A Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) is the formal, publicly published document a US federal agency issues to announce that it intends to make grant or cooperative-agreement awards in a defined area, and to spell out exactly who may apply, under what mechanism, by what deadline, against what review criteria, and with what strings attached after the award is made. “NOFO” is now the standard, government-wide term for this document — it replaced the older label Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA), which is still common in older material, in NIH’s own long-standing policy numbering, and in casual conversation among research administrators. If you searched “NOFO” or “FOA” to get here, you are looking for the same thing either way.
This guide covers what a NOFO actually is, how to read one section by section without missing the details that sink an otherwise-strong application, how the major agencies vary their NOFO format, and where to find them before a deadline sneaks up on you.
NOFO vs. FOA: why the term changed
NIH began shifting from “Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA)” to “Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO)” for newly issued announcements starting around January 2023. The government-wide standardization followed: the Office of Management and Budget’s April 2024 revision to the Uniform Guidance (2 CFR Part 200) — formalized in 2 CFR 200.204, “Notices of funding opportunities” — designated NOFO as the term every federal grant-making agency uses going forward, replacing a patchwork of agency-specific labels (FOA at NIH, Notice of Funding Availability/NOFA at HUD and others, Solicitation for Grant Applications/SGA elsewhere, program solicitation at NSF). The same revision restructured the template itself: 2 CFR Part 200, Appendix I now sets out a standardized, plain-language NOFO format for awards issued on or after October 1, 2024, including a required Executive Summary (commonly capped around 500 words) written to communicate eligibility, deadline, and award-size information clearly rather than in agency jargon.
Practically, this means: NIH’s older Grants Policy Statement section headings and pre-2023 announcements still say “FOA”; new NIH and cross-agency announcements say “NOFO”; and both terms point at the identical underlying document type. CASRAI’s dictionary entry on Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) goes deeper on how NIH’s RFA/PA family maps onto NSF’s program-solicitation hierarchy if you’re working across agencies and the terminology stops lining up.
How to read a NOFO: section by section
Per 2 CFR Part 200, Appendix I and the standard format used across grants.gov, NIH, NSF, and most other federal funders, a NOFO is organized into eight numbered sections. Skimming straight to the deadline and the award ceiling is the single most common way applicants miss something that later disqualifies or weakens their application — every section below carries information that changes how you plan the submission.
Section I — Funding Opportunity Description
States the program’s purpose, the specific scientific, technical, or programmatic priorities it funds, and the background or authorizing statute behind it. Read this first to confirm your project is actually responsive — a strong proposal that doesn’t address the stated priorities can be judged non-responsive regardless of its quality.
Section II — Award Information
Covers the funding instrument (grant vs. cooperative agreement), estimated total program funding, anticipated number of awards, individual award ceiling and floor, project period length, and whether cost sharing or matching funds are required. A cooperative agreement here signals the agency expects active, ongoing programmatic involvement — steering-committee participation, work-plan sign-off — not a hands-off grant relationship.
Section III — Eligibility Information
Specifies who may apply: eligible organization types, individual eligibility where relevant, and any restrictions. This is where cost-sharing requirements and limited-submission constraints are formally stated. Two details applicants routinely misread here: eligibility is usually evaluated at the applicant-organization level, not the individual investigator level (see below), and a program that “encourages” a certain applicant type is different from one that legally restricts eligibility to it.
Section IV — Application and Submission Information
The mechanics: required forms and formats, page limits, content and formatting requirements for each application component, and the submission deadline — including the exact time and time zone. Submission systems (Grants.gov, NIH ASSIST, NSF’s Research.gov) uniformly enforce the stated deadline; a submission that clears at 5:01pm Eastern against a 5:00pm Eastern deadline is late, full stop, regardless of local time zone confusion on the applicant’s end. This section also states whether a letter of intent, preliminary proposal, or white paper is required or encouraged before the full application — and, per Appendix I, agencies are required to say explicitly whether a pre-application step is mandatory, optional, or not used.
Section V — Application Review Information
States the specific evaluation criteria the review panel will score against, how those criteria are weighted, and the review process itself (peer review panel, program officer discretion, additional agency-level selection factors after technical review). This is the section that should shape how you structure the proposal narrative — see below.
