Research Grant Funding Statistics: Where to Look

Search for “research grant funding statistics” and you will land on a mix of official agency dashboards, a handful of funder press releases, and third-party listicles that repackage a snapshot of numbers from a single fiscal year. None of that is CASRAI’s business to replicate. Success rates, award counts, and total dollars obligated change every fiscal year and differ by agency, program, and even by institute within an agency — a page that tries to host “the” current numbers is stale within months. What stays useful is knowing exactly where the real, authoritative numbers live, what the terms on those dashboards actually mean, and how to avoid the most common misreading of them.

This guide is a navigational aid, not a numbers page: it points you to the primary sources research administrators actually rely on — NIH RePORT, the NSF National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES), and the equivalent tools for UK and other major funders — and explains the terminology so the numbers you pull mean what you think they mean.

Why there is no single “grant funding statistics” number

“What is the grant success rate?” is not a question with one answer, even for a single agency in a single year. Rates vary by:

• Funder and program — NIH, NSF, DOE, DOD, and mission agencies each publish separately, using their own methodologies; there is no single US federal dashboard that aggregates them on comparable terms.
• Mechanism or activity code — an NIH R01 success rate is not the same as an R21 or K-award success rate; an NSF CAREER award rate is not the same as a standard research grant rate.
• Institute, center, or directorate — within NIH, each of the 27 institutes and centers sets its own funding decisions and effectively its own de facto payline; within NSF, each directorate/division does the same.
• Career stage — NIH separately tracks rates for new/early-stage investigators versus established investigators, and they frequently diverge.
• Fiscal year — federal fiscal years run October–September; a rate reported for FY2025 is not directly comparable to a calendar-year figure a foundation might report.

Because of this, the right habit is not to memorize a percentage but to know which live tool to query for the specific agency, mechanism, and year you actually need.

Terminology: success rate, funding rate, and payline are not interchangeable

Agencies use precise, agency-specific definitions for the terms that show up in these statistics, and conflating them is the most common misreading:

• Success rate (NIH’s term) — the percentage of reviewed applications that receive funding in a given fiscal year and activity category. NIH RePORT’s Success Rates tool computes this on a fiscal-year basis and is the authoritative source for the figure — CASRAI does not reproduce it here because it changes every year and by mechanism/institute.
• Payline (NIH-specific) — a percentile or score cutoff an institute sets, in advance of final funding decisions, as its working threshold for funding an application. Paylines are a budget-planning tool, not a retrospective outcome statistic, and they are typically less generous than the eventual success rate because institutes fund some applications above the payline through exception processes.
• Funding rate (more common in NSF and foundation reporting) — generally the number of awards made divided by the number of proposals submitted in a period. NSF’s own performance reporting and NCSES survey data use this framing rather than NIH’s “success rate” language, and the two are not always calculated the same way (e.g., how resubmissions or amended proposals are counted can differ by agency).

Before quoting a rate in a report or grant application (some funders ask applicants to note the sponsor’s typical funding rate), confirm which of these three concepts the source is actually reporting.

Official U.S. federal sources

NIH RePORT (report.nih.gov)

NIH RePORT’s funding statistics section is the authoritative source for NIH-specific numbers and includes:

• Success Rates — funded applications as a percentage of reviewed applications, by fiscal year, mechanism, and institute/center.
• NIH Data Book — summary statistics on extramural grants and contract awards, applications received, and the organizations and personnel NIH supports.
• Awards by Location — geographic breakdowns of NIH-supported organizations.
• NIH Budget and Spending — appropriations history and budget justifications.
• Categorical Spending — funding by research, condition, and disease category (RCDC).

This is distinct from NIH RePORTER, the award-search tool covered in CASRAI’s own NIH Award Search: How to Use NIH RePORTER to Find Funded Grants — RePORT publishes aggregate statistics; RePORTER lets you search individual funded projects by PI, institution, or project number. Use RePORT for “what’s the current success rate,” and RePORTER for “who has NIH funding for X.”

NSF and NCSES

NSF’s own funding-rate figures are published through its annual performance reporting, and broader federal R&D investment statistics — including funding by agency, by field of science, and by performer type — come from the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES), NSF’s statistical agency. NCSES runs the Survey of Federal Funds for Research and Development and the Higher Education Research and Development (HERD) Survey, and publishes periodic reports (e.g., its analyses of federal R&D funding by agency and research category) at ncses.nsf.gov. For finding and applying to open NSF opportunities rather than statistics, see CASRAI’s NSF Funding Search guide.

