How the grant data is built

The IRS publishes electronically filed nonprofit returns as bulk XML. PaperOrbit downloads those files and parses two different forms, which is why the search covers organizations most funding tools do not.

• Form 990-PF, Part XV is filed by private foundations and lists the grants they paid during the year. This is 6,362,385 of the records here.
• Form 990, Schedule I is filed by public charities that make grants: professional associations, disease foundations, community foundations, hospital systems and similar organizations. This is 3,279,061 of the records here. Most funding databases are built from 990-PF alone, which is why an association that funds research in your field can be invisible in them.

Every record is a grant that was actually paid and reported to the IRS. That is a strong fact, and it is the reason the dollar figures on this site can be trusted: they are sums of filed records, not estimates, and never written by an AI model.

What a record does not tell you is whether that funder is open to applications now. Tax filings are historical and say nothing about current programs, deadlines, or eligibility. Many private foundations never accept unsolicited proposals at all; the way in is a program officer. Grantmaking charities and associations more often run real application cycles, but their own website is the only authority on what is open. Treat a result as evidence of who funds work like yours, then go and check.

Search is Postgres full-text matching over each grant’s stated purpose and the recipient’s name. No language model reads your query or picks the results, so nothing here can be invented. Funders are ordered by a fixed formula combining how well their grants match your words, how many of them match, how much money is involved, and how recent their most recent matching grant is.

Two adjustments are applied by hand and worth disclosing. Grants whose stated purpose reads like research funding are weighted up. Grants that read like building campaigns, galas and event sponsorships are weighted down. Donor-advised fund sponsors are excluded entirely, because their filings record the fund moving money on behalf of anonymous donors and there is no one for a researcher to approach.

• Only electronically filed returns are included. Paper filings and organizations that do not file the relevant schedule are absent.
• A filing appears well after the money was granted, so the most recent year or two is always thin. A funder’s absence from a recent year usually means the filing has not been published, not that they stopped giving.
• Organizations are identified by EIN. A funder that files under several EINs will appear as several entries, and names are reproduced as filed, including inconsistent capitalization and abbreviations.
• Stated purposes are free text written by the filer. They range from a full sentence to a single word, and some say only “general support”, which matches poorly no matter how relevant the funder actually is.
• Ranking was tuned against health science and biomedical vocabulary. Humanities and some social science searches are weaker, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise.
• Amounts are reproduced as filed. Filers occasionally report figures in the wrong units or misplace a decimal, and those errors carry through.

New filings are added when the IRS publishes them, currently by hand rather than on a fixed schedule. The date at the top of this page is the real one. There is no guarantee of a refresh cadence, and it is better to tell you that than to imply data is fresher than it is.

If you find a record that is wrong, a funder that is missing, or a figure that does not match the filing it came from, please say so. Email support@paperorbit.org or use the contact form. Every funder page links to that organization’s filings on ProPublica so you can check any figure against the source document yourself.

PaperOrbit grant search. Derived from IRS Form 990-PF Part XV and Form 990 Schedule I electronic filings, tax years 2019 to 2025. Accessed August 20, 2026. paperorbit.org/funding