What your Grants.gov and eRA Commons statuses mean
What do the application statuses in Grants.gov and eRA Commons mean?
In Grants.gov, Received means your file arrived and Validated means it passed the automated checks. Received by Agency and Agency Tracking Number Assigned mean the agency has it. Rejected with Errors is the only status that needs you to act, and fast. For NIH, eRA Commons takes over from there. Statuses like Pending SRG Review and Pending Council Review mean your application is moving through peer review, which takes months.
Last reviewed October 12, 2026.
Grants.gov statuses
- Received
- Grants.gov has your file and given it a tracking number. Nothing has been checked yet. Save the confirmation email.
- Validated
- It passed. The agency has not collected it yet.
- Rejected with Errors
- The file failed a check and the agency will not see it. Read the error, fix it and submit again before the deadline. This is why you submit days early. The common submission errors and their fixes.
- Received by Agency
- The agency has downloaded your application. You are out of the Grants.gov queue and into the agency's own process, which runs on its own calendar.
- Agency Tracking Number Assigned
- The agency has logged it in its own system. From here, its status lives with the agency, not Grants.gov.
eRA Commons statuses, for NIH and other HHS programs
eRA Commons runs its own checks after Grants.gov hands the application over. Watch for errors there too.
- Errors or warnings after submission
- Errors stop the application and must be fixed before the deadline. Warnings do not stop it, but read them. You then have two business days to view the assembled application in eRA Commons and check that it looks right.
- Pending Administrative Review
- NIH staff are checking that it is complete and assigning it to a review group and an institute.
- Pending SRG Review
- It is assigned to a peer review group and waiting for the panel to meet. This is usually the longest stretch of the whole process, because panels meet only a few times a year and each one reads a large batch of applications at once.
- Pending Council Review
- Peer review is done. Your score and summary statement appear in eRA Commons around this point. The institute's advisory council meets next.
- Council Review Completed
- Council has met. Now you wait. A funding decision follows, and a Just-in-Time request for more information is often a good sign.
What to do with the months in between
Most of the wait is the peer review stretch, and nothing you do will speed it up. Five things worth doing while you wait. The most valuable one is the next application. Quillify searches 4,300+ open grants, and "Am I qualified?" reads the full announcement and tells you where you stand. See how finding funding works.
Who asks this most
The answer above is the same whoever you are. What Quillify does about it is not.
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