Other US federal agencies

Agencies without a dedicated statistics portal comparable to NIH RePORT typically report funding-rate figures inside their own annual performance and accountability reports, congressional budget justifications, or grants management dashboards. Grants.gov itself is a discovery and application-submission system, not a statistics source — it does not publish aggregate success-rate data.

UK and other international sources

UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) publishes funding and success-rate data by council in its annual report and accounts and through its UKRI Funding Service reporting; CASRAI’s own UKRI Grants guide covers how the nine research councils and the Funding Service fit together for administrators who need the structural picture rather than year-specific rates. Other national funders (Canada’s Tri-Agency, the European Research Council, and equivalents) each publish their own statistics separately — there is no single cross-national dashboard, and rates are not directly comparable across countries because eligibility rules, review processes, and what counts as an “application” differ.

Private foundations and aggregated listicles

Individual foundations (e.g., major biomedical or scientific philanthropies) sometimes disclose approval rates in their own annual reports, but there is no standardized public reporting requirement for private funders comparable to NIH RePORT or NCSES, so foundation-level figures are inconsistent in both availability and methodology. Third-party sites that aggregate “grant statistics” listicles are useful for a quick orientation but are secondary sources built from the same primary data described above — always trace a specific number back to the funder’s own report before relying on it in institutional planning or a proposal.

How to interpret these numbers correctly

• Match the fiscal year convention. Federal fiscal years (October–September) do not align with calendar-year or academic-year figures a university or foundation might report.
• Check what counts as an “application.” Some rates include resubmissions and amended applications as new counts; others don’t. This alone can move a reported rate by several points.
• Separate new from renewal (competing) applications. Renewal/competing-continuation success rates are often reported separately from new-application rates and are frequently higher.
• Don’t compare rates across agencies at face value. A 20% NIH success rate and a 20% NSF funding rate are not measuring identically-defined events — see the terminology section above.
• Distinguish dollars requested from dollars awarded. Award counts and dollar totals can move in opposite directions in the same year if average award sizes change.

Practical checklist for research administrators

1. Identify the exact agency, program/mechanism, institute or directorate, and fiscal year you need — a generic “NIH success rate” query is rarely what a PI or dean’s office actually needs.
2. Go to the primary source (NIH RePORT’s Success Rates tool, NCSES, or the funder’s own annual report) rather than a secondary aggregator.
3. Note the exact definition the source uses for “success rate” / “funding rate” and whether it is stated anywhere on the page or report.
4. If you’re citing the figure externally (e.g., in a grant justification or institutional report), cite the primary source and the fiscal year explicitly rather than restating it as a general fact — these numbers are point-in-time by design.
5. For finding open opportunities or already-funded projects rather than aggregate rates, use the tool-specific guides linked throughout this page (NIH RePORTER, NSF Funding Search, UKRI Funding Service) rather than a statistics dashboard.

Frequently asked questions

What is a “good” grant success rate?

There is no universal benchmark — historical NIH success rates have generally run in the high-teens to twenties percent depending on mechanism and year, while some NSF directorates and highly competitive award types run lower; both move year to year with appropriations and application volume. Check the current fiscal-year figure for the specific mechanism you’re evaluating rather than relying on a remembered or generic number.

Where can I find NIH grant success rates broken down by institute?

NIH RePORT’s Success Rates tool at report.nih.gov lets you filter by fiscal year, activity code, and institute/center — this is the authoritative source rather than any third-party summary.

Is NIH RePORT the same as NIH RePORTER?

No. RePORT (report.nih.gov) publishes aggregate statistics — success rates, the Data Book, budget data. RePORTER is the separate award-search tool for finding individual funded projects; see CASRAI’s NIH RePORTER guide for how to use it.

Is there a single source for global research funding statistics?

No. Each national funder (NIH/NSF in the US, UKRI in the UK, the Tri-Agency in Canada, the ERC in the EU, and equivalents elsewhere) publishes its own statistics separately, using its own definitions and fiscal-year conventions, so there is no single comparable global dashboard. OECD’s Main Science and Technology Indicators aggregates national R&D expenditure data at a macro level, but that is a different kind of statistic (total national R&D spend) from agency-level grant success or funding rates.