US Grants Monitor: Grants.gov Alerts + NIH Award History

Find fundable federal grant opportunities the day they post, and see who already won similar grants and how much. One actor, two official US government sources: Grants.gov for open and forecasted opportunities, NIH RePORTER for the award history behind them (principal investigator, recipient organization, award amount, direct and indirect cost split). No API key, no subscription, one flat per-record price.

Built for nonprofit grant writers, university research development offices, and anyone tracking federal funding for research or programs (works out of the box via API and MCP).

Why this actor

• Two sources most tools keep apart: grant opportunities on Grants.gov, and who actually won similar grants on NIH RePORTER. Run either one alone or both together in a single call.
• A real diff, not a re-export: monitor mode remembers the opportunities you have already seen and returns only what is new since your last run, the same pattern used across this profile's other government-data monitors.
• Fixed per-record price instead of a monthly plan: you pay for what you actually get, no seat count, no annual contract.
• Official sources, no key, no scraping: every field comes from Grants.gov's public search API and the National Institutes of Health's RePORTER API. No login, no third-party mirror.
• Flat schema either way: opportunity and award records share one dataset, tagged by type, so a spreadsheet or BI tool can consume them without any JSON spelunking.

Use cases

• Nonprofit grant writers: watch the funding categories and agencies you apply to and get alerted the day a new opportunity opens.
• University research development offices: track ALN/CFDA numbers and agencies relevant to your departments, and check NIH RePORTER for what a similar proposal actually won before your researchers write theirs.
• Program and development staff: search by keyword across both current opportunities and past awards to size up a funding area before committing staff time to an application.
• AI agents: plug it into Claude, Cursor or any MCP client and ask, "any new NSF opportunities on climate resilience this week, and what has NIH funded on that topic recently?"

Input

Search open opportunities:

{
    "mode": "opportunities",
    "keywords": ["climate resilience"],
    "agencies": ["NSF", "NASA"],
    "oppStatuses": ["posted", "forecasted"],
    "maxResults": 25
}

Look up who already won similar NIH grants:

{
    "mode": "awards",
    "keywords": ["climate resilience"],
    "activityCodes": ["R01"],
    "fiscalYears": [2025, 2026],
    "maxResults": 25
}

Both in one run, tagged by recordType in the same dataset:

{
    "mode": "both",
    "keywords": ["rural broadband"],
    "maxResults": 25
}

Monitor an agency for a scheduled run:

{
    "mode": "opportunities",
    "agencies": ["USDA"],
    "monitorMode": true,
    "webhookUrl": "https://hooks.slack.com/services/xxx/yyy/zzz"
}

Provide at least one of keywords, agencies or alnNumbers so the query is scoped. agencies uses two different vocabularies depending on mode: Grants.gov top-level agency codes (NSF, NASA, HHS, USDA, DHS, find the full list at grants.gov/search-grants) for opportunities, and NIH institute/center abbreviations (NHLBI, NIEHS, NCI) for award history. alnNumbers (Assistance Listing Numbers, formerly CFDA numbers) and oppStatuses apply to opportunities only. activityCodes (NIH mechanism codes like R01, K01, U01) and fiscalYears apply to award history only, and fiscalYears defaults to the current and previous year when left empty. includeDetails (on by default) fetches the full Grants.gov record per opportunity: award ceiling and floor, expected number of awards, and the full description, at one extra request per opportunity. Turn it off for a faster run with just the search-result fields.

Output (one record per opportunity or award, tagged by recordType)

Opportunity:

{
    "recordType": "opportunity",
    "opportunityId": "360298",
    "opportunityNumber": "HHS-2026-IHS-TMD-0001",
    "title": "Tribal Management Grant (TMG) Program",
    "agency": "Indian Health Service",
    "agencyCode": "HHS-IHS",
    "aln": ["93.228"],
    "openDate": "2026-07-17",
    "closeDate": "2026-08-28",
    "oppStatus": "posted",
    "awardCeiling": 300000,
    "awardFloor": 50,
    "expectedAwards": 16,
    "description": "The Tribal Management Grant program aims to prepare tribes and tribal organizations for assuming all or part of existing Indian Health Service program...",
    "lastUpdatedDate": "Jul 17, 2026 08:53:38 AM EDT",
    "url": "https://www.grants.gov/search-results-detail/360298",
    "changeType": null,
    "retrievedAt": "2026-07-17T19:49:00.625Z"
}

Award:

