NSF Research Award Tracker – Federal Science Funding API

An NSF Awards API wrapper and science-funding feed that pulls National Science Foundation grants and normalizes each into a clean record: award id, title, awardee institution, principal investigator, program, funds obligated, dates and abstract. Use it to build a research-funding intelligence tool, a business-development feed for vendors selling to labs, or a competitive-grants monitor.

Who uses it

University research-development and sponsored-programs offices, vendors selling lab equipment/software into funded projects, science journalists, and research-intelligence products.

Why this is worth charging for

New NSF awards signal where money and hiring are flowing in science. The NSF API paginates with a 1-based offset and returns string amounts. This actor coerces amounts to numbers, builds the PI name and award URL, and delivers a deduplicated, keyword- or institution-scoped funding feed you can monitor on a schedule.

Output

Each dataset item is one normalized record:

{
  "awardId": "2412345",
  "title": "Study of Quantum Widgets",
  "awardee": "State University",
  "awardeeState": "CA",
  "principalInvestigator": "Alice Nguyen",
  "fundsObligated": 500000,
  "estimatedTotal": 1200000,
  "startDate": "09/01/2024",
  "expirationDate": "08/31/2027",
  "program": "Physics",
  "agency": "NSF",
  "url": "https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2412345",
  "source": "NSF"
}

Input

Field	Description
keyword	Search term across award title/abstract, e.g. 'quantum computing'.
awardeeName	Filter by awardee institution name.
awardeeStateCode	2-letter state of the awardee institution.
startDateFrom	Only awards starting on or after this date (NSF expects MM/DD/YYYY).
rpp	Results per page (NSF max 25).
maxPagesToScan	Pages per run.
onlyNewSinceLastRun	Recommended for schedules — skips records already returned by a previous run using persisted state, so you're only charged for genuinely new items.
maxItems	Stop after this many normalized records.

Pricing (Pay-Per-Event)

• query — $0.02, charged once per run for the API query/poll.
• award-record — $0.01 per normalized record pushed. This is the primary event.
• apify-actor-start (Apify-managed) — covers baseline compute per run.

A keyword or institution monitor returns tens of awards per run for pennies. onlyNewSinceLastRun bills only newly-posted awards.

Source & reliability

Data comes from the official api.nsf.gov/services/v1/awards service. Amounts are coerced to numbers. No key or proxies required. Run npm test for the offline self-test covering the normalizer, including edge cases and missing-field handling.

FAQ

Is there an API for NSF awards?

Yes — this actor wraps the official NSF Awards API and returns clean, deduplicated award records via the Apify API, webhook or export.

Can I track one university?

Yes. Set awardeeName (and optionally a keyword) and schedule with onlyNewSinceLastRun for an institution-specific funding feed.

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