National Science Foundation federal obligations in North Carolina

What the NSF–North Carolina cell actually joins

This tie page is the intersection of awarding agency 049, labeled National Science Foundation, and North Carolina as the USAspending place-of-performance state. The $917,926,485.52 total is the sum of obligations on records that carry both attributes. Drop the state filter and the Foundation’s national profile appears; drop the agency filter and North Carolina’s all-agency spending appears. Neither parent page equals this cell.

One thousand one hundred eighty-three awards is a modest row count next to cabinet departments that post tens of thousands of records in the same state. The dollars still matter as a discrete NSF geography slice. The join does not rank North Carolina against other states, and it does not mean 1,183 separate campuses each received a check.

Readers sometimes treat an NSF geography total as a ranking of university systems. This cell does not do that. The $917,926,485.52 figure is the obligation sum on records tagged awarding agency 049 and place-of-performance NC. It is silent on proposal success rates, overhead rates, and which campuses appear in the recipient field. Those fields are not in the packet facts, so they stay off this page.

Agency 049 as the awarding side

USAspending keys the awarding-agency dimension to numeric codes. This pair is 049. The English label is National Science Foundation. Other science-adjacent agencies (Health and Human Services, Defense, Energy) have their own codes and their own North Carolina ties. Mixing those codes would fold $917,926,485.52 into unrelated cabinets.

The agency hub for 049 shows Foundation awards without a North Carolina constraint. This narrative restates only the 1,183-award, $917.9 million North Carolina cell. Packet facts do not include fiscal years, directorate names, or assistance-versus-contract splits, so those details are omitted here.

North Carolina as place of performance

North Carolina in this table is the USAspending geography tag NC. Work performed at a Research Triangle lab, a recipient with an NC address, and an award that simply lists NC on the place-of-performance field can all land in the same $917,926,485.52 sum. The join does not distinguish those cases. It also excludes NSF awards coded to South Carolina, Virginia, or other states even when staff or subcontractors sit in North Carolina.

Statewide North Carolina federal spending is the parent geography. Agency 049 is one awarding agency among many in that parent. Readers who want the unfiltered state total should open the North Carolina hub rather than treating $917.9 million as the state’s entire federal footprint.

Place of performance can diverge from where a principal investigator lives or where a subaward is spent. An NC tag can reflect a university accounting office, a field site, or a data-entry default. The join reports the tag that USAspending stored. It does not reconstruct the research workflow behind 1,183 awards.

How 1,183 awards sit under $917.9 million

Average obligation is about $776,000 ($917,926,485.52 ÷ 1,183). That ratio is a concentration check, not a typical grant size. NSF award files mix multi-year cooperative agreements, standard grants, and smaller instruments; an arithmetic mean hides that mix. It is not a median, and it is not an invoice.

USAspending obligations can include downward adjustments in the raw file; this aggregate reports the net total supplied in the facts. Without a transaction table on this page, 1,183 is best read as award records in the aggregate, not as 1,183 completed projects.

If a later refresh of the aggregate changes either the dollar total or the 1,183-award count, this narrative should be rewritten from the new facts. Until then, the only numbers on this page are $917,926,485.52, 1,183 awards, agency 049, and state NC, plus the mean computed from those two figures.

What this pair is not

Sharing a state with an awarding agency does not mean North Carolina taxpayers chose these awards, and it does not mean Foundation outlays equal $917,926,485.52 inside the state. Campaign-finance tables and federal spending tables are not linked here. Correlation between a research campus and an NSF obligation is not evidence that one caused the other.

Continue from National Science Foundation in North Carolina for the overlay table, North Carolina federal spending for all agencies, National Science Foundation for agency 049 nationally, and All spending ties for other pairs.

Questions

How much NSF funding is obligated in North Carolina?

USAspending records $917,926,485.52 in obligations for awarding agency 049 (National Science Foundation) with North Carolina place of performance, covering 1,183 awards. That is an obligation aggregate for this pair, not an outlay figure and not the Foundation’s national total.

Does this total include every federal science award in North Carolina?

No. The filter is awarding agency 049 only. Health, defense, energy, and other agencies that fund research in North Carolina sit on separate ties. Statewide North Carolina spending is the parent page for the all-agency view.

What does the average NSF award in North Carolina represent?

Dividing $917,926,485.52 by 1,183 awards produces about $776,000 per award. That is a mean of the aggregate, not a median grant, and it mixes whatever award types sit in the USAspending table for this pair.

Are these obligations the same as money already paid out?

No. USAspending obligations are legal commitments. Outlays are later cash movements. This page reports $917,926,485.52 in obligations across 1,183 awards, not a disbursement ledger.