Methodology

The funding total, the opportunity count and the closing-soon count on our homepage are aggregates over the public opportunity feed, computed by our opportunities service and read by the site at request time. They are not estimates, projections, or market-size figures, and they are not drawn from any third-party report.

They are counts of records in our own feed. That is the whole claim.

Only opportunities that pass the same public-visibility filter as the public opportunity list. Every figure is an aggregate: a count, a sum, or a distinct count. No figure is derived from a sample, and none is extrapolated.

• Funding open right now is the sum of stated award values across those opportunities. Where a notice publishes several figures, we take the largest of them, typically the award ceiling: it is what the source published, not our estimate of what will be awarded. Where the same program reaches us from more than one source and we have not yet matched the records, it can be counted twice.
• Live opportunities is a count of those records.
• Closing within 30 days counts those whose extracted close date falls in the next 30 days.

Anything private. Organization-private and user-uploaded opportunities never enter these aggregates, and the endpoint that produces them applies the same public gate as the public list rather than a looser one. The figures carry no personal data and no per-opportunity detail beyond the aggregate.

The figures are recomputed continuously and cached briefly, so in normal operation what you see is at most about an hour old, and about ten minutes old on a region-scoped view. We do not publish a fixed as-of date because there is no fixed snapshot: the number moves as notices open and close.

If the service becomes unreachable, the last computed values may continue to be served for the life of the cache rather than disappearing immediately, so during an outage a figure can be older than the intervals above. What we do not do is show a zero: if no value can be produced at all, the figures are hidden.

They are not a measure of the total funding available in the United States. They are not a claim about how much of it any organization could win, and they are not a forecast. A large total reflects the size of the feed we monitor, not the size of anyone's opportunity.

Award values come from the issuing notice. Where a funder publishes an inaccurate or placeholder value, ours inherits it, and we correct records when we find that.

Fit is scored across eligibility, alignment, capacity and timing. A score is a decision-support output, not a prediction of award. Eligibility is evaluated as a pass/fail gate and reported separately from scored fit, so a high score never obscures a disqualifying requirement. Where the underlying notice is thinly extracted, the platform is designed to say so rather than present a confident score.

See our editorial policy for how published writing is produced and reviewed.

If a figure here looks wrong, it may be. Write to [email protected] with the page and the number, and we will check the underlying records. Corrections to published essays are noted by their last-updated date.