{
    "recordType": "award",
    "projectNumber": "1R01HD117936-01",
    "title": "Heat Waves, Pediatric Readiness, and Child Outcomes: Risk, Mitigation, and Resilience in Emergency Care",
    "piNames": ["Craig D. Newgard"],
    "orgName": "OREGON HEALTH & SCIENCE UNIVERSITY",
    "orgUei": "NPSNT86JKN51",
    "fiscalYear": 2025,
    "awardAmount": 87026,
    "directCost": 55786,
    "indirectCost": 31240,
    "agency": "Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development",
    "activityCode": "R01",
    "projectStart": "2025-05-01",
    "projectEnd": "2025-09-30",
    "orgCity": "PORTLAND",
    "orgState": "OR",
    "url": "https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/11105604",
    "retrievedAt": "2026-07-17T19:48:52.672Z"
}

Field	Record type	Meaning
recordType	both	opportunity or award
opportunityId / opportunityNumber	opportunity	Grants.gov opportunity identifiers
title	both	Opportunity or project title
agency / agencyCode	opportunity	Funding agency
aln	opportunity	Assistance Listing / CFDA numbers
openDate / closeDate	opportunity	Application window
oppStatus	opportunity	posted, forecasted, closed or archived
awardCeiling / awardFloor	opportunity	Award size range in dollars, when Grants.gov publishes one
expectedAwards	opportunity	Number of awards the agency expects to make
description	opportunity	Full opportunity description, trimmed to ~2000 characters
lastUpdatedDate	opportunity	When Grants.gov last updated the listing
changeType	opportunity	Monitor mode: new; null on one-off runs
projectNumber	award	NIH project number
piNames	award	Principal investigator(s)
orgName / orgUei	award	Recipient organization and its Unique Entity Identifier
fiscalYear	award	Award fiscal year
awardAmount / directCost / indirectCost	award	Total award and its direct/indirect cost split, in dollars
agency	award	Funding NIH institute or center
activityCode	award	NIH mechanism code (R01, K01, ...)
projectStart / projectEnd	award	Project period
orgCity / orgState	award	Recipient location
url	both	Direct link to the opportunity page or the NIH RePORTER project page
retrievedAt	both	When this run fetched the record

Pricing

Pay per event, no subscription. Users on higher Apify plans get automatic discounts.

Event	Price	When
Run started	$0.001	Flat, once per run
Opportunity found	$0.004	Per grant opportunity returned with its data
Award record	$0.003	Per NIH award history record returned
Digest sent	$0.03	Monitor mode only, per Slack/webhook digest actually posted

In monitor mode, the persistent seen-set means you are never billed twice for the same opportunity: a scheduled run that finds nothing new only pays the flat run fee. That is the difference between this and a raw export that bills you for the whole result set on every run.

FAQ

How do I get alerted when a new NSF opportunity opens? Put NSF in agencies, set mode to opportunities, turn on monitorMode, add a Slack webhook URL and schedule the actor. You get a digest only when NSF actually posts something new, and you are only charged for new opportunities.

How do I find out what a similar grant actually paid? Set mode to awards, put your topic in keywords and narrow with activityCodes (for example R01 for an NIH research project grant) and fiscalYears. You get real award amounts, recipient organizations and principal investigators, not a funding range guess.

Can I search opportunities and award history together? Yes. Set mode to both and both record types come back in the same dataset, tagged by recordType.

Is this data free? The data is public: Grants.gov and NIH RePORTER are both official, keyless US government APIs. You pay only for this actor's convenience: the merged schema, the detail lookups, the diffing and the webhook alerts.

Why do agencies values look different for opportunities and awards? Grants.gov and NIH RePORTER use different agency vocabularies. Grants.gov identifies agencies by short top-level codes (NSF, NASA, HHS); NIH RePORTER identifies its institutes and centers by their own abbreviations (NHLBI, NIEHS). The same agencies list is passed to both, so it is most useful when you either run one mode at a time or already know both codes for your target agency.

What does includeDetails change? With it on (the default), each opportunity gets one extra Grants.gov request for its award ceiling and floor, expected number of awards, full description and last-updated date. With it off, you get only the fields available from the search result: title, agency, dates, status and ALN. Turn it off for a faster, lighter run when you just need to know what is open.

Does it work with AI agents? Yes. Like every Apify actor it is exposed via REST API and MCP, so Claude, Cursor and similar tools can call it directly, for instance to answer "what NIH institutes fund rural health research and how much did they award last year?"

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Something missing?

If you need an extra field, another source, or a different output, open an issue on this Actor and describe it. I read every request and small additions usually ship within days. More monitors and data Actors are on my profile, including the Federal Register monitor, a USAspending monitor, and a ClinicalTrials.gov monitor.

Keywords: Grants.gov API, federal grants monitor, NIH RePORTER, grant opportunity alerts, grant award history, nonprofit grant writer tools, research development office, ALN CFDA lookup, R01 award amounts, federal funding tracker, NIH grant database, grant opportunity monitoring, US government grants for AI agents, MCP.