Candid Search Download Limit: The Caps and How to Work Within Them

If you download funder records from Candid search, the Candid search download limit decides how many you can keep each month. Searches cost nothing against the cap. Each grant record or profile record you download draws from a monthly allowance that is fixed by plan.

A download cap is a limit that controls how many records you can download to a file in a month. Candid search replaced the older Foundation Directory during 2026, when Candid brought GuideStar and Foundation Directory capabilities onto one platform (Candid blog, January 20, 2026), and our explainer on whether Foundation Directory Online still exists covers the transition. The caps apply to the current Candid search plans.

Quick Answer: What Is the Candid Search Download Limit?

The Candid search download limit is a monthly cap on the grants and profiles a paid plan can download. Premium monthly allows up to 250 grants and 750 profiles per month, and Premium annual allows up to 1,000 grants and 5,000 profiles per month (Candid pricing page, read October 2026). Searches and profile views are unlimited on both plans.

What the Candid Download Limit Per Month Covers

Candid's monthly download limit is a cap on grant downloads and profile downloads. It is not a cap on searching or viewing. You can run searches freely on a paid plan. The number of records you download each month has a fixed ceiling (Candid pricing page, read October 2026).

Grants and profiles are counted as two separate allowances. A grant record describes a single award transaction. A profile record describes a funder or a nonprofit organization. Candid search covers grants given, grants received, guidelines for open opportunities, and grant transaction profiles (Candid help center, read September 2026). When you download either kind of record to a file, the corresponding allowance drops by the number of rows you kept.

Enriched records are downloads too. Candid Premium and Ultimate subscribers can download available financial data for an organization, including revenue and expenses, balance sheets, financial trends analysis and audited financials (Candid help center, read September 2026). Candid Premium includes the ability to download an organization's full profile and to download compensation data for officers, directors, trustees, key employees and highest paid employees (Candid Learning, read September 2026). The published caps name only grants and profiles, so budget for these files as if they draw on the profile allowance and pull them only for funders close to an application.

One category sits outside the cap. Candid lists unlimited 990 downloads as a Candid Premium feature (Candid Learning, read September 2026). That matters for depth research. You can read the full filing for context on a funder's giving pattern without spending the profile allowance. Then you reserve profile downloads for funders that survive screening. Our walkthrough on finding foundation funders for your nonprofit shows how to screen on public signals before you spend a download.

The free tier works differently. Candid's free tier gives "One per Month" full profile views, with limited search results and limited personalized dashboards (Candid pricing page, read October 2026). A free account therefore cannot carry list building on its own. A single full view per month covers almost nothing.

Candid's own product page states Candid search covers 1.9M+ nonprofit profiles, 304k+ funder profiles and 29M+ grants (Candid search product page, read September 2026). The searchable pool is enormous and the monthly download allowance is not, which is why screening matters more than downloading.

Candid Search Download Limit by Plan

The Candid search download limit is published per plan as a monthly pair. One number covers grants. One number covers profiles. Premium monthly allows up to 250 grants and 750 profiles per month, and Premium annual allows up to 1,000 grants and 5,000 profiles per month (Candid pricing page, read October 2026).

Both Premium plans include unlimited search results and unlimited access to full profile views (Candid pricing page, read October 2026). Discovery stays open. Take-home records are metered.

This table states the published pairs side by side.

Source: Candid pricing page, read October 2026.

Candid Ultimate is sold as everything in Premium plus compliance reporting and Landscapes, which Candid calls its "data visualization tool for funding trends" (Candid pricing page, read October 2026).

The annual plan allows more downloads than the monthly plan in both categories (Candid pricing page, read October 2026). A team that downloads steadily across a full prospecting season will feel that difference quickly. A team that researches in one short burst may never touch either ceiling. Pick the plan by download volume, not by search volume. Search volume costs nothing extra on either plan. What each plan costs is set out in our guide to Candid Premium price and tiers, and the retired directory tiers are in Foundation Directory Online cost. For Candid beside the other paid tools, see grant database pricing compared.

What Counts Toward Your Monthly Download Cap

Your monthly download cap counts downloaded rows. It does not count searches run or profiles opened. Each grant row you keep draws from the grants allowance and each profile row you keep draws from the profiles allowance (Candid pricing page, read October 2026).

