Methodology

The foundation directory describes U.S. private foundations from the grants they report to the IRS. It reflects filings, not real-time activity.

Source

Form 990-PF e-files, from the IRS Form 990 series downloads. Every U.S. private foundation files this form each year and lists the grants it paid. Community foundations file Form 990 instead and are not covered.

What we read

From each return: the foundation’s name and EIN, the tax period, the grants it paid during the year (recipient, amount and purpose, as itemised on the return), the grants it approved for future payment, and its answers about applying. A grant line with no recipient name or no amount is skipped.

Filing years

2021 to 2025. The loaded filings were last verified on 2026-08-29.

One return per period

The IRS corpus holds some returns more than once. Before anything is added up we keep one return for each foundation and tax period: the copy filed last.

Grants paid

The sum of the grants itemised as paid during the tax year on each of the foundation’s returns in the filing years above.

Grants reported

The number of those individual paid grants.

Typical grant

The median amount of those individual paid grants: half were smaller and half larger. It is a median of grants, taken across all the returns we have for the foundation.

Giving by year

The same paid grants, grouped by the tax year of the return. A foundation that did not file in every year shows only the years we have, so a missing year means no return in our data, not zero giving.

Largest grants

The five largest individual paid grants.

Top recipient states

The five states that received the most money, by the state in each recipient’s address on the return. Grants whose recipient has no state are left out of this list.

Future commitments

Grants the foundation reported on its return as approved for future payment.

We read this from the foundation's latest return only. A foundation is marked as accepting applications when that return does not say the foundation gives only to preselected charitable organizations and it gives at least one way to apply: a contact name or address, a website or address for submissions, application forms or materials, or submission deadlines.

A foundation whose latest return says it gives only to preselected organizations, or gives no application information, is not marked. The mark is a reading of a filing, not a promise. A foundation's policy can change before its next filing, so check its own website before you apply.

A foundation gets a public profile once its filings show at least $1M in grants paid across at least 5 grants. The threshold keeps single-transfer trusts and dormant shells out of the directory. Foundations below it are not shown on public pages; they remain searchable inside GrantCue.

Community foundations and other organizations that do not file Form 990-PF are not in the directory. Foundation and corporate giving is also outside the funding snapshots below.

Profiles are rebuilt every week from the filings already loaded. New filings are added when our IRS ingestion runs; the “Corpus verified” date on the directory page is the last date we checked the loaded filings.

• Filings lag real activity by a year or more.
• Amended returns are not reconciled with the original return.
• Amounts, recipient names and states are as the foundation wrote them. We do not audit them.
• A foundation's stated application policy can change before its next filing.
• The directory covers private foundations only.

The funding snapshot posts report the grant opportunities that were active in GrantCue's own catalog on a stated date. They are dated editions: each one says the day its numbers were pulled, and its numbers do not change afterwards. The same catalog is searchable live in the app.

Sources

Grants.gov and official state and state-agency grant sources. Each edition describes the sources it covered that day.

Dollar totals

The sum of each opportunity’s published estimated funding. Opportunities that publish no amount are left out of the dollar totals, so every total is a floor, not a census.

Median award

The median of the award ceilings that opportunities publish. The average is shown beside it where a few very large programs pull it far above the median.

Categories

Only records that arrive with a normalized category are counted in category figures.

Exclusions

When a value is excluded, the edition says what and why. The August 2026 edition left one record out of every dollar figure: its amount, $2,147,483,647, is the largest value a signed 32-bit integer can hold, an overflow value in the source feed and not a real award.

The editions are July 2026 and August 2026. They describe what GrantCue tracks, not every grant in America.

The underlying 990-PF filings are public records. You may quote or republish these aggregates with credit and a link. The whole directory is available as a CSV: one row per foundation. To cite the directory:

GrantCue Foundation Directory, compiled from IRS Form 990-PF filings 2021–2025. https://www.grantcue.com/foundations. Method: https://www.grantcue.com/methodology

To cite a funding snapshot, use the post's own address and its date, for example:

GrantCue, Grant Funding Snapshot, August 2026. https://www.grantcue.com/blog/grant-funding-snapshot-august-2026

Found something wrong? Write to support@grantcue.com. How we correct errors is in the editorial policy.