DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft): Overview

The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) — the German Research Foundation — is Germany’s central, self-governing research funding organisation. If you searched for the bare acronym “DFG” expecting something else entirely (California’s former Department of Fish and Game, Dollar Financial Group, a New Jersey school-district classification, or generic internet slang all share the initials), this page is not that — it covers the German research funder specifically. This guide explains what DFG is, how it is governed and funded, its major funding programmes, who is eligible to apply, how the proposal process works, and how DFG compares to other national and international research funders.

What DFG is

DFG is a membership-based, private-law association (eingetragener Verein) headquartered in Bonn, Germany, rather than a government ministry or agency. It funds research across all academic disciplines — natural sciences, engineering, life sciences, humanities, and social sciences — at universities and non-university research institutions throughout Germany, and traces its lineage to the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft (founded 1920), with the present-day DFG formally re-established in 1951 after a post-war reconstitution. Its self-governing character is a defining feature: funding decisions are made by researchers themselves through elected review boards, not by government officials, even though the bulk of its budget is public money from federal and state (Länder) government.

DFG’s members include German universities, non-university research institutions, academies of science and the humanities, and major learned societies and research organisations (such as the Max Planck Society, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Helmholtz Association, and Leibniz Association), which together elect its governing bodies and give the organisation its self-governing mandate.

Governance and structure

DFG’s statutory bodies, as set out in its own organisational description, include:

General Assembly (Mitgliederversammlung) — the organisation’s main organ, made up of delegates from member institutions.
Senate — elected by the General Assembly, responsible for fundamental questions of research policy and strategy.
Joint Committee (Gemeinsamer Ausschuss) — brings together Senate members and representatives of the federal and state governments that fund DFG, reflecting the organisation’s dual character as researcher-governed but publicly financed.
Executive Committee and President — the President is elected by the General Assembly and represents DFG externally.
Review Boards (Fachkollegien) — discipline-specific boards of elected researchers who assess proposals and recommend funding decisions; members are elected by the research community for fixed terms, which is the mechanism through which peer review, rather than administrative discretion, drives most funding decisions.
Head Office (Geschäftsstelle) — the administrative body in Bonn that manages day-to-day operations, proposal processing, and programme administration.

DFG’s annual research-funding budget is in the range of several billion euros — DFG’s own reporting has put the figure at roughly €3.3 billion (2019) rising to approximately €3.9 billion in more recent years — funded jointly by the German federal government and the state governments. Because the exact figure changes with each federal budget cycle, check dfg.de directly for the current year’s reported total rather than treating any single figure here as fixed.

Major funding programmes

DFG organises its funding portfolio around two broad categories: funding for individual researchers and funding for coordinated, institution-level research structures. The main programmes are:

Individual Grants Programme / Research Grants (Sachbeihilfe) — the central, bottom-up instrument: any researcher with a doctorate affiliated with a German university or non-university research institution can apply, in any discipline, for funding for a specific, clearly defined project, with no fixed submission deadline.
Priority Programmes (Schwerpunktprogramme, SPP) — nationwide, thematically coordinated collaboration across up to around 30 individual projects at different institutions, typically running up to six years across two three-year funding periods; new SPP topics are decided annually by the DFG Senate.
Collaborative Research Centres (Sonderforschungsbereiche, SFB) — long-term, university-based, multidisciplinary research institutions that can run for up to twelve years, built around a shared research programme at a single host university (often with partner institutions).
Research Training Groups (Graduiertenkollegs, GRK) — structured doctoral programmes that fund a cohort of doctoral researchers working on a coordinated research and qualification programme.
Research Units (Forschungsgruppen, FOR) — smaller coordinated groupings (fewer than ten projects) that let several researchers pursue a shared research question, funded for up to eight years across two four-year periods.
Clusters of Excellence — large-scale, long-term funding for internationally competitive research fields, awarded through the joint DFG/German Council of Science and Humanities (Wissenschaftsrat) Excellence Strategy rather than DFG’s regular programmes alone.
Emmy Noether Programme — funds early-career researchers to lead their own independent junior research group, aimed at qualifying them for a professorship; see CASRAI’s Emmy Noether vs. ERC Starting Grant comparison for how it stacks up against the equivalent EU scheme.
Walter Benjamin Programme — funds postdocs in the early phase after their doctorate to pursue an independently designed project, most commonly abroad; see CASRAI’s full Walter Benjamin Programme guide.
International collaboration programmes — including Initiation of International Collaboration funding and formal agreements with partner funding organisations in specific countries to support integrated international research training groups and research consortia.

