Typical award
What a program has actually been granting, as distinct from the most it is allowed to grant. A ceiling says what is permitted; a typical award says what happened. Most notices publish one or the other, rarely both.
Part of the GrantTrove grant funding glossary — one entry for every field the catalogue stores.
Also called Average award · Median award · Awards usually range
In detail
Agencies publish this in prose far more often than in a field: "awards typically range from $25,000 to $75,000", "most grants are under $10,000", "the average award in the last cycle was $48,200". It is the single most useful planning number a notice can contain, and it is the one most often buried in a paragraph.
It is not a derived figure on our side. Where a program states a typical or average award we store what it stated; where it does not, the field reads Not stated. Computing an average from a ceiling and a floor would produce a number the program never published, on programs where the real distribution is nothing like the midpoint.
Read together with the ceiling, this field is what separates a program worth a week of work from one that is not. A $2,000,000 ceiling with typical awards of $40,000 is a small-grants program with one large exception in it.
Against the award ceiling
The ceiling is a rule and the typical award is a record. A program may never once have awarded its ceiling. Quoting the ceiling as an expectation is the most common way a search wastes a month, and it is why the two live in separate columns and never appear under one heading. Where only the ceiling is published, the typical award reads Not stated rather than being back-filled from it.
How GrantTrove stores it
- The figure is stored in its own column, separate from both the ceiling and the pool, and is shown only where the source published one.
- Where the source expressed it as prose rather than a number, the wording is kept verbatim in the amount note so you read the agency’s own hedge rather than our reading of it.
Common questions
Is this an average you calculated?
No. It is what the program published about its own awards. We do not average a ceiling and a floor to manufacture one, because the midpoint of a range is not a typical award on most programs.
Why is it so often missing?
Because publishing it is optional and it makes a program look smaller. A notice can satisfy every disclosure requirement while stating only a ceiling.
What should I plan against when it is missing?
Where the program publishes a pool and an expected number of awards, that division is the better figure. Where it publishes neither, there is no honest planning number, and the field says so.