Where can I find a list of all federal grants?

The authoritative list of federal discretionary grant opportunities is at Grants.gov. It is the official catalog operated by HHS on behalf of the federal Grants Management Line of Business, and every federal agency that publishes discretionary grants posts them there. Mandatory and formula grants (block grants to states, Medicaid, SNAP, highway funding) are not on Grants.gov because they are allocated by statute rather than competition.

Yes. Grants.gov is a free, public service of the U.S. federal government. Searching, browsing, registering, and applying are all free. Any service that claims to charge you to access Grants.gov listings or to apply for a federal grant is a scam.

How long does it take to register on Grants.gov?

The Grants.gov registration itself takes about 30 minutes once your SAM.gov registration is active. The slow step is SAM.gov, which can take 7 to 10 business days the first time (longer if your organization is new or your documentation is incomplete). Plan on 2 to 4 weeks end to end before you can submit your first application.

Can individuals apply for federal grants on Grants.gov?

In a small number of cases, yes. Federal grants for individuals are largely limited to research fellowships, arts and humanities awards (NEA, NEH), and a few targeted scholarship programs. Federal student aid is administered through FAFSA, not Grants.gov. Almost every "free $7,000 government grant for individuals" advertised online is a scam.

What is the difference between a grant and a cooperative agreement?

Legally, both are forms of federal financial assistance. The difference is the level of federal involvement: a grant means the federal agency funds the work and then steps back; a cooperative agreement means the agency is substantially involved in execution (technical direction, milestone review, joint decision making). From an applicant standpoint, the search, eligibility, and application process are essentially identical.

What is the difference between a federal grant and a federal contract?

A grant is financial assistance: the government gives you money to do something that benefits the public (research, training, community development). A contract is a procurement: the government pays you to deliver a specific good or service for the government itself. Grants are governed by 2 CFR 200 (the Uniform Guidance); contracts are governed by the [FAR](/free-govcon-tools/glossary/far-federal-acquisition-regulation). They use different application processes, different reporting requirements, and different platforms (Grants.gov for grants; [SAM.gov](/free-govcon-tools/glossary/sam-system-for-award-management) for most contracts).

What is a CFDA number or Assistance Listing?

The Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA), now formally called "Assistance Listings," is a classification system for federal grant programs. Every program has a number like "93.279" (NIH National Institute on Drug Abuse) or "47.041" (NSF Engineering). The first two digits identify the funding agency. Assistance Listings live in SAM.gov and are the way to search by program rather than by opportunity.

What is the best free way to search federal grants?

Grants.gov itself, for completeness. The catalog is exhaustive and the data is authoritative. The downside is that it is a publishing platform, not a discovery platform: there is no relevance ranking, no organization-level eligibility check, and noisy alerts. For organizations that want grant discovery integrated with eligibility filtering, AI analysis, and proposal tooling, modern platforms like CLEATUS pull the Grants.gov feed in and add that layer on top.

How to Find Federal Grants on Grants.gov: A 2026 Guide

The federal government obligates roughly $1 trillion a year in financial assistance through grants and cooperative agreements, and almost every one of those opportunities is published in a single place: Grants.gov. Knowing how to find federal grants on Grants.gov, filter out the ones you cannot win, and get notified when new ones drop is one of the highest-leverage skills any organization that touches public money can build.

TL;DR

Grants.gov is the single source of truth. It is the official, free, federal-wide catalog of grant and cooperative agreement opportunities, managed by HHS on behalf of the federal Grants Management LoB.
There are roughly 1,820 active opportunities at any time, drawn from a historical universe of more than 82,000 records across 26 federal agencies (HHS, NSF, DOE, USDA, ED, DOD, and others).
The search tool works, but barely. Keyword search is fragile, eligibility is not enforced, and category email subscriptions are noisy enough that most serious applicants unsubscribe.
Eligibility is the filter that matters most. Roughly 60% of federal grants are restricted to state, local, or tribal governments and nonprofits; only a subset is open to small businesses, individuals, or for-profits.
Forecasts give you 6 to 18 months of lead time. A "Forecast" record on Grants.gov is an agency telling you a grant is coming, before the synopsis is posted.
You do not have to live on Grants.gov. Modern platforms like CLEATUS pull the entire Grants.gov feed in, match it to your organization's eligibility and capabilities, and surface only the federal grants you can actually win.

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What Grants.gov Actually Is

Grants.gov is the federal government's official catalog of grant and cooperative agreement opportunities. It is operated by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on behalf of the federal Grants Management Line of Business, and it has been the legally designated single point of access for federal financial assistance since 2002.

