Grants.gov
The federal government’s own portal for discretionary grant opportunities and, for most agencies, for submitting applications. It is free, authoritative for what it covers, and covers exactly one layer of the funding landscape: federal discretionary programmes.
Part of the GrantTrove grant funding glossary — one entry for every field the catalogue stores.
Also called Grants dot gov
In detail
What it does, it does definitively. A federal notice is on Grants.gov because the agency posted it there, which makes it the primary source rather than a copy of one — and it is where our own federal records are verified against.
What it does not do is state, local, tribal or foundation funding, or tell you what a programme awarded last time, or tell you when a record you saw last month changed.
Against a database built on top of it
Any database of federal grants is downstream of this portal, ours included, and should say so. What a downstream product can add is the layers the portal does not cover, a verification date on every field, and a record that keeps its shape when the source changes. What it must not do is present portal data as its own coverage.
How GrantTrove stores it
- `source_url` on a federal record points at the notice on the portal that published it, and `verify_method` records how that check was made.
- `last_verified_at` dates the check. The data sources page publishes which feeds are connected and which are not, so the boundary of our coverage is a page rather than an inference.
Common questions
Why use anything other than Grants.gov?
For federal discretionary grants alone, you may not need to. For state, local, tribal and foundation funding, and for knowing when a record changed, it does not answer.
Is your federal data from Grants.gov?
Yes, and each record links the notice it came from. We do not present it as our own coverage.
Do you submit applications?
No. Every record links out to the grantmaker’s own system.