT-98-084, a 1998 Notice on data and safety monitoring) — a legacy numbering format from before NIH standardized the IC-code segment. Because the number is unique and permanent, it functions as a stable citation: an institutional policy, a grants management office SOP, or a Grants Policy Statement footnote can reference a NOT-number the same way it would cite a CFR section, and the underlying document will not move or be renumbered.

Weekly Table of Contents and how people track it

The Guide publishes on a rolling basis and rolls new items up into a Weekly Table of Contents, typically released Friday afternoons, listing everything posted that week with direct links. NIH offers a subscription mechanism (email/LISTSERV-style alerts) so research offices, PIs, and grants administrators can get the weekly digest automatically rather than checking the site manually. Tracking the Guide — whether via the weekly TOC, a subscription, or a saved institutional search — is the standard way a research office stays current on NIH policy changes that affect active or pending awards, independent of any single funding opportunity.

The FY2026 change: NOFOs moved to Grants.gov

Per NOT-OD-25-143, NIH stopped posting new NOFOs in the Guide during fiscal year 2026; Grants.gov is now the single official source for NIH grant and cooperative agreement funding opportunities, not a mirror of the Guide and not one of two equally authoritative places to check. This was one piece of a broader FY2026 restructuring of how NIH issues funding opportunities — see CASRAI’s guide on the FY2026 NOFO overhaul for the full picture, including the shift toward fewer, broader parent announcements and the SimplerNOFO pilot format. The important distinction for this term specifically: the Guide did not stop publishing — it stopped publishing one category of content (NOFOs) while continuing everything else (policy Notices, administrative supplements, RFIs, correction notices). A research office that only ever watched the Guide for new funding opportunities needs to rebuild that monitoring workflow around Grants.gov; a workflow that watches the Guide for policy changes affecting existing awards is unaffected and should keep watching it.

Why this distinction matters operationally

Conflating “the NIH Guide” with “NIH funding opportunities” was always a slight oversimplification, and FY2026 made the gap concrete: the Guide is a publication vehicle for several document types, of which NOFOs were historically the highest-volume and highest-attention one, but never the only one. A research administration office’s monitoring setup should point at Grants.gov for new NOFOs and keep the Guide in view for the Notice types that never moved — policy changes, allowable-cost updates, deadline extensions, RCR/training requirement updates, and the notices (like NOT-OD-25-143 itself) that announce process changes like this one.

Related terms

Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) — the solicitation document type, now called NOFO, that the Guide carried until FY2026.
NIH Funding Opportunity Changes: The FY2026 NOFO Overhaul — the full FY2026 restructuring this Notice was part of.
NIH Grants Policy Statement (NIH GPS) — the standing policy document that Guide Notices frequently amend or supplement.

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

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Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

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