There is no “average” grant. There is a long tail of small cheques — and a tiny club of enormous ones.
Across 89,503 federally-funded businesses since 2016, the median award is $15,000 while the mean is $910,000. The top 0.1% of recipients hold 65% of all dollars; the $10M-plus tier (0.6% of firms) holds 78%. “Grants” are 40% of agreements but only 6% of the money — “contributions” carry 94%.
The median business gets $15k. The mean says $910k.
When a handful of billion-dollar cheques sit in the same dataset as 89,000 small ones, the average stops describing anybody. Half of all recipients are at or below the green line.
Where the businesses are, and where the money is.
Every for-profit recipient since 2016, bucketed by their total federal funding. The two columns almost perfectly invert: the tier with nearly all the firms holds almost none of the dollars.
The top 1% of recipients hold four-fifths of the money.
Line up all 89,000 recipients from largest to smallest. By the time you’ve counted the first 1%, you’ve already accounted for 81 cents of every dollar. A perfectly equal split would be the dotted line.
Hover the curve to read any point. X-axis is the top share of recipients on a log scale; Y-axis is their cumulative share of all federal for-profit dollars.
“Grants” are the rounding error. “Contributions” are the money.
The word everyone searches for — grant — covers a thin slice of the spend. The real billions move through contributions: larger, hand-negotiated, and far less advertised.
Federal disclosure tags each agreement as a grant (G) or a contribution (C). Medians shown are per-agreement; both instruments still have a tiny typical cheque — contributions just also contain the giants.
The club at the top of the curve.
The 0.6% of recipients who each crossed $10M in total federal funding hold more than three-quarters of every dollar. Here is the very top of that club.
If you’re in the small tier, the game is winning more, smaller cheques.
You’re not going to land a battery-plant deal. But the long tail is real money — IRAP, regional, sector and wage programs that fund tens of thousands of ordinary businesses every year. The trick is knowing which ones fit you, and stacking them. That’s what GrantCompass is for.
See what your business qualifies for