Section VI — Award Administration Information
Covers what happens after selection: award notice mechanics, the administrative and national policy requirements that attach to the award (audit requirements, reporting obligations, applicable Uniform Guidance provisions), and the reporting schedule and format expected once funded.
Section VII — Agency Contacts
Names and contact information for program staff (who answer substantive questions about scientific or programmatic fit) and grants management staff (who answer questions about forms, submission mechanics, and budget rules) — a distinction worth using correctly, since a scope question routed to a grants management contact, or vice versa, often just bounces back with a delay.
Section VIII — Other Information
A catch-all for anything that doesn’t fit the preceding sections: agency-specific policy notices, links to required forms, and other reference material.
Agency-specific variants
“NOFO” is the umbrella term; individual agencies layer their own sub-types on top of it, and the sub-type changes whether funds are set aside for that specific competition and whether a dedicated review panel is convened.
- NIH splits every NOFO into two families. A Request for Applications (RFA) is a one-time, targeted competition with its own set-aside funds, usually a single receipt date, and a dedicated Scientific Review Group convened specifically for it — see CASRAI’s guide to the NIH RFA for the full mechanics. A Program Announcement (PA), including Parent Announcements, is a standing, recurring solicitation on NIH’s normal due dates with no dedicated funding set-aside, routed through NIH’s standard two-tier review. Two PA variants matter: a PAR carries special receipt, referral, or review considerations; a PAS is a PA that does carry set-aside funds while otherwise following standard PA conventions. A Notice of Special Interest (NOSI) is not itself a NOFO — it highlights a research priority and directs applicants to submit through an existing standing NOFO (often a Parent Announcement), carrying no set-aside funds or dedicated review panel of its own.
- NSF does not use “NOFO” internally. Its Proposal & Award Policies & Procedures Guide (PAPPG) defines a parallel hierarchy: a broad, standing program description; a more formal program announcement, both using NSF’s generic eligibility and standard merit-review criteria; and a program solicitation — the tier functionally closest to an NIH RFA, carrying non-standard eligibility, submission limits, mandatory letters of intent or preliminary proposals, cost-sharing requirements, or a cooperative-agreement instrument, and citable by its own solicitation number (e.g., NSF 24-XXX). A Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) is a separate NSF communication type that signals interest in a topic or clarifies policy but is not itself a funding announcement — it typically points applicants toward an existing standing mechanism rather than opening a new competition.
- DOD and other mission agencies commonly use a Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) — a solicitation format used when an agency seeks basic and applied research proposals across a broad set of topics rather than a single narrowly defined deliverable, typically reviewed via peer/scientific review rather than a traditional contract source-selection process. A BAA follows the same underlying NOFO logic (defined scope, eligibility, submission mechanics, review criteria) but is structured around research-topic areas rather than a single funding priority.
Critical details applicants and administrators miss
- The applicant is usually the institution, not the PI. Federal grant eligibility, cost-sharing obligations, and the legal application itself typically run through the applicant organization (via its Authorized Organizational Representative), with the principal investigator as the project’s technical lead — not the other way around. Section III eligibility language should be read against your institution’s status, not just the PI’s individual qualifications.
- Limited submissions require internal competition. When a NOFO restricts the number of applications a single institution may submit, the research office typically runs an internal pre-selection process well ahead of the agency deadline — missing your institution’s internal deadline can eliminate you from that NOFO even though the agency deadline hasn’t passed. See CASRAI’s guide to limited submissions for how that internal process typically works.
- Letters of intent are usually non-binding — but check the specific NOFO, and check current agency policy, not just habit. Where required, an LOI is typically a short, non-binding pre-application notice that helps the agency estimate review workload and recruit reviewers; submitting one does not commit you to applying, and not submitting one when it was only “encouraged” rather than required is not disqualifying. That said, this is an area where policy has genuinely shifted: NIH eliminated its LOI process NIH-wide effective December 3, 2025 (Guide Notice NOT-OD-26-019) as part of an administrative-burden reduction effort — NIH no longer requests or accepts LOIs for standard applications. NSF’s letter-of-intent requirements, by contrast, remain in active use for specific solicitations that require them — see CASRAI’s guide to the NSF Letter of Intent for when NSF requires one and what to include. Always read the specific NOFO’s Section IV rather than assuming last year’s process still applies.
