Which Foundations Have Fall Grant Deadlines? We Counted 1,214
Fall is year-end appeal season. For a slice of private foundations it is also deadline season, and those deadlines are easy to miss if your grant calendar is built around the big spring cycles.
We wanted to know how big that slice is, so we counted.
Where the deadline comes from
Every private foundation files a Form 990-PF with the IRS each year. One section of it describes how to apply: who to contact, what form the application takes, any restrictions, and a line for submission deadlines. The foundation writes that line itself, in its own words.
We read that line for every foundation in our data that gave money in its 2024 or 2025 filing and did not say it only funds preselected organizations. That is 23,251 foundations that, on paper, accept applications.
What we found
1,214 of them wrote a deadline that falls in October, November or December. By month:
- 399 name an October date
- 343 name a November date
- 499 name a December date
Those add up to more than 1,214 because some foundations name two fall dates. For 809 of the 1,214, the fall dates are the only dates they name.
The most common single dates:
| Date | Foundations |
|---|---|
| December 31 | 253 |
| October 1 | 182 |
| November 1 | 173 |
| December 1 | 157 |
| October 31 | 116 |
| November 15 | 82 |
By the time you read this, October 1 has passed. 1,038 of the 1,214 name at least one date on or after October 15, so most of the list is still ahead of you.
These are not tiny funds. The median foundation among the 1,214 gave $148,600 in its latest year, and 1,007 of them gave $25,000 or more.
The December 31 problem
The most common fall deadline lands on the last day of the year, the same week most small shops are running their year-end appeal, closing the books, and taking whatever time off they get. If your organization is one person deep in development, a December 31 deadline is really a mid-December deadline, because the last two weeks of the year are already spoken for.
It is worth looking at your December now, while it is still empty.
What this count cannot tell you
A count is only as honest as its limits, so here are ours.
It is a floor. We only counted deadlines written as a month and a day, like "October 15" or "12/31". A foundation that wrote "the fall board meeting" or "sixty days before the November meeting" is not in the 1,214, even though it has a fall deadline.
The dates are a year or two old. A 990-PF describes the year it covers, and foundations change their calendars. 63 of the 1,214 name a specific year of 2025 or earlier in the deadline itself, so their literal date has already passed. Treat every date on a filing as a lead to confirm on the foundation's own website, not as a calendar entry.
A deadline is not an invitation. Plenty of foundations list an application process and still fund mostly the same organizations year after year. A deadline tells you when to apply. It does not tell you whether an application like yours has ever been funded.
Where GrantSnag fits, and where it does not
GrantSnag does not filter by deadline today. We are saying that plainly because the number above came out of our own data, and it would be easy to let you assume the product does something it does not.
What GrantSnag does show is the other half of the question: who each foundation has actually paid, and how much, straight from the same filings. That is the part that tells you whether a December 31 deadline deserves your December. A foundation that has written checks to three organizations like yours is worth the late nights. One that has never funded outside its own county is not, whatever its calendar says.
If you want the method behind that, Peer Search IS the Geography Filter walks through it, and The Problem Was Never Finding Grants explains why we think fit, not discovery, is the real work.
How we counted
For the curious: foundations filing a 990-PF with total giving above zero, a most recent filing year of 2024 or later, and no "preselected organizations only" statement. We matched month-and-day patterns for October, November and December in the application deadline text, and excluded any foundation whose deadline text also says there is no deadline, rolling review, or applications accepted any time. 577 of the 1,214 come from 2024 filings and 637 from 2025 filings.