Grants.gov Scraper: Federal Grants, NIH & NSF Awards API

Grants.gov scraper on Apify: search open and forecasted federal grant opportunities on Grants.gov plus funded NIH RePORTER and NSF awards in one run, exported to Excel, CSV and JSON. Apify's free plan includes $5 of monthly platform credit, enough for roughly 1,666 grants at $0.003 each (pricing below).

Find federal funding in one run. Get open and upcoming Grants.gov opportunities, plus NIH and NSF awards already made, as one clean table with deadline, award ceiling, eligibility, summary and official link, and download it as Excel or CSV.

Grant research usually means three websites, three search forms and a lot of copy-pasting. Grants Finder queries the official public APIs of Grants.gov, NIH RePORTER and NSF Award Search in parallel, normalizes every record into the same columns and hands you a spreadsheet you can filter, share or load into a CRM.

• 🎯 Open opportunities from Grants.gov: forecasted and posted funding calls with close date, award ceiling and floor, total program funding, expected number of awards, applicant eligibility, funding instrument, assistance listing (CFDA) and the agency contact
• 🧬 NIH RePORTER awards: who got funded, by which institute, for how much, project dates, principal investigator, activity code and the funding opportunity (FOA) it came from. Each project appears once, not once per fiscal year
• 🔬 NSF awards: estimated total award, start and end dates, recipient institution, PI, directorate and program
• 🔎 One set of filters for all three: keywords, agencies (codes, institutes or directorates), date range and amount range
• 📊 Excel + CSV export: formatted workbook with clickable links, a search log sheet and per-source counts
• 🚫 Nothing guessed: when a source doesn't publish a field, the cell stays empty
• 💸 $0.003 per result. 150 results cost $0.45. Searches with no results cost nothing

Who it's for

• Grant writers and development consultants: a weekly list of open calls that fit a client, with deadlines and ceilings side by side
• Research offices and university administrators: spot new opportunities and see which programs fund work like yours
• Nonprofits, startups and SBIR/STTR applicants: check eligibility and amounts before investing in an application
• Analysts, journalists and BD teams: track who is funded in a field, by whom and for how much

Not for coursework. Grants Finder finds and organizes public funding records. It doesn't write proposals, and it isn't meant for completing assignments on someone else's behalf. Always confirm deadlines and eligibility on the official page before applying.

How to use the Grants.gov scraper

1. Click Try for free and type your keywords (use quotes for exact phrases, e.g. "machine learning" agriculture).
2. Pick the sources. Grants.gov = opportunities you can apply to; NIH and NSF = awards already made.
3. Optional: add agencies, a date range or an amount range.
4. Set Maximum results per source. You pay per returned result, so this also caps the cost.
5. Click Start. A 150-row run usually takes under a minute. Download GRANTS_XLSX or GRANTS_CSV from Storage → Key-value store, or use the dataset via API.

Input example

{
  "keywords": "artificial intelligence",
  "sources": ["grants_gov", "nih", "nsf"],
  "maxResultsPerSource": 25,
  "dateFrom": "2025-01-01",
  "minAmount": 100000
}

Agency filter cheat sheet

Source	What to type	Examples
Grants.gov	Agency code, code prefix or part of the name	HHS-NIH11, HHS (all HHS), DOE, USDA, ED, NSF, Geological Survey
NIH RePORTER	Institute abbreviation, or NIH for all	NCI, NIAID, NIMH, NHLBI, NIGMS
NSF	Directorate, or NSF for all	CSE, BIO, GEO, MPS, SBE, EDU, ENG, TIP

A source is skipped when none of its agencies are in the list, so ["NCI"] searches only NIH, and ["DOE", "NSF"] searches Grants.gov and NSF.

Output example

One row per opportunity or award. Real rows from a run of the input above (75 results: 25 per source; summaries shortened):

{
  "rank": 1,
  "source": "Grants.gov",
  "recordType": "opportunity",
  "status": "posted",
  "title": "Cooperative Agreement for Affiliated Partner with the Great Lakes-Northern Forest Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit (CESU)",
  "agency": "Geological Survey",
  "agencyCode": "DOI-USGS1",
  "number": "G27AS00079",
  "openDate": "2026-10-14",
  "closeDate": "2026-11-14",
  "amount": 150000,
  "amountType": "award ceiling",
  "totalProgramFunding": 150000,
  "expectedAwards": 1,
  "eligibility": "Others (see text field entitled \"Additional Information on Eligibility\" for clarification) | … Eligible recipients must be a participating partner of the Great Lakes-Northern Forest CESU Program.",
  "summary": "The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is offering a funding opportunity to a CESU partner for research in … national-scale biogeographic information for fish and other aquatic organisms…",
  "fundingInstrument": "Cooperative Agreement",
  "url": "https://www.grants.gov/search-results-detail/364075"
}