- The due date and time zone are exact, not approximate. Section IV states the submission deadline down to the minute and time zone (commonly Eastern Time for US federal agencies). Electronic submission systems enforce this automatically; a late submission is generally not accepted regardless of the reason, absent a documented, pre-approved system-outage exception.
- Resubmission rules vary by agency and can be stricter than expected. NIH, for example, generally permits only one resubmission (A1) of an original application (A0), and it must go to the same NOFO type — a one-time RFA that has closed generally cannot receive a resubmission under that same number.
- Required registrations take weeks and must be current at the time of award, not just at application. Before an institution can submit to most federal NOFOs, it needs an active SAM.gov registration with a valid Unique Entity Identifier (UEI), plus agency-specific accounts — eRA Commons for NIH, Research.gov for NSF — and a current Grants.gov registration for the applicant organization. SAM.gov registration alone commonly takes several weeks for a new entity and requires annual renewal; starting this process after a NOFO is already open is a common, avoidable cause of missed deadlines. Most applications are ultimately built and submitted as an SF-424 package (or the SF-424 R&R research variant) through these registered accounts.
Let Section V drive the proposal, not just Section I
The most common structural mistake in proposal writing is organizing the narrative around what the project does (Section I’s description) rather than around what the reviewers will actually score (Section V’s criteria). If Section V weights “significance” and “innovation” as separate, explicitly scored criteria, the narrative should visibly address each one as its own point, in language that echoes the review criteria’s own terms — not bury both inside a single background section and hope a reviewer connects the dots. Reading Section V before drafting, and returning to it before final edits to confirm every scored criterion has an unambiguous, easy-to-find answer in the narrative, is lower-effort than it sounds and disproportionately affects review scores.
Where to find NOFOs and how to set alerts
Every US federal grant-making agency is required to publish its NOFOs on Grants.gov, which supports free saved searches and email alerts by agency, category, or keyword — the standard first stop for cross-agency searching. NIH-specific NOFOs are additionally indexed in the NIH Guide for Grants and Contracts (grants.nih.gov), which offers its own weekly email subscription and RSS feed and is generally the fastest way to catch a new NIH RFA or PA before it’s widely circulated. NSF posts funding opportunities directly on nsf.gov and through Research.gov, which also supports saved searches. Individual NIH Institutes/Centers, NSF Directorates, and other agency sub-units frequently maintain their own funding pages and mailing lists as well — useful for a narrow research area where early awareness matters more than it does for a broad, open-ended standing announcement. CASRAI’s guide to funding opportunity databases covers the broader landscape of where researchers search for funding beyond the federal-agency sources above, and the guide on finding a research funding sponsor covers the earlier step of identifying a plausible funder before a specific NOFO exists.
Frequently asked questions
Is a NOFO the same thing as a grant?
No. A NOFO is the solicitation — the published announcement inviting applications. The grant or cooperative agreement is the award itself, made to a successful applicant after review. You apply “in response to” a NOFO; the award only exists after that competition concludes.
Is FOA an outdated term I should stop using?
Not exactly outdated, but superseded for new material. NIH and other agencies now use NOFO for newly issued announcements, and 2 CFR 200.204 makes NOFO the standardized government-wide term. “FOA” still appears throughout older policy documents, NIH’s own Grants Policy Statement section numbering, and everyday conversation, and both terms refer to the same underlying document — but new CASRAI content, and increasingly new agency material, uses NOFO.
Do I need to read all eight sections, or just the deadline and award amount?
Read all eight, at least once, before you commit resources to a proposal. Section III eligibility and Section IV submission requirements are the two sections most likely to contain a disqualifying detail (a limited-submission cap, a non-standard page limit, a required pre-application step) that a skim of Section I and II alone won’t surface.
What happens if my institution isn’t eligible under Section III?
The application will generally be screened out administratively before it reaches technical or scientific review, regardless of the proposed project’s quality. If eligibility is ambiguous for your specific institution type, the Section VII agency contacts are the right people to ask before investing in a full proposal — not a decision to guess at.
Does every NOFO require a letter of intent?
No — it depends on the agency and the specific NOFO. Section IV states explicitly whether a letter of intent, preliminary proposal, or white paper is required, encouraged, or not used at all. NIH eliminated its LOI process NIH-wide as of December 3, 2025; NSF continues to require letters of intent for specific solicitations. Never assume based on a prior year’s version of a similar-sounding announcement — check the current NOFO’s own Section IV.