Searches and full profile views do not draw from those two numbers, because both are unlimited on the Premium plans (Candid pricing page, read October 2026).

This table separates what draws from the cap and what does not.

Sources: Candid pricing page, read October 2026; Candid Learning and Candid help center, read September 2026.

Batch size is a separate question from the monthly cap: Candid's legacy Foundation Directory export help article states "Note: Exports are limited to 100 line items at a time" (Candid Learning, read September 2026), and that article predates Candid search. The export steps themselves are in our guide to exporting grants to Excel from Candid.

The license draws a hard line around bulk extraction. Candid's license states that printing or downloading of search output may not exceed a significant segment of the databases (Candid Subscriber License Agreement, last updated April 25, 2025, read October 2026). It further states that scraping or other technological means of wholesale or material downloading or storing of the databases is strictly prohibited and that excessive downloading justifies immediate suspension or termination of access (Candid Subscriber License Agreement, last updated April 25, 2025, read October 2026). Stay inside the published monthly numbers. Download through the normal export path. Automated collection sits outside the agreement no matter what your allowance shows.

What Unlimited Search Results Mean for Downloads

Unlimited search results mean you can test and refine queries without spending anything. Every downloaded row spends from a fixed monthly purse. Both Premium plans include unlimited search results and unlimited access to full profile views, paired with monthly download ceilings (Candid pricing page, read October 2026).

Paid filters exist for exactly that screening. Candid's paid filters include zip code and radius, affiliation type, IRS subsection, total revenue, total expenses, total assets, IRS form type, number of employees, total contributions, program service revenue, cash and equivalents, and investments and securities (Candid Learning, read September 2026). Candid also describes Candid search's fundraiser tools as identifying grantmakers "based on funding priorities, geographic focus, issue areas, and populations served using one tool" (Candid blog, January 20, 2026). Every row a filter removes is a row you never read and never download.

One commenter on Reddit, writing about the monthly caps, said "I was fooled by the unlimited searches feature in the price list" (Reddit thread 1vb5ctu, read September 2026). That is one user's report, not a Candid statement. Keep the two words separate. Unlimited means you may look at everything. Capped means you may keep only so much per month.

Build the habit of reading before downloading. Open the full profile. Check the guidelines tab for open opportunities. Scan recent grants given for fit with your program model, and read a grant transaction profile on screen before you download the row (Candid help center, read September 2026). Profiles that fail that read cost you nothing. Profiles that pass it earn a download. Background on funders you already downloaded can come from their public 990 filings instead of repeat downloads.

How to Stay Inside the Monthly Cap

Staying inside the monthly cap is a matter of sequencing. Screen with unlimited tools first. Download in small dated batches second. Log every download third. That order spends the allowance only on funders you have already read.

Start each research block with filters, not with exports. Apply geography, issue area, and size filters until the result set matches the number of funders you can genuinely contact this quarter. Read the survivors through full profile views, which are unlimited on paid plans (Candid pricing page, read October 2026). Download only the funders with a live guideline match or a recent grant in your range. Download less. Search more.

Spread downloads across the month in dated batches. Name each file with its date and its content. Log the row counts in a plain tracker with the running monthly total beside each entry. The tracker is the control. Without it, nobody knows how much of the month's allowance is left.

Use unlimited 990 downloads for depth instead of extra profile downloads (Candid Learning, read September 2026). Candid notes its 990s are available as far back as 2000 for registered search users (Candid Learning, read September 2026). ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer and Grantmakers.io also give free 990 access outside Candid (ProPublica, read October 2026; Grantmakers.io, read September 2026), and more no-cost sources are in our roundup of free options for foundation research. Reserve the capped profile downloads for funders approaching an application.

Compliance detail is plan specific. Only Ultimate subscribers have access to Compliance Reporting, which includes IRS Publication 78 data, Business Master File data, and a downloadable Compliance Report (Candid help center, read September 2026). Do not spend Premium profile downloads chasing compliance signals that live in a higher tier. Use 990s and profile views for eligibility reads. Leave compliance downloads to accounts that hold them.

