The typical foundation grant is $3,500, not $59,878

We read every grant that US private foundations reported paying in their tax filings, 4,436,666 of them. The average and the median are not close, and the gap is costing small organizations applications they would have won.

4,436,666grants read

$265.7Btotal paid

$60Kaverage grant

$3,500median grant

Form 990-PF filings, 57,872 foundations with ten or more reported grants. Method at the bottom.

Why the two numbers are 17 times apart

Foundation giving is not a bell curve. A handful of very large grants sit at one end and hundreds of thousands of small ones sit at the other, so the average lands nowhere near what a typical grant actually looks like. Quote the average and you describe a grant that almost nobody receives.

The sector quotes the average anyway. It is in the databases, the sector reports and the advice columns, and it is the number a development director carries into a decision about where to spend the week.

What the distribution actually looks like

Grant size	Grants	Share
Under $1,000	1,134,420	25.6%
$1,000 to $5,000	1,199,406	27.0%
$5,000 to $10,000	588,637	13.3%
$10,000 to $25,000	665,892	15.0%
$25,000 to $100,000	535,731	12.1%
Over $100,000	312,580	7.0%

72.4% of all foundation grants are $10,000 or less. Nearly 53% are under $5,000. The money that moves most often is small money.

The problem is inside individual foundations too

This is not only a sector-wide artifact. In 40% of the foundations we looked at, that foundation's own average grant is at least double its own median. The average is skewed by its own largest cheques.

1,370 foundations report an average grant above $50,000 while their median sits at $10,000 or less. On paper they look like institutions that only write large cheques. In practice most of what they pay out is small.

174,917 grants of $10,000 or less were paid by foundations whose average exceeds $50,000. Every one of them is a grant a small organization could have won, sitting behind a statistic that told it not to bother.

What to do with this

When you research a funder, find the median of what it has paid, and the bottom quarter of its range. Both are in its 990-PF, which is public. If the median is $4,000 and it gives thirty times a year, that is a realistic ask from a funder with a habit, whatever its average says.

Ignore the average. It is the number most likely to talk you out of an application you would have won.

The median for the funders in your state

We publish the median, the lower quartile and the full grant history for every foundation in the index, free. Pick your cause and your state to see the funders that have already paid grants to organizations like yours.

Find your funders About the index

Method

Every private foundation in the United States files a Form 990-PF listing each grant it paid: recipient, address, purpose and amount. The IRS publishes the filings as raw XML. We parsed the 4,436,666 grant records in the 2024, 2025 and 2026 releases, covering tax years 2022 through 2026.

Rows where the foundation reported a lump sum instead of itemising, typically written as "see attached schedule", were excluded, along with rows with no recipient or a value of zero or less. Per-foundation figures use foundations with ten or more reported grants, so a single filing cannot swing a median.

Anyone can check any number here against the filing it came from. The extraction code is available on request, and the figures on this page are recomputed from the index every time it is rebuilt.