U.S. universities spent $117.5 billion on research and development in Fiscal Year 2024, an increase of $8.9 billion, or 8.1%, over FY 2023 — the second-largest annual jump in current dollars since FY 2003. The National Science Foundation released the figures on December 23 in its annual Higher Education Research and Development (HERD) Survey.

For R&D managers tracking where the money actually sits, the growth was driven overwhelmingly by federal sources, which contributed $5.4 billion of the year-over-year rise. Universities added $2.1 billion from their own institutional funds. State and local governments added $633 million, business-funded R&D gained $131.5 million, nonprofit funding rose $16 million, and all other sources added $529 million.

What does the federal funding mix look like?

Federal agencies supplied more than $64 billion in FY 2024 — 55% of all university R&D. The agency breakdown:

• Health and Human Services (including NIH): $35.5 billion
• Department of Defense: $10.2 billion
• National Science Foundation: $7.2 billion
• Department of Energy: $2.9 billion
• NASA: $2.4 billion
• Department of Agriculture: $1.9 billion
• All other federal agencies combined: $4.5 billion

Institutional funds covered $30.2 billion, slightly more than a quarter of the total. That share matters for portfolio planning: even at the wealthiest research universities, more than half the research budget rides on federal appropriations cycles.

Who spends the most?

Johns Hopkins University again topped the ranking, as it has for decades, with $4.13 billion in total R&D expenditures. More than $2.5 billion of that flowed to its Applied Physics Laboratory, which alone exceeds the total R&D spending of most institutions on the list.

The rest of the top 10:

• University of Pennsylvania: $2.17 billion
• UC San Francisco: $2.13 billion
• University of Michigan: $2.11 billion
• University of Wisconsin: $1.93 billion
• UCLA: $1.90 billion
• UC San Diego: $1.88 billion
• University of Washington: $1.69 billion
• Stanford: $1.64 billion
• Cornell: $1.61 billion

Positions 11 through 25: North Carolina ($1.60B), Ohio State ($1.58B), Duke ($1.58B), Maryland ($1.54B), Georgia Tech ($1.53B), Yale ($1.52B), Pittsburgh ($1.50B), NYU ($1.50B), Harvard ($1.49B), Columbia ($1.45B), Minnesota ($1.41B), Texas A&M ($1.39B), MD Anderson Cancer Center ($1.36B), Vanderbilt ($1.33B) and Penn State ($1.30B).

Thirty-seven institutions reported at least $1 billion in R&D in FY 2024, up from 33 in FY 2023 and 29 in FY 2022. Fifteen of the top 25 were public universities, and most had an affiliated academic health center — a structural reminder that academic medical enterprises, not core science departments, anchor the largest budgets.

Which fields absorb the spending?

Health Sciences led all fields at $38.5 billion. Biological and biomedical sciences took $20.8 billion, and engineering — across all subfields — spent $19.3 billion. Physical sciences accounted for $7.5 billion and agricultural sciences $4.8 billion. The top three fields together represent roughly two-thirds of all academic R&D.

How reliable is the measurement?

The survey, sponsored by NSF's National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, collected data from 925 institutions that grant bachelor's degrees or higher and spent at least $150,000 on R&D in the prior fiscal year. For most respondents, FY 2024 covered July 1, 2023 through June 30, 2024. Expenditures include all funds spent on activities specifically organized to produce research outcomes, whether externally sponsored or institutionally funded.

The data carry a clear limitation for planning purposes. HERD is a lagging indicator: its expenditure figures are more than a year old and do not capture the effects of recent changes in federal research policy on university funding. Any institution building FY 2026 lab budgets off these numbers should treat them as a baseline under stress, not a trend line.

Still, total R&D spending remains the most widely recognized metric of a university's research scale, which is why institutions track their annual position so closely. The FY 2025 HERD release will show whether the 8.1% growth rate survived the policy shifts of the past year.