A free reference on how US universities fund research, built from federal data and refreshed every month.
The Research Spend Index is published by Bowen AI Strategy Group, a research and AI search firm in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We built it because the numbers research offices ask about most (who spends what, who NIH funds, how funding moved this year) sit in large federal files that few people have time to read.
Rankings of 322 R1 and R2 universities by fiscal year 2024 research spending, with a page for each school and each state showing where the money comes from and how it changed over ten years. NIH funding by institution, state and institute, a year-over-year comparison and a monthly tracker for the current fiscal year. Grants to universities from NSF, the Department of Energy, USDA and other federal funders. A buyer's guide for research offices choosing funding opportunity databases.
University research spending comes from the National Science Foundation's HERD Survey. NIH figures come from NIH RePORTER, and other federal grants from USAspending.gov. Every page names its source and fiscal year, and the methodology explains how each figure is counted. We update NIH and federal grant pages monthly and the HERD rankings each year when NSF releases new data.
Rankings and figures come only from the federal data above. If a company sponsors a placement on this site, it is labeled as a partner where it appears and marked as sponsored, and it never changes a ranking or a number.
If a figure looks wrong for your institution, check it against the source named on the page first; NSF and NIH sometimes report a campus inside a parent institution. Corrections that match the federal source are applied in the next monthly update.