A few things that confuse new users:

Grants.gov is a catalog, not a funder. No one at Grants.gov decides who gets money. Every opportunity is posted by an agency (NIH, NSF, DOE, USDA, etc.) and adjudicated by that agency under its own rules.
Grants.gov is also a workflow tool. Most federal agencies require you to submit your application package through Grants.gov itself (using the SF-424 family of forms), though several large agencies route applicants out to their own portals (NSF Research.gov, NIH eRA Commons, NASA NSPIRES, DOE ARPA-E eXCHANGE).
Grants.gov publishes both grants and cooperative agreements. A cooperative agreement is legally similar to a grant but gives the federal agency a more active role in execution. From a finding-and-applying standpoint, treat them the same.
Grants.gov also publishes "procurement contract" notices. A small number of agencies post procurement opportunities here even though those legally belong on SAM.gov. The flag to look for is the funding instrument; if it says "procurement contract," it is a FAR contract, not a grant.

If you have ever read that Grants.gov contains "all federal grants," that is technically true for discretionary grant programs. It does not contain:

Mandatory and formula grants (block grants to states, Medicaid, SNAP, highway funding), which are allocated by statute.
Subgrants from prime recipients (e.g., a state agency reallocating federal money to local nonprofits).
Most state, local, or private foundation grants. Those live elsewhere.

For federal discretionary funding, though, Grants.gov is the canonical place to look.

Who Is Eligible for Federal Grants

The most useful filter on Grants.gov is also the one most applicants ignore. Every opportunity declares its eligible applicant types using a standard list of 17 codes. The breakdown across the active universe looks roughly like this:

Eligible applicant type	Approx. share of active opps	Typical funders
State and local governments	~35%	HHS, DOJ, DOT, HUD, EPA
Nonprofits with 501(c)(3)	~30%	HHS, ED, NEH, NEA
Public and private institutions of higher ed	~25%	NSF, NIH, DOE, ED
Small businesses (SBIR/STTR and others)	~10%	NIH, NSF, DOE, USDA, DOD
For-profit organizations (non-SBIR)	~6%	DOE, DOT, EPA
Native American tribal organizations	~5%	HHS, HUD, USDA, BIA
Individuals	~3%	NEH, NEA, ED (very limited)
Unrestricted / "Other"	~6%	Mixed

A couple of takeaways that the official guidance soft-pedals:

Federal grants for individuals are rare and narrow. Almost every "$7,000 free government grant" you see advertised online is a scam. Real federal grants for individuals are limited to research fellowships, arts and humanities awards, and federal student aid (which is administered through FAFSA, not Grants.gov). If you are an individual looking for help with bills, debt, or rent, federal grants are not the answer; check USA.gov benefit finder instead.

Small businesses have a real lane, and it is SBIR/STTR. The Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer programs collectively obligate roughly $4 billion a year across 11 agencies. NIH and DOD are the largest funders. SBIR opportunities are listed on Grants.gov (and, for DOD, on the DSIP portal).

Nonprofit eligibility is stricter than it looks. Many "nonprofit" opportunities require 501(c)(3) status specifically, not just any nonprofit corporation. Some also require a multi-year operating history or audited financials.

Before you spend any serious time on Grants.gov search, decide which applicant-type code matches your organization. Filtering by it before anything else removes 70 to 90% of the noise.

Step by Step: How to Find Federal Grants on Grants.gov

1. Get your organization registered

You cannot apply for a federal grant from Grants.gov without three things:

A UEI (Unique Entity Identifier) from SAM.gov. The UEI replaced the old DUNS number in 2022. See our guide to finding your SAM.gov UEI.
An active SAM.gov registration. Free, but registration can take 7 to 10 business days the first time. See how to register your company on SAM.gov.
A Grants.gov account linked to your organization. Created at grants.gov/applicants/applicant-registration; the e-Biz POC on your SAM.gov record has to authorize you to apply on the organization's behalf.

You can browse and search Grants.gov without any of this. You cannot apply.

2. Use the search filters in this order

The default Grants.gov search keyword box is the worst tool on the site. Skip it and use the filters instead:

Eligibility (Applicant Type). Pick the codes that describe your organization. Be conservative; if you are not sure, leave the filter wider rather than narrower.
Funding Activity Category. This is the program area: Health, Energy, Education, Environment, Science and Technology, Community Development, and roughly 20 others. Pick the 2 to 4 that match your work.
Funding Instrument. "Grant" and "Cooperative Agreement" cover almost everything you care about. Add "Procurement Contract" only if you are an established federal contractor.
Opportunity Status. "Posted" (open and accepting applications), "Forecasted" (announced but not yet open), and "Closed" (past deadline, useful for studying winners). Skip "Archived" unless you are doing historical research.
Agency. Add specific agencies only if you have a relationship or a clear thesis. Starting with all agencies is fine.

Only after those filters are set should you try keyword search, and even then prefer specific technical terms ("hyperspectral imaging," "opioid use disorder," "rural broadband") over general ones ("technology," "health," "innovation"). The search index is exact-match leaning; "AI" and "artificial intelligence" return different results.

