| State | Overdue Primary Grants | Overdue Primary Award Amount ($ millions) |
|---|---|---|
| CA | 64 | 47.87 |
| NY | 57 | 39.54 |
| MA | 37 | 22.53 |
| PA | 23 | 8.69 |
| MD | 21 | 14.28 |
| TX | 21 | 14.39 |
| NC | 20 | 13.00 |
| IL | 17 | 16.21 |
| TN | 16 | 26.14 |
| FL | 13 | 10.54 |
| GA | 12 | 5.75 |
| MI | 12 | 15.98 |
| WA | 12 | 28.40 |
| MO | 11 | 15.74 |
| OH | 10 | 4.00 |
| UT | 9 | 3.10 |
| INTERNATIONAL | 8 | 4.26 |
| CO | 8 | 2.63 |
| WI | 8 | 3.03 |
| AZ | 7 | 4.17 |
The Grant Watch team has begun to track overdue funding in the RePORTER database. Normally, yearly grant renewals are fairly timely, especially for non-competive renewals. However, with the delays that have plagued the NIH for the last several months, we are starting to see grants going 1, 2, and even 3 months without the next year of expected funding appearing in the RePORTER database. As time goes on, we are increasingly concerned that some of these may represent “shadow terminations” where the grantee may not recieve any official notification.
Overdue grants are up this year compared to last year
Using data pulled from NIH RePORTER on 2025-05-18, we searched for grants which were officially supposed to end sometime 2026 or later, but whose most recent budget year had ended. We filtered out subprojects from this analysis due to issues with subproject IDs changing in the new year. We decided to remove competitive renewals from the analyis as well until we finalize how we want to deal with them. Finally, we matched these against known terminations in the 2025-05-20 Grant Watch Airtable and only found 9 that overlap. For these reasons, the analysis below represents a conservative estimate of overdue funding.
Of the remaining grants, we found 1066 which were 30 days overdue, 502 that were 60 days overdue, and 309 that were 90 days overdue. Conveniently, we can use the date_added field in RePORTER to compare the current number of overdue grants to the number in previous years. There are substantially more 30, 60, and 90-day overdue grants today than there were at the same time last year.
Administrative delays are a likely explanation for most of the 30-day overdue grants. However, the relatively large number 60- and 90-day overdue grants is concerning and we expect that many may be effectively terminated.
More primary grants are 60- and 90-days overdue this year
Once we started looking closer at the data, we realized that supplement grants make up a large portion of the grants which are at least 60 days overdue. In most cases, the primary grant received its next year of funding, implying that we may be picking up on a fairly normal process for supplementary grants. Here, the historical database helped again to give us a snapshot of what the same breakdown looked like in May 2024. Interestingly, we see a similar number of overdue supplements today as we did in May 2024, but the number of overdue primary grants is far higher.
We took the overdue primary grants and summed up their most recent awards to get a look at the impact of overdue funding by state. Here we see that many of the states that tend to receive the most NIH funding each year have a large number of overdue grants as well. Additionally, the total value of those awards surpasses $10 million dollars for many states.
Overdue grants may provide insight into funding restrictions
Overdue funding has the potential to be one metric that we track each month alongside actual grant terminations and financial transactions. Below we have zeroed in on institutions with more than 20 grants that had a budget period ending in March 2025 and plotted the percentage of these grants that were still overdue. Columbia, which has been under a funding freeze since early April, stands out. However, we also see UCD pop out at this time. We will continue to track this this metric over time to better understand grant funding delays that may not be reported publicly.
Next steps
The Grant Watch team is committed to providing the most accurate information we can given the data available. We are continuing to develop new metrics that may help identify grants and institutions that are not receiving new notices of award or not drawing down payments. We hope to make these resources publicly available in the near future.