Three out of four nonprofits get most of their grant money from one funder.
Concentration makes a funding plan depend on a small number of relationships. In a separate comparison of funder filings two years apart, 45 percent of earlier relationships were not observed again. That includes one-time grants; it is not a forecast for an individual funder.
Grant records 1,145,482Nonprofits 327,904Funders 26,949Published September 2026
76%
get most of their grant money from a single funder
29%
have no second funder at all
45%
of earlier relationships were not observed again two years later
It is the same in every state we measured
Seven to eight out of every ten nonprofits lean on one funder for most of
their grant money. That holds across the nine largest grant markets in the country, so it
is not a small-state problem or a rural one.
101,118 nonprofits receiving $100,000 to $5,000,000 in grants.
CA 10,794 | NY 7,777 | TX 6,084 | FL 5,301 | IL 4,871 | PA 4,208 | OH 3,797 | NC 3,562 |
GA 2,558.
Nearly a third have nobody else
Counting funders instead of dollars says it plainly. For 29 percent of these
nonprofits, one grantmaker is the entire grant program.
The typical nonprofit here reported 3 funders.
Funders move on
A narrow funding base would be survivable if grantmakers held steady. We took
436,348 grants going out in one filing year and looked for the same organizations two years
later. Fewer than 55 percent were still being funded.
8,140 funders whose grantee lists could be compared across two filing
years. 82% of them dropped at least one organization they had funded. 83% added at least
one they had not.
Most nonprofits depend on one funder for most of their grant money, and
a separate comparison found that roughly half of earlier relationships were not observed again two years later.
The comparisons answer different questions: how concentrated recorded grant income is, and whether earlier funder-to-organization relationships appear in later filings. They do not establish the probability that any particular nonprofit will lose its largest funder. One-time awards and incomplete itemization matter when interpreting the result.
The common reaction is to send more applications to more funders. The filings point to a
narrower question: if the largest funder stepped back next quarter, which grantmakers have
already funded organizations of this size, in this place, doing this work, and how many of
them are there?
What this measures, and what it does not
Source
Grants itemized by filing organizations on IRS Form 990 and 990-PF returns for tax
year 2023: 1,145,482 grant lines, reduced to 833,972 funder-to-nonprofit relationships
once multiple grants between the same pair are summed. Concentration figures cover the
101,118 nonprofits that received $100,000 to $5,000,000, which is the range most
organizations with a grant program sit in.
"Most of their grant money"
More than half of the grant dollars an organization received that year came from one
funder. Three quarters or more: 52 percent of them. Ninety percent or more: 40 percent.
Renewal
Measured on a separate set of grantee lists covering tax years 2021, 2022 and 2024, so
it is reported on its own rather than as one series with the concentration figures. A relationship is not observed again when the funder's later list does not name an organization its earlier list did. This includes awards intended to be one-time grants and does not by itself establish why a relationship is absent.
Vintage
Tax year 2023 is the most recent year with broad coverage. A 2023 return is generally
filed in 2024 and released later still, so this is the newest complete picture
available, not a picture of this month.
Grant money, not total revenue
Government awards, individual giving, fees and earned revenue are not in this data.
Concentration here describes the grant portion of the funding, as filings record it. An
organization with one funder in these numbers may well have other income.
A funder that itemizes nothing is invisible
Only grants a filer chose to list appear, which pushes measured funder counts down for
some organizations. Treat any single nonprofit's figure as a ceiling on concentration
rather than an exact reading.
No dollar totals are published here
The largest entities in this data are donor-advised fund sponsors and in-kind
distributors. Adding their dollars to everyone else's produces a number that looks like
US grantmaking and is not one. Every figure above is a count, or one organization's own
dollars divided among its own funders, which that distortion does not touch.
Your own number
The Grant Funding Viability Assessment answers this for one organization: how the funding
behind the mission looks today, scored 0 to 100, the months of real runway, the pipeline the
funding goal would take, and named funders that already back organizations like yours. Built
from your filings, peer records, and visible funder behavior.