3. Read the synopsis the right way

A Grants.gov opportunity page (the "synopsis") is dense. The order to read it in:

Eligibility section. If you are not eligible, stop. Do not waste 60 minutes reading the rest.
Funding amount and award structure. Look for award floor, ceiling, total program funding, and expected number of awards. A $50M program with 50 awards is a $1M average; a $50M program with 1 award is a different proposition entirely.
Cost-sharing requirement. Many federal grants require the recipient to put up matching funds (often 20 to 50% of total project cost). If you cannot make the match, you are not competitive.
Key dates. Open date, response deadline, anticipated award date, anticipated start date. The deadline is usually 30 to 90 days from posting.
Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) document. This is the actual PDF or Word doc with the evaluation criteria, formatting requirements, and submission instructions. Download it. Read it twice. The synopsis is a summary; the FOA is the law.
Program officer contact. Listed under "Agency Contact." For competitive programs, a 15-minute call with the program officer before you start writing is the single highest-ROI action you can take.

4. Use forecasts for runway

Grants.gov publishes "Forecast" records for opportunities the agency intends to release in the coming 12 to 18 months. Forecasts list the expected funding, expected applicant types, expected award count, and a target posting date. They are essentially the agency telling you in advance what is coming.

Forecasts are how serious applicants get their 60 to 90 days of pre-positioning: identifying partners, lining up letters of support, building the technical narrative. Save a search on forecasts in your area and treat each one as a 12-month-out pipeline entry.

5. Set up alerts (and accept they will be noisy)

Grants.gov offers two notification mechanisms:

Saved searches that email you when new opportunities match your filters. Better than nothing.
Funding-category subscriptions that email you every new opportunity in a category. These are extremely noisy; most users unsubscribe within a month.

Saved-search alerts work best when your filters are tight (specific applicant type, 2-3 funding categories, optionally an agency). If your filters are loose, expect 50+ emails a month.

The Honest Limits of Searching Grants.gov Manually

Grants.gov is a publishing platform. It is not a market intelligence tool, and it was not designed to be one. After you have used it for a while, the same gaps show up:

No relevance ranking. Every opportunity matching your filters is shown equally. There is no signal for "this fits your past work."
No eligibility check at the organization level. The system tells you which applicant types are eligible. It does not tell you whether your specific organization is eligible (e.g., it does not know your 501(c)(3) status, your SBA size standard, your state of incorporation).
No proposal infrastructure. When you find a good opportunity you are on your own: download the FOA, start a Word doc, find your old proposals, copy paste, edit, repeat.
Forecast quality varies. Some agencies post detailed forecasts months in advance; others post a forecast 2 weeks before the synopsis, which defeats the purpose.
The keyword search misses things. It is not unusual to find a relevant opportunity through a sibling agency announcement and discover it was indexed on Grants.gov under a term your search never tried.

These are not reasons to avoid Grants.gov. They are reasons not to be the person whose job is to live on Grants.gov.

How CLEATUS Helps With Grants

We recently added Grants.gov as a first-class source inside CLEATUS, so every active synopsis and forecast (~1,820 opportunities) is now indexed and matched against your organization's profile alongside the federal contract opportunities we already index from SAM.gov, GSA eBuy, SeaPort NxG, and 50+ state and local portals.

In practice that means:

Eligibility-first filtering. Auto Capture reads your SAM.gov registration, your SBA size standard, and your applicant-type eligibility, and only surfaces grants you can actually apply to.
Grant-specific fields are searchable. CFDA / Assistance Listing, funding instrument, award floor and ceiling, total program funding, cost-sharing flag, applicant type, and expected number of awards are all extracted and filterable.
AI analysis of the synopsis and FOA. GovCon Copilot reads grant solicitations the way it reads RFPs. Ask it "what are the evaluation criteria," "summarize the eligibility section," "what compliance documents do I need," "what is the cost-share requirement" and get a structured answer.
Drafting support. The AI Proposal Suite drafts statements of need, project plans, and budget justifications using your prior proposals and uploaded company documents, structured to the FOA.
One pipeline. Grants live in the same pipeline as your federal contracts and state and local bids, with the same alerts, statuses, and workflow.

You do not have to think about grants as a separate workflow. They are just opportunities with a few extra fields.

Frequently Asked Questions

Final Take

Federal grants are not a separate world from federal contracts. They are a parallel funding system of comparable size, governed by different statutes but pursued by many of the same organizations. The infrastructure to find them is already in place at Grants.gov; the gap is between "all the data is published" and "I can act on the parts that apply to me."

Use Grants.gov the way it was designed to be used: as the canonical catalog. Layer eligibility, matching, and proposal tooling on top of it so the time you spend reading FOAs is the time that actually moves your win rate.

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About CLEATUS

CLEATUS is an AI-powered government funding platform that helps organizations find opportunities, analyze requirements, and win more federal grants and contracts at a fraction of traditional capture costs. We aggregate federal grants, federal procurement, and state and local opportunities into a single pipeline. Our GovCon Copilot analyzes solicitations and your internal documents to surface the funding you can actually win.