NIH Research Grant Funding Rates Plummeted in 2025

The number of investigators winning research grants from the U.S. National Institutes of Health dropped sharply in 2025, according to recently released data. The number of investigators winning R01 equivalent grants dropped from 7,720 in 2024 to 5,885 in the 2025 fiscal year that ended on 30 September.

Across all areas, the NIH went from funding roughly 5,000 new research grants in 2024 to just 3,900 in 2025. New grants for Alzheimer's and aging research were cut in half — from 369 in 2024 to 177, all while the US population is rapidly aging. Mental health research grants fell by 47 percent. And new grants for cancer research fell by 23 percent — even as cancer rates are rising sharply among Gen X and millennial Americans.

The funding rate for early-stage investigators (ESIs), those who earned their graduate degree within the past 10 years, dropped from 26% in 2024 to just 19% in 2025. An 11% rise in the number of applicants—from 5,446 in 2024 to 6,065 the next year—contributed to the decline. In absolute terms, the number of ESIs awarded funding dropped from 1,423 in 2024 to 1,144 in 2025.

Established investigators, whose applicant numbers were also up slightly to 12,770 in 2025, saw a similar drop in their success rate, from about 27% to about 20%. For 8,740 "at-risk" investigators, who are at risk of losing all funding, the rate was 17%, down from 24% in 2024.

NIH suggests one cause of the decline is the policy, imposed last year by the White House budget office, of paying up front for multiyear grants. The practice forces NIH to commit hefty chunks of its annual funding to those grants, squeezing the amount available for other awards. "The decrease seen in FY 2025 may likely be due in part to NIH implementing a requirement to use 50% of its remaining competing Research Project Grant funds (starting in June 2025) for full-year funded competing RPGs, which was expected to lead to fewer awards and support fewer researchers overall," the agency's Office of Extramural Research stated in a blog post.

The biomedical research community is facing the prospect of major funding disruptions again this year. The U.S. National Institutes of Health has delayed posting calls for new grant applications for so long that large academic research programs may not have their funding renewed until next year—assuming those notices are approved at all.

Since the current administration took office 13 months ago, NIH has posted only 84 Notices of Funding Opportunities (NOFOs), down from 787 in the previous year. Many more are in limbo. NIH has 323 opportunities listed as "forecasted." Typically, a NOFO is published, or opened for applications, within a few weeks of its announcement. But many on the list were announced in 2024 and '25 and still are not open.

Early in the current administration, NIH tightened the requirements for these Notices of Funding Opportunities; each had to be approved by the NIH director's office and its parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, rather than just by each institute's advisory council. NIH also said it would halve the number of NOFOs.

The $7.3 billion National Cancer Institute, NIH's largest institute, is feeling the effects. At a recent public meeting, the deputy director noted the NOFO approval process now requires 16 steps. The deputy director for scientific strategy and development added that NCI is trying to "educate" the director's office about why some programs must be funded with NOFOs. Clinical trial networks, in particular, involve many academic groups and need the coordination provided by a funding notice. "We are now in a back-and-forth with them to really explain our needs in terms of clinical trials, in terms of infrastructure. … It's a learning process, and we're working on it," she said.

For now, NCI is working on giving its clinical trial networks 1-year funding extensions to hold them into the 2027 fiscal year that starts on 1 October.

There's little prospect of catching up before the fiscal year ends this fall. Notices for new NOFOs "would need to be on the street by now." NIH programs for which Congress specified a funding level, such as the Helping to End Addiction Long-term Initiative addressing opioid addiction, may not be able to spend their appropriations. In that case, they would have to give the money back to the U.S. Department of the Treasury or else meet their spending targets by funding investigator-initiated grants that "look like they fit the program," which could go against lawmakers' intent.

Although Senate Committee on Appropriations members wanted to pare back multiyear funding in 2026, the final funding bill for NIH instead limits the amount of funding going to multiyear grants to the same level as in 2025.