US Federal Grants & Funding Scraper — Grants.gov, NIH & NSF (Opportunities, Awards & Leads)

Scrape US federal grants from three official sources in one actor — the open Grants.gov opportunities you can still apply for, plus the awarded NIH RePORTER and NSF research projects that show exactly who got funded. Every record ships the fields other scrapers leave empty: full descriptions and abstracts, award ceilings and amounts, eligibility, principal investigators, organizations, built-in contact emails/phones, publication counts and a 0–100 lead score.

No login, no API key, no browser — fast JSON extraction from open government data with 99%+ reliability.

Why this federal grants scraper?

Most grant scrapers cover a single source and stop at the listing card. This actor unifies the whole federal funding picture and ships the richest dataset in the category:

Data	Typical scrapers	This actor
Open Grants.gov opportunities to apply for	partial	✅ full detail
Awarded NIH RePORTER projects (with abstracts)	❌ separate tool	✅
Awarded NSF grants (with PI emails)	❌ separate tool	✅
Award ceiling / floor / estimated total funding	❌	✅
Eligibility, applicant types, funding instruments	❌	✅
CFDA / Assistance Listing programs	❌	✅
Principal investigators (names, titles, profile IDs)	❌	✅
Organization name, state, UEI	partial	✅
Built-in contact email / name / phone	❌	✅
Publication count + PubMed IDs per NIH project	❌	✅ opt-in
Website contact enrichment (emails, phones, socials)	❌	✅ opt-in
Lead score (0–100)	❌	✅
Monitoring mode — only new funding	❌	✅

Different from spent-money scrapers: USAspending shows money already obligated. This actor surfaces funding you can still apply for (Grants.gov) and the PI-level research detail (abstracts, investigators, emails, publications) that USAspending never carries.

Use cases

• Grant discovery — find every open and forecasted federal opportunity for your mission, by keyword, agency, eligibility, funding category or CFDA number. Feed grant-finder tools, newsletters and dashboards.
• Lead generation — awarded organizations and principal investigators are active buyers: labs, universities and research startups need reagents, equipment, software, CROs, recruiting and consulting. Score them, and reach them with built-in PI/agency emails or website-crawled contacts.
• Competitive funding intelligence — see who is winning NIH and NSF awards in your field, how much, for what, and how productive they are (publication counts).
• Research & market analysis — track funding trends by agency, institute, state, topic and dollar amount across millions of historical awards.
• Monitoring — schedule recurring runs to capture only newly posted opportunities or newly awarded projects, and push them straight into your CRM or Slack.

How to use

1. Sign up for Apify — the free plan is enough to try this actor.
2. Open the US Federal Grants & Funding Scraper, choose a data source (Grants.gov opportunities, NIH projects, or NSF awards), enter search keywords, and click Start.
3. Watch results stream into the dataset table.
4. Export as JSON, CSV, Excel, XML or RSS — or pull results programmatically via the Apify API.

Input

{
    "searchType": "grantOpportunities",
    "searchQueries": ["artificial intelligence", "cancer"],
    "oppStatuses": "forecasted|posted",
    "includeOpportunityDetails": true,
    "enrichOrganizationContacts": false,
    "maxResults": 200,
    "monitorMode": false
}

Core

• searchType — grantOpportunities (Grants.gov), nihProjects (NIH RePORTER), or nsfAwards (NSF).
• searchQueries — keywords, each run against the selected source. Leave empty to list everything matching your filters.
• startUrls — scrape specific records directly: Grants.gov detail URLs, NIH project-details URLs, or NSF showAward URLs.
• maxResults — cap per run. monitorMode / monitorKey — emit only records not seen in previous runs.
• enrichOrganizationContacts — crawl an organization/info website (home + contact/about) for extra emails, phones and socials.

Grants.gov filters — oppStatuses (forecasted|posted|closed|archived), grantsAgencies, eligibilities, fundingCategories, fundingInstruments, cfda, includeOpportunityDetails (default true — the value is in the detail).

NIH filters — fiscalYears, nihInstitutes (NCI, NIAID, NHLBI…), orgStates, orgNames, piNames, onlyActiveProjects, includeNihPublications, awardAmountMin / awardAmountMax.

NSF filters — nsfStates, nsfDateStart, nsfDateEnd.

Output

One record per funding item. Grant opportunity (source: "grants.gov", recordType: "opportunity"):

{
    "source": "grants.gov",
    "recordType": "opportunity",
    "id": "359855",
    "opportunityNumber": "RFA-CA-27-020",
    "title": "Advanced Development of Informatics Technologies for Cancer Research",
    "agency": "National Institutes of Health",
    "status": "posted",
    "openDate": "2026-05-21",
    "closeDate": "2026-10-19",
    "description": "This Notice of Funding Opportunity invites applications for…",
    "awardCeiling": 600000,
    "awardFloor": 50000,
    "estimatedTotalFunding": 2600000,
    "expectedNumberOfAwards": 3,
    "eligibilityDescription": "…",
    "applicantTypes": ["Small businesses", "Private institutions of higher education"],
    "fundingInstruments": ["Cooperative Agreement"],
    "fundingActivityCategories": ["Health"],
    "cfdaPrograms": [{ "cfdaNumber": "93.393", "programTitle": "Cancer Cause and Prevention Research" }],
    "contactName": "National Institutes of Health",
    "contactEmail": "nciitcr@mail.nih.gov",
    "contactPhone": "301-402-2541",
    "score": 78,
    "url": "https://www.grants.gov/search-results-detail/359855",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-06-17T01:30:00.000Z"
}

Awarded NIH / NSF research project (recordType: "award"):