Close the loop each month with a short review. Count downloaded rows against the plan ceiling. Mark which downloaded funders received an inquiry. Drop the rest from the active shortlist. A downloaded row that never produces contact was screening that should have happened in the search view. Tighten next month's filters by one notch based on what you dropped. Caps reward narrow searches.

What Happens When You Reach the Download Cap

When you reach the download cap, you have used that month's allowance for that record type, since each cap is stated per month (Candid pricing page, read October 2026). Grants and profiles run out separately, so a spent grants allowance leaves any remaining profile downloads in place. Searches and full profile views are unlimited on paid plans, so research can continue inside the platform while downloads wait.

Plan around the published figure for your plan, since Candid's pricing page is the primary source for the caps (Candid pricing page, read October 2026).

The license adds a separate risk. Candid's license states that excessive downloading justifies immediate suspension or termination of access (Candid Subscriber License Agreement, last updated April 25, 2025, read October 2026). Do not route around the cap with automated collection, which the agreement strictly prohibits. A month's wait for the allowance is an annoyance. A suspended account in the middle of a prospecting season is a real setback.

Use the wait for research that costs no download. GrantCue's public directory has profile pages for more than 10,000 private foundations built from IRS 990-PF public filings, filterable by whether a foundation indicates it accepts applications, and its kanban-style pipeline tracks the opportunities you pursue, with an ICS calendar feed for deadlines on every plan, Free included (grantcue.com, September 2026). Save the remaining Candid allowance for funders you have already screened on their GrantCue foundation page.

FAQ

What Is the Candid Download Limit Per Month?

Candid's monthly download cap is the number of grant and profile records a paid plan can download each month. Premium monthly allows up to 250 grants and 750 profiles per month, and Premium annual allows up to 1,000 grants and 5,000 profiles per month (Candid pricing page, read October 2026). Searches and profile views on paid plans are unlimited.

What Is the Candid Search Download Limit?

The Candid search download limit is a monthly pair of caps on downloaded records: up to 250 grants and 750 profiles on Premium monthly, and up to 1,000 grants and 5,000 profiles on Premium annual (Candid pricing page, read October 2026). It counts rows downloaded, not searches run. Views, searches and 990 downloads on paid plans sit outside it (Candid Learning, read September 2026).

Do Candid Download Limits Reset Every Month?

Yes, the published caps are stated per month for each plan (Candid pricing page, read October 2026). Grants and profiles each carry their own monthly number, so one allowance can run out while the other still has room. Candid says fundraising assistant credits are restored each month based on your subscription date (Candid pricing page, read October 2026); ask Candid whether download caps reset on the same date before planning a large download.

What Counts Toward the Candid Download Limit?

Downloaded grant rows count toward the grants allowance and downloaded profile rows count toward the profiles allowance (Candid pricing page, read October 2026). Searches, filter changes and full profile views do not draw from either number on paid plans. The published caps name only grants and profiles, so budget financial and compensation downloads as profile downloads.

Why Can I Search Without Limit but Not Download Without Limit?

Candid's paid plans pair unlimited discovery with metered downloads. Both Premium plans include unlimited search results and unlimited full profile views alongside monthly download ceilings (Candid pricing page, read October 2026). Search freely to screen, then download only funders with a live guideline match or a recent grant in range.

What Happens If I Hit the Candid Download Cap?

The month's allowance for that record type is used up, while searching and full profile views continue because both are unlimited on paid plans (Candid pricing page, read October 2026). Use the time to read and screen for the next month's downloads. Do not work around a cap with automated collection, since Candid's license says excessive downloading can justify suspension or termination of access (Candid Subscriber License Agreement, last updated April 25, 2025, read October 2026).

A Monthly Download Routine You Can Repeat

A workable month divides into weekly batches with a tracker beside them. The first pass screens and downloads the strongest matches. The middle passes add the next tier after reading full profiles and recent 990s. The final pass holds a reserve for late discoveries and corrections. The tracker keeps a running total against the plan ceiling.

Start with a broad filtered search. Narrow by geography and size. Read on screen. Download a tight set. Then repeat for the next program area. That cadence fits the product. Discovery is unlimited on paid plans, while downloads are capped monthly (Candid pricing page, read October 2026). A plain grant tracking sheet is enough to hold the owner and the next date beside each downloaded funder, so nothing downloaded goes stale while the cap resets.