The National Institutes of Health awarded roughly 58,000 grants in the 2026 fiscal year, which ended Wednesday — down from 61,000 in FY2025 and well below the roughly 63,700 awarded annually before the second Trump administration took office.

A STAT analysis of NIH spending shows the agency did spend its entire external grants budget of about $34 billion, as it did the prior year, after a slow start in issuing new awards. But the way it distributed that money is creating deep uncertainty among researchers, according to a STAT survey and interviews.

Researchers reported that delays in the grant review process are slowing the pace of their work and making it harder to propose and conduct the kind of innovative, high-impact science the NIH exists to support.

What changed in NIH funding patterns?

The analysis identifies two persistent shifts:

• The agency continued reducing grant awards involving health disparities, race, and ethnicity.
• It made little progress on other stated Trump administration priorities, including disbursing funds more evenly across the country and expanding support for early-career scientists.

The drop in total awards — about 3,000 fewer than FY2025 — potentially resulted from the White House's push to fully fund more multiyear grants in advance, leaving less money available for new awards.

The final count may rise somewhat in the coming weeks because of reporting lags in the NIH grants database, a caveat R&D managers should weigh before treating 58,000 as the settled figure.

What does this mean for lab planning?

For research administrators, the numbers point to a tighter competitive environment: a flat $34 billion outlay spread across fewer projects means larger average awards but fewer entry points for new applications. Slower review timelines compound the problem, stretching the gap between proposal submission and funding decisions and complicating staffing and project schedules.

The pattern of reduced awards touching health disparities, race, and ethnicity suggests PIs in those fields face portfolio decisions that go beyond ordinary success-rate math, while early-career investigators have not seen the expanded support the administration has flagged as a goal.

NIH leadership has not, according to the reported analysis, demonstrated measurable movement toward the geographic redistribution of funds it has cited as a priority — a gap between stated policy and observed spending that researchers and institutions will likely continue to probe as FY2027 planning begins.