IES Restarts Grantmaking After 15 Months — With a Three-Year Topic Lock and $224 Million About to Expire

The Institute of Education Sciences has resumed competitive research grantmaking after a standstill of more than 15 months — its first new research competitions since early 2025. Five FY 2027 competitions are open now, with applications due through Grants.gov by 11:59:59 p.m. ET on October 1, 2026.

Across three tranches, IES plans to issue approximately $250 million in FY 2027 grants. For a field that has spent a year and a half watching its primary federal funder go quiet, that is the news.

The rest of the news is more complicated. About $224 million in withheld fiscal 2025 funds may expire on September 30, 2026 if IES does not obligate it. As of June 30, IES had spent only 24 percent of its 2025 research budget, and it has been slow to access more than $450 million in unapportioned fiscal 2026 funds. The agency is restarting with a severely reduced staff and a very short runway.

And the competitions that reopen are not the competitions that closed. IES has locked its topical priorities through FY 2029.

What is open right now

The first tranche comprises five competitions, announced in the Federal Register on August 10, 2026, all due October 1, 2026:

IES describes these as core infrastructure competitions — they support the development of the education sciences and the training of education scientists rather than funding studies of specific interventions.

That characterization is worth pausing on, because it explains an otherwise odd sequencing decision. Faced with a restart and an expiring appropriation, IES did not lead with its flagship Education Research Grants program. It led with data systems, methodologists, and training pipelines. Whether that reflects a deliberate judgment that the field's infrastructure decayed most during the pause, or simply that these competitions were the fastest to stand up, the practical effect is the same: the first money out the door goes to capacity, not to interventions.

For applicants, the deadline is the immediate problem. These competitions were announced in August with an October 1 due date — a roughly seven-week window for proposals that, in a normal cycle, teams would have had months to develop. Anyone who was not already building a state longitudinal data partnership or a training program design is at a structural disadvantage in this tranche.

What comes next

Two more tranches follow:

Tranche two — late September or early October 2026:

• From Seedlings to Scale (NCER)
• Transformational Research in Special Education (NCSER)

Tranche three — December 2026:

• Education Research Grants (NCER and NCSER)
• Education Research and Development Centers (NCER and NCSER)
• Research Networks Focused on Critical Problems (NCER and NCSER)

The December tranche is where most of the field actually lives. Education Research Grants is the workhorse competition, and the R&D Centers and Research Networks are the large, multi-year, multi-institution awards. If your work does not fit the October 1 infrastructure competitions, December is your cycle — and the time to build toward it is now, because the announcement-to-deadline windows in this restart have been short.

Plan on it being tight. A December announcement with a spring deadline would be normal; a December announcement with a January or February deadline would fit the pattern IES has just established. Build the partnership agreements, letters of support, and data-access arrangements before the RFA drops, not after.

The topic lock is the structural change

This is the part of the restart that will outlast the funding anxiety.

IES is no longer inviting general submissions across the breadth of education research. Director Matthew Soldner has framed the goal as accumulating knowledge — building "a cohesive body of knowledge" rather than a scattered portfolio. In practice, that means IES has specified topical priorities spanning FY 2027 through FY 2029:

General education (NCER):

• Literacy
• STEM

Special education (NCSER):

• Special education workforce
• Transitions to the workforce
• Low-incidence disabilities
• Strengthening systems for evidence-based practice

Six topics. Three years.

Further, research agendas will specify particular questions within these broad topics rather than inviting open submissions against a general theme. And the new Network Hubs will function as what IES calls "needs-sensors and evidence-synthesizers," feeding back into future research priorities — meaning the entities funded in this cycle help set the agenda for the next one.

For researchers, the implication is blunt and should be stated plainly: if your program of research sits outside those six topics, IES is not your funder through FY 2029.

That covers a great deal of serious work. Educator mental health, school climate, attendance and chronic absenteeism, civics and social studies, arts education, English learner instruction as a standalone focus, higher education access and completion, early childhood outside of literacy and STEM — none of these appear on the list. Catherine Bradshaw, education dean at Johns Hopkins, has made exactly this point publicly, noting that contextual factors like attendance and mental health deserve consideration alongside the approved priorities.

The honest strategic advice has two branches.

If your work genuinely fits a priority topic, this is a better environment than the open-topic era. A narrower field means fewer competing applications per topic, and a funder that has publicly committed to a topic for three years is a funder that will keep funding it. Position aggressively.

If your work does not fit, resist the temptation to reframe it into one. Reviewers reading a literacy competition can tell the difference between literacy research and school-climate research wearing a literacy jacket, and the topic specificity — particular questions within broad topics — makes that camouflage harder to sustain. The better use of the next three years is genuine diversification: NSF's education directorates, IMLS where applicable, and the private funders who have historically filled IES gaps. Spencer, W.T. Grant, and the Gates and Walton foundations all fund territory IES has just vacated.

Also note the enhanced connection to NCES and NAEP data running through the new structure. Priorities are explicitly grounded in NAEP performance data and in feedback from the State Learning Agenda pilot. Proposals that use NAEP or other NCES data — or that address a problem NAEP data visibly documents — are aligned with how IES is now framing its own mission. That is a cheap, legitimate positioning advantage for work that qualifies.

The money problem behind the restart

A restart is only as real as the obligations behind it, and IES's obligation record is the reason to hold the $250 million figure loosely.

The $224 million in fiscal 2025 funds withheld for over a year was released in May 2026. If IES does not spend it by September 30, it may expire. As of June 30, the agency had obligated just 24 percent of its 2025 research budget. It has also been slow to access over $450 million in unapportioned fiscal 2026 funds.

Then there is capacity. IES has absorbed significant staff reductions. Running eight-plus competitions across three tranches in four months — writing RFAs, recruiting and convening peer review panels, processing awards — is an enormous administrative load for a full-strength agency. Ellen Goldring of Vanderbilt captured the field's mood precisely: "We're just thrilled that things are starting to open up and flow," alongside continuing concern about whether the staff exists to execute.

What this means for applicants is a matter of expectations management rather than strategy. Assume slower review, later award notifications, and a meaningful chance that the December tranche slips. Do not build a project budget that requires funds to arrive on a historically normal schedule. If you have a start date that cannot move, say so in the application and be specific about what flexibility exists.

It also means the funding volatility that has defined federal research since 2025 has not ended for education researchers — it has changed shape. The broader pattern of unspent appropriations across science agencies is one we examined in the federal research funding bottleneck, and IES is now its clearest case: money appropriated, money released, money still unobligated, and a statutory clock running.

What to do this week

If you fit an October 1 competition — state longitudinal data, research training, or statistical methodology — you have days, not weeks. Confirm your state data partner's commitment in writing, verify your Grants.gov registration is active and your SAM.gov entity registration has not lapsed (a lapsed registration is the single most common cause of a failed federal submission), and submit early. The deadline is 11:59:59 p.m. ET and Grants.gov does not forgive.

If you are aiming at the December tranche, treat October and November as preparation, not waiting. Secure district and state partnerships now. Line up letters of support. Resolve data-use agreements, which routinely take longer than the entire application window. And map your research questions explicitly onto the FY27–FY29 priority topics — not as a marketing exercise, but as an honest test of whether IES is the right funder for this particular project.

If you are outside the six topics, start diversifying this fall rather than next year. Three years is long enough to lose a research program.

After 15 months of silence, the door is open. It is narrower than it was, it may not stay open on schedule, and what is on the other side has been decided through 2029.