{
  "source": "NSF Award Search",
  "recordType": "award",
  "status": "active",
  "title": "EPSCoR Graduate Fellowship Program (EGFP): Boise State Microelectronics Education and Research Fellows",
  "agency": "NSF / Scholarships, Fellowships, and Traineeships Section",
  "number": "2535466",
  "openDate": "2027-03-15",
  "closeDate": "2030-02-28",
  "amount": 954000,
  "amountType": "estimated total award",
  "recipient": "Boise State University (BOISE, ID)",
  "principalInvestigator": "Todd P Otanicar",
  "url": "https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2535466"
}

Fields

Field	Grants.gov	NIH RePORTER	NSF
source, recordType	Grants.gov, opportunity / forecast	NIH RePORTER, award	NSF Award Search, award
title, agency, agencyCode, number	Opportunity title, agency, code, opportunity number	Project title, institute, IC code, project number	Award title, division, directorate, award ID
openDate / closeDate	Posted date / application close date	Project start / end	Award start / expiration
amount, amountType	Award ceiling	Fiscal-year award (total cost)	Estimated total award
amountFloor, totalProgramFunding, expectedAwards	✔
eligibility	Applicant types + eligibility notes
recipient, principalInvestigator		✔	✔
summary	Synopsis (up to 1,500 characters)	Abstract	Abstract
fundingInstrument, fundingOpportunity, assistanceListing, fiscalYear	✔	✔	✔
status	forecasted / posted / closed / archived	active / ended	active / ended
url	Grants.gov detail page	RePORTER project page	NSF award page

Files in the key-value store

Key	What it is
GRANTS_XLSX	Excel workbook: all results with clickable links, a Search log sheet and a Read me sheet
GRANTS_CSV	Same table as CSV (UTF-8, opens cleanly in Excel)
SUMMARY	JSON search log: your filters, per-source counts (found, filtered out, returned) and any source that was unavailable

For AI agents

Use this Actor to find open federal grant opportunities (Grants.gov) and funded NIH / NSF awards. Call it with Apify's MCP server (https://mcp.apify.com, tool call-actor, Actor pandadad0214/grants-finder) or the API (POST https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/pandadad0214~grants-finder/run-sync-get-dataset-items).

Minimal input:

{"keywords": "artificial intelligence", "sources": ["grants_gov", "nih", "nsf"], "maxResultsPerSource": 10}

Each dataset item includes:

• agentSummary: one line, e.g. Grants.gov opportunity (posted): Title; Agency; $500,000; closes/ends 2026-01-15; no. ... (the existing summary field is the grant's own description)
• source, recordType, status: where it came from and whether it is open, forecasted, active or ended
• title, agency, number: what and who
• openDate, closeDate: ISO dates (YYYY-MM-DD)
• amount: USD
• eligibility, summary, url: details and link

The run's key-value store has a SUMMARY record with counts (returned, bySource) and file names (GRANTS_XLSX, GRANTS_CSV), a one-line takeaway, and nextStep (the suggested follow-on tool). Every input field has a description with formats, units and limits.

Grants.gov scraper pricing and free results

Apify paid-plan discounts: Bronze members pay 10% less, Silver 20% less and Gold 30% less per result. Free-plan prices are shown below; the discount applies automatically.

$0.003 per result returned to the dataset (pay-per-event), plus a tiny Actor-start fee of $0.00005. Excel, CSV and the search log are included. Runs that find nothing cost nothing beyond the start fee. Your maximum charge per run is respected: if it's lower than the number of results, the results are shared evenly across sources.

FAQ

Is there a free way to try this Grants.gov scraper? Yes. Apify's free plan includes $5 of monthly platform credit, enough for roughly 1,666 grants at $0.003 each.

Is this data official? Yes. Every row comes from the public APIs of Grants.gov, NIH RePORTER and the NSF Award Search. Grants Finder is not affiliated with or endorsed by any US government agency.

Why do NIH and NSF show awards instead of open calls? Those APIs publish funded projects. NIH and NSF open calls are also listed on Grants.gov, so the Grants.gov source covers them. Award data shows who gets funded, typical amounts and which programs fund your topic.

Why are some amounts empty? Some Grants.gov opportunities don't publish an award ceiling. If you set an amount filter, those rows are left out and counted in SUMMARY.

How fresh is it? Live: every run queries the APIs directly. Schedule the Actor (for example weekly) to watch for new opportunities.

Can I use it from code or an AI agent? Yes, via the Apify API, the Python/JS clients, or as a tool through Apify's MCP server.

More Panda Federation tools

• Reference Checker
• Citation Generator
• Google Scholar Scraper Alternative
• PubMed Scraper
• Academic Research MCP Server
• Researcher & Expert Finder

All Panda Federation Actors on Apify

Questions or a custom data feed? Open an issue on this Actor's Issues tab.

Changelog

• 2026-10-30 (hint update): Next-step hint now points to Researcher & Expert Finder.
• 2026-10-30 (agent update): Built for AI agents: a one-line agentSummary on every result, takeaway and nextStep in the SUMMARY record, and input fields with formats, limits and examples.
• 2026-10-30: New search-friendly title and page, FAQ, safe demo run on empty input, Bronze/Silver/Gold discounts, output screenshot, and a next-step hint in the log and NEXT_STEP record pointing to Literature Search.
• 2026-10-29: First public release with pay-per-event pricing.