Granted Research
What a federal grant is actually worth
Data: FY2024 federal grant obligations by agency (federal awards). Last verified July 2026.
In fiscal year 2024 the federal government obligated $1.19T through 687,607 grant actions. But there is no such thing as a typical federal grant. In FY2024 half of all awards were smaller than $165,406 — yet the median grant ranged from $1.55M at USAID down to $22,000 at the State Department, a spread of roughly 71×, according to Granted’s federal awards database.
$165,406
Median federal grant
half of grants are smaller
$1.55M
Largest agency median
USAID · No. 1 of 30
71×
Widest gap
USAID vs. State Dept.
$1.19T
Total FY2024 grants
687,607 actions
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<iframe src="https://grantedai.com/research/federal-grant-size-by-agency/embed" width="100%" height="600" style="border:1px solid #e5e7eb;border-radius:12px" title="Median federal grant size by awarding agency, FY2024 — Granted AI" loading="lazy"></iframe>The full ranking
Median grant size by awarding agency, FY2024. The 15 agencies with the largest typical grants, then the five smallest. Median and quartiles reflect grant actions with a positive dollar obligation; agencies with fewer than 100 such actions are omitted (see the full CSV for all 40).
| # | Agency | Median grant | Middle 50% | Grant actions | Total (FY24) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Agency for International Development | $1,554,877 | $700K–$3.60M | 5,145 | $10.0B |
| 2 | Department of Energy | $590,000 | $220K–$1.43M | 12,195 | $14.6B |
| 3 | Environmental Protection Agency | $499,306 | $150K–$1.29M | 7,505 | $43.5B |
| 4 | Department of Justice | $450,268 | $220K–$800K | 10,992 | $4.6B |
| 5 | Department of Veterans Affairs | $443,603 | $115K–$922K | 4,463 | $2.2B |
| 6 | Delta Regional Authority | $435,214 | $250K–$450K | 141 | $63M |
| 7 | Department of Commerce | $384,630 | $143K–$1.30M | 7,445 | $29.5B |
| 8 | Department of Health and Human Services | $307,203 | $72K–$613K | 243,803 | $808.2B |
| 9 | Appalachian Regional Commission | $300,000 | $99K–$510K | 453 | $279M |
| 10 | Social Security Administration | $264,250 | $124K–$300K | 226 | $84M |
| 11 | Department of Labor | $252,741 | $65K–$1.27M | 8,472 | $8.3B |
| 12 | Denali Commission | $250,000 | $133K–$621K | 193 | $60M |
| 13 | Small Business Administration | $200,000 | $150K–$511K | 987 | $389M |
| 14 | Department of Transportation | $197,774 | $39K–$773K | 109,430 | $100.7B |
| 15 | Inter-American Foundation | $189,630 | $125K–$263K | 125 | $25M |
| ranks 16–25 omitted — see the full CSV | |||||
| 26 | Department of Housing and Urban Development | $55,726 | $13K–$180K | 71,755 | $23.8B |
| 27 | Department of Agriculture | $52,532 | $9K–$300K | 44,872 | $50.4B |
| 28 | National Endowment for the Humanities | $49,927 | $8K–$150K | 1,674 | $154M |
| 29 | National Endowment for the Arts | $25,000 | $15K–$40K | 2,761 | $89M |
| 30 | Department of State | $22,000 | $7K–$91K | 11,924 | $3.3B |
“Median grant” is the middle award size; the “Middle 50%” column shows the 25th to 75th percentile range. These are computed over grant actions with a positive obligation — deobligations and $0 administrative actions are excluded from the size figures but counted in “Grant actions.” Sub-agencies (for example the NIH within Health & Human Services, or FEMA within Homeland Security) roll up into their parent department.
What the numbers show
The agencies that write the biggest typical checks fund large, capital- or research-intensive work. Behind USAID, the largest median grants among major agencies come from the Department of Energy ($590,000), EPA ($499,306), Justice ($450,268), Veterans Affairs ($443,603) and Commerce ($384,630). Each of these agencies has a typical grant several times the $165,406 federal median.
A big typical grant is not the same as a big budget. The Department of Health and Human Services has a middling median of $307,203, yet it obligated $808.2B in FY2024 — 68% of all federal grant dollars. The reason is that a handful of enormous Medicaid formula grants sit on top of HHS’s 132,185 ordinary awards: the median describes the typical grant, while the total is dominated by a few giants. Median and total answer different questions.
At the other end are agencies that spread money across many small awards. The State Department made 7,403 positive-dollar grants at a median of just $22,000; the National Endowment for the Arts ($25,000) and Humanities ($49,927) run small by design. Even Agriculture, which moved $50.4B across 44,872 actions, has a typical grant of only $52,532.
Even among the largest cabinet departments the gap is an order of magnitude. Energy’s typical grant is about 11× Agriculture’s and roughly 27× the State Department’s. And sizes swing widely inside a single agency too: at the Department of Labor, the middle half of grants runs from $65K (25th percentile) all the way to $1.27M (75th) — a spread the single “median” number hides.
For an organization deciding where to apply, the takeaway is that the agency shapes the check size as much as the mission does. This analysis counts grant-type federal assistance only — no loans, contracts or direct payments — for fiscal year 2024, the most recent complete year. The full methodology, exclusions, and reconciliation are below.
Methodology & sources
- Data source
- Federal financial-assistance awards from USAspending.gov, as mirrored in Granted’s federal awards database (687,607 FY2024 award actions). The dollar field is
federal_action_obligation— net new obligations (new obligations minus downward adjustments) for each action. - What counts as a “grant”
- Every FY2024 row in this dataset is grant-type assistance: block grants, formula grants, project grants, and cooperative agreements. Loans, direct payments, insurance, and procurement contracts are not included.
- Agency
- Grants are grouped by
awarding_agency_name, the top-level department or independent agency that made the award. Sub-agencies — the NIH within Health & Human Services, FEMA within Homeland Security, the FAA within Transportation — roll up into their parent department, so an agency’s median blends its component bureaus. - Median & percentiles
- Median, 25th and 75th percentiles use PostgreSQL’s
percentile_cont(linear interpolation) over grant actions with a positive dollar obligation. Deobligations (99,529 negative actions) and $0 administrative actions (147,814) are excluded from the size figures because they distort a “typical award size” — but all 687,607 actions are still counted, and each agency’s positive-dollar count is published in the CSV. - Ranking threshold
- An agency is ranked only if it made at least 100 positive-dollar grant actions in FY2024, which drops small-sample agencies whose median would be noise. 30 of 40 agencies qualify; the rest appear in the CSV, unranked.
- Reconciliation
- Total FY2024 grant obligations across all 40 agencies were $1.19T. Of 687,607 actions, 440,264 carried a positive obligation, 147,814 were $0, and 99,529 were net-negative deobligations.
- Fiscal year
- Federal fiscal year 2024 (Oct 1, 2023 – Sep 30, 2024), the most recent fully closed fiscal year in our dataset at the time of analysis. Figures reflect the agencies as they reported that year; some have since been reorganized (for example, USAID’s grantmaking was restructured in 2025), which does not change the FY2024 record.
- Reproducibility
- Every number on this page is generated by a committed analysis script (
scripts/research-studies/federal-grant-size-by-agency/analyze.py) and published in full in the downloadable CSV. See our data methodology for how Granted sources and maintains this data.
Free to cite and republish with attribution to Granted AI under CC BY 4.0 (grantedai.com/research/federal-grant-size-by-agency). Questions or corrections: nathan@grantedai.com.