National Endowment for the Humanities

Why 1,440 awards matter more than the round million figure

Many independent agencies in this size band show a few hundred awards. NEH shows 1,440. That volume is what you expect when an agency’s core product is competitive grants to museums, libraries, colleges, scholars, and state humanities councils rather than a handful of operations contracts. $383,304,565.26 divided by 1,440 is about $266,184 per award—well below the seven-figure means of some peer commissions, and still an average, not a typical grant size.

The USAspending table does not grade the humanities. It does not say whether a documentary, a digital archive, or a teacher institute was funded. It says an award exists, with an obligation amount, tagged to CGAC 418. Cultural value is outside this file. Award geography and award dollars are inside it.

What $383.3 million does and does not include

The $383,304,565.26 is an awarding-agency obligation stock through FY2026. It includes instruments NEH awarded that remain in the USAspending warehouse. It excludes staff salaries that never become awards. It excludes matching funds that grantees raise from private donors; those dollars are not federal obligations. A university that reports a $50,000 NEH grant plus $50,000 of its own match will show only the federal side here, and only if that federal side is in the extract.

Obligations are legal commitments. Outlays can trail as grantees draw down over a multi-year period of performance. This packet has no outlay total, so this page does not claim that $383.3 million has already been paid. De-obligations on unused grant balances would lower a future extract without any public “cut” headline in this dataset.

Questions

How much has NEH obligated on USAspending?

The National Endowment for the Humanities shows $383,304,565.26 in obligations through FY2026 across 1,440 awards. Awarding-agency CGAC 418 is the filter. The total is federal obligations, not private matching funds and not an outlay sum. USAspending.gov records this as awarding-agency obligations through FY2026, not cash outlays. The live table for CGAC 418 is the source for the current 1440-award book.

Why does NEH have 1,440 awards?

The extract counts 1,440 instruments for CGAC 418. That volume fits a competitive grant program better than a small operations-contract shop. Average obligation is about $266,184. The packet does not publish how many awards are grants versus contracts. That figure uses only the packet totals. The extract has no median and no contract-versus-assistance split. FY2026 is the warehouse cutoff, not a single-year appropriation.

What does agency code 418 mean?

418 is the USAspending awarding-agency CGAC identifier for the National Endowment for the Humanities. SpendingVault’s /agencies/418/ path uses that code. It is not an Arts Endowment code and not a Smithsonian identifier. SpendingVault URLs under the agency path filter to that CGAC identifier. It is an accounting tag, not a quality score. Totals on this page are obligations through FY2026.

Can I see NEH grants by state?

Yes. The state breakdown for agency 418 attributes the 1,440 awards using USAspending geography fields. Place of performance and recipient location can differ. The table reports the source file, not a hand-coded map of every humanities council. Outlays are unpublished in this packet, so this page does not estimate cash already paid. Refresh the agency page after USAspending updates rather than treating the current stock as frozen.