How much foundations actually give
How much money does a typical foundation give, and how big is a typical grant?
Much less than most people assume. Across the 19,390 private foundations that accept applications and are published on this site, the median one gave $82,800 in its most recent filing year, spread across nine grants, and its typical grant was $5,000. More than half of them gave under $100,000 in total for the year. Fewer than two in a hundred gave more than $10 million. The whole group moved about $33 billion between them, so the money is real and it is concentrated in a small number of very large funders while most of the field writes checks in the low thousands.
Last reviewed 8 August 2026.
The distribution, which nobody publishes
- A typical grant is $5,000
- Taking the median grant each foundation makes, then the median of those: $5,000. Six in ten sit under $10,000 and eight in ten sit under $25,000. If your plan assumes a foundation grant is worth $50,000, that describes about one in twelve of them.
- A typical foundation gives $82,800 a year
- In total, to everybody, across everything. Fifty-four percent gave under $100,000 for the year. That is the number that should decide how many funders you approach, because a $250,000 project is not one letter, it is a portfolio.
- Nine grants a year
- The median foundation made nine. So the odds are not one in hundreds of applicants for one slot, they are a small board choosing nine recipients, often ones they have some connection to. That is why who introduces you matters more here than it does in federal funding.
- Their largest grant is usually $25,000
- The median foundation's biggest single grant of the year. Worth knowing before you ask for more than that, because the answer is visible in the filing before you write a word.
- Two in five give in one state only
- Forty percent of these foundations sent every grant to a single state. Geography is not a soft preference for most of them, it is the eligibility rule they did not write down.
What that should change about how you work
The instinct is to find the biggest foundation whose mission matches yours and write to it. The distribution says the opposite: the money you can realistically win is spread across a large number of small, local funders who each give a handful of grants a year.
That makes the search the expensive part, not the writing. Twenty well-chosen $5,000 funders is a harder research problem than one $100,000 funder and a much likelier $100,000. It is also exactly the problem software should be doing instead of a person with a spreadsheet.
It is why Quillify leads with which funders will read you and what size they write, and not with how many records we hold. A hundred thousand funder profiles is not the useful number. Nine is.
Measured across the 19,390 private foundations published on this site, all of which accept applications, from filings indexed on 7 August 2026. Foundations file annually, so each figure describes a year that has already closed.
How these were calculated
Medians, not averages, throughout, because the averages are meaningless here. A handful of foundations giving hundreds of millions pull a mean upward until it describes nobody. The median describes the foundation you are actually likely to be writing to.
Every figure comes from Form 990-PF, which private foundations file annually and which is public. Foundations that accept no unsolicited applications are excluded from all of it, because including them would make the typical grant look smaller than the typical grant you could apply for.
Who asks this most
The answer above is the same whoever you are. What Quillify does about it is not.
Related
- Reading a foundation's tax returnWhat can I learn from a foundation's 990-PF?
- Most foundations will never read your proposalDo foundations accept unsolicited grant proposals?
- Start from the funder, not the opportunityHow do I find funders who would actually fund my organization?
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