{
    "source": "nsf",
    "recordType": "award",
    "id": "2547822",
    "title": "REU SITE: Directed, Intensive and Mentored Opportunities in Data Science",
    "agency": "NSF",
    "awardAmount": 465000,
    "fundsObligated": 465000,
    "organizationName": "Tufts University",
    "orgState": "MA",
    "orgUei": "WL9FLBRVPJJ7",
    "piName": "Michael C Hughes",
    "piEmail": "michael.hughes@tufts.edu",
    "programOfficerName": "Sharmistha Bagchi-Sen",
    "programOfficerEmail": "shabagch@nsf.gov",
    "contactEmail": "michael.hughes@tufts.edu",
    "abstract": "This award supports an on-campus summer research program…",
    "fundProgramName": "RSCH EXPER FOR UNDERGRAD SITES",
    "startDate": "2026-10-01",
    "publicationCount": null,
    "score": 60,
    "url": "https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2547822",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-06-17T01:30:00.000Z"
}

NIH projects additionally include projectNumber, coreProjectNumber, principalInvestigators[] (name, title, profile ID, contact-PI flag), terms, spendingCategories, directCost/indirectCost, publicationCount + publicationPmids (opt-in), isActive and full abstract.

Automate & schedule

Run this actor on autopilot and pull results into your own stack:

• Apify API — start runs, fetch datasets, and manage schedules over REST.
• apify-client for JavaScript and apify-client for Python — official SDKs.
• Schedules — run it daily/weekly with monitorMode on to capture only newly posted opportunities or newly awarded projects; perfect for grant alerts and lead pipelines.
• Webhooks — trigger downstream actions (CRM import, Slack alert, email sequence) the moment a run finishes.

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'MY_APIFY_TOKEN' });

const run = await client.actor('scrapesage/us-federal-grants-scraper').call({
    searchType: 'nsfAwards',
    searchQueries: ['quantum computing'],
    nsfStates: ['MA'],
    enrichOrganizationContacts: true,
    maxResults: 200,
});

const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(`Got ${items.length} funding records & leads`);

Integrate with any app

Connect the dataset to 5,000+ apps — no code required:

• Make — multi-step automation scenarios.
• Zapier — push new funding leads straight into your CRM.
• Slack — get notified when a monitored search finds new grants.
• Google Drive / Sheets — auto-export every run to a spreadsheet.
• Airbyte — pipe results into your data warehouse.
• GitHub — trigger runs from commits or releases.

Use with AI assistants (MCP)

The output is clean, LLM-ready JSON. Call this actor from Claude, ChatGPT or any agent framework through the Apify MCP server — ask your assistant to "find open NIH AI grants closing this quarter and list the agency contacts" and let it run this scraper for you.

Agent-ready: autonomous payments (x402 & Skyfire)

This actor is agent-ready — AI agents can discover it, run it, and pay for it autonomously, with no Apify account and no human in the loop. It uses pay-per-event pricing and limited permissions, so it qualifies for Apify's agentic-payment standards:

• x402 — an open, HTTP-native payment protocol. Agents pay per run in USDC on the Base network directly through the Apify MCP server — no account, no API key.
• Skyfire — agent-to-service payments for fully autonomous AI-agent workflows.

Building an AI agent, MCP tool, or autonomous data pipeline? This scraper is ready to plug in and pay as it goes.

More scrapers from scrapesage

Build a complete government funding & B2B lead stack:

• USAspending Scraper — federal awards already spent, contractors & vendor leads.
• SAM.gov Scraper — federal contract opportunities & contacts.
• SEC EDGAR Scraper — company filings, financials & Form D.
• FEC Campaign Finance Scraper — donors, PACs & lobbying.
• Court Records Scraper — case law, dockets & judges.
• Companies House Scraper — UK companies, directors & PSCs.
• Google Patents Scraper — patents, citations & assignees for R&D intelligence.
• GitHub Scraper — repos, developers & contact leads.

Tips

• Grant discovery vs leads — use grantOpportunities to find funding to apply for; use nihProjects/nsfAwards to find funded organizations and PIs as leads.
• Always keep includeOpportunityDetails on for Grants.gov — the listing alone is lean; the detail carries the description, amounts, eligibility and contacts.
• Cost control — narrow with filters (agency, state, fiscal year, amount) and maxResults; contact enrichment only runs when a record actually carries a website.
• Recurring monitoring — combine Schedules with monitorMode so each run returns (and bills for) only new funding.

FAQ

Where does the data come from? Three official, public US-government sources: Grants.gov, NIH RePORTER and the NSF Awards API. No API key or login is required.

What is the difference between this and USAspending? USAspending reports money already obligated. This actor adds open opportunities you can still apply for (Grants.gov) plus PI-level abstracts, investigator emails and publication output (NIH/NSF) that USAspending does not carry.

Where do the emails come from? Grants.gov publishes an agency contact email per opportunity; NSF publishes the principal investigator and program officer emails directly; NIH provides PI names and organizations. With enrichOrganizationContacts on, the actor also visits an organization's public website for additional contacts.

Can I export to Google Sheets, CSV or Excel? Yes — one click in the dataset view, or automatically on every run via the Google Drive integration.

How do I monitor new grants automatically? Create a Schedule (e.g. daily) with monitorMode on, and optionally add a webhook or Zapier zap to push new funding into your CRM as it appears.

Is this legal? This actor collects publicly available US-government open data only. You are responsible for using the data in compliance with applicable laws and each source's terms.

A field is null — why? Some records genuinely don't publish every field (e.g. NIH does not expose PI emails; some forecasts omit amounts). Fields are null only when the data doesn't exist, not because the scraper skipped them.

Need help?

Open an issue on the actor's Issues tab, or visit the Apify help center. Feature requests are welcome — this actor is actively maintained.