For a structured side-by-side of the two broadest categories, see CASRAI’s Individual Grants Programme vs. Coordinated Programmes comparison.

Who is eligible to apply

DFG funding follows a bottom-up model: researchers propose their own project ideas rather than responding to a fixed call on a government-set topic (Clusters of Excellence and some coordinated programmes are the main exceptions, since those involve institutional strategy and competitive calls). As a general rule across DFG’s individual-researcher programmes:

The applicant must hold a doctorate.
The applicant must be affiliated with a German university or a non-university research institution eligible to receive DFG funding (this can include a German host institution for researchers based abroad, depending on the programme).
There is no restriction by academic discipline — DFG funds across the full range of sciences and humanities.
Career-stage programmes (such as Emmy Noether and Walter Benjamin) add further eligibility windows tied to time since the doctorate; these vary by programme and are detailed on each programme’s own DFG page.

Researchers based outside Germany can be involved through DFG’s international collaboration programmes and partner-organisation agreements, and some individual programmes (like Walter Benjamin) are specifically structured around outbound or inbound international mobility.

Application process and the elan portal

DFG proposals are submitted and processed through elan, DFG’s online portal for electronic proposal submission and processing. Applicants use elan to prepare and submit proposals, track a proposal’s status through review, and manage ongoing grants (interim and final reports, for example). Because DFG’s programmes largely use a bottom-up, continuous-submission model rather than fixed annual competition rounds, proposals for most individual-researcher programmes can generally be submitted at any time rather than against a single yearly deadline — though coordinated programmes (Priority Programmes, Clusters of Excellence, and similar calls) do run on fixed cycles. Once submitted, proposals go through external peer review and are assessed by the relevant discipline-specific Review Board (Fachkollegium), which recommends a funding decision. Applicants should always confirm the current process, required forms, and any programme-specific deadlines directly on the relevant programme page at dfg.de/en/research-funding, since forms and modular funding components are revised periodically.

How DFG compares to other funders

Because DFG funds essentially all disciplines through a researcher-led, bottom-up structure, it is often compared with other major national and supranational funders that take a similar broad remit but different institutional design:

DFG vs. ERC (European Research Council) — both fund excellent researchers on a bottom-up basis, but ERC operates EU-wide under Horizon Europe with its own career-stage grant lines (Starting, Consolidator, Advanced), while DFG funds are restricted to research hosted in Germany. See the Emmy Noether vs. ERC Starting Grant comparison for a program-level view.
DFG vs. Horizon Europe — Horizon Europe is the European Union’s overall research and innovation funding programme, of which ERC is one pillar; DFG is a national funder that also participates in and co-funds international collaborative schemes alongside its own national programmes. See CASRAI’s Horizon Europe overview.
DFG vs. other national funders — DFG’s closest international counterparts, in terms of being a self-governing, bottom-up national research funder covering all disciplines, include organisations such as France’s ANR, Japan’s JSPS and JST, China’s NSFC, and Canada’s NSERC. Each differs in governance model, discipline scope, and the balance between individual-investigator and coordinated/institutional funding — DFG’s peer-review-led, association-based governance is closer in spirit to a grant-making learned society than to a government funding ministry.

Frequently asked questions

What does DFG stand for?

DFG stands for Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which translates to “German Research Foundation.” It is sometimes also referred to in English as the German Research Association.

Is DFG a German government agency?

No. DFG is a self-governing, membership-based association under private law, not a government ministry or agency. Its funding decisions are made by elected researcher review boards, although most of its budget comes from German federal and state government funding.

Can researchers outside Germany receive DFG funding?

DFG’s core individual-researcher programmes generally require the funded project to be hosted at a German university or research institution, but researchers based abroad can be involved through DFG’s international collaboration programmes, partner-organisation agreements, and mobility-focused schemes like the Walter Benjamin Programme.

What is the elan portal?

Elan is DFG’s online system for submitting and processing funding proposals and managing awarded grants, including interim and final reporting.

Does DFG have application deadlines?

Many of DFG’s individual-researcher programmes (such as the Individual Grants Programme) accept proposals continuously with no fixed deadline. Coordinated programmes and competitive calls, such as new Priority Programme topics or Clusters of Excellence rounds, run on fixed cycles set by DFG.

How is DFG different from the Max Planck Society or Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft?

DFG is a funding organisation — it awards competitive grants to researchers and institutions but does not itself run research institutes. The Max Planck Society, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Helmholtz Association, and Leibniz Association are Germany’s major research-performing organisations, which operate their own institutes and are themselves DFG member organisations eligible to apply for DFG funding.