Update (Sept 9, 2025):
GRFP is LIVE!!! https://www.nsf.gov/funding/opportunities/grfp-nsf-graduate-research-fellowship-program
Deadline is Oct. 27, 2025, for life sciences (which suggests they plan to fund life sciences), and shortly after that for other fields. There still isn’t a full solicitation (the detailed guidelines of what they want in a proposal), and they oddly do not link to the old solicitation. This could mean they’re changing something (page count, what they ask, etc.) but it’s hard to know. This is also fewer days than I had been expecting given the policy of 90 days from them announcing an opportunity to applying, but maybe they’re considering that the fact that this is a renewal of a program as meaning they don’t have to meet the window (and really, who would rather them have a deadline go much later so grad students and programs don’t know about GRFP funding until very late in the cycle?).
Another interesting part of the webpage is that the estimated number of awards is:
1 to 3000 - NSF will support up to 3000 new Graduate Research Fellowships per fiscal year under this program solicitation pending availability of funds.
That is different from last year’s language of
Estimated Number of Awards: 2,300
NSF will support up to 2,300 new Graduate Research Fellowships per fiscal year under this program solicitation pending availability of funds.
They’re giving a 1-3,000 range rather than what typically is the expected number of awards. My guess is they’re still hoping to get a large number of awards. Given the potential external funders, maybe NSF is leaving room for them to fund the typical awardees plus honorable mention students. Though it also opens the possibility that in March NSF will announce “congrats to the NSF GRFP awardees: Martha. Just Martha.”
Regarding availability of funding, there is currently uncertainty about a potential government shutdown at the end of September (as well as uncertainty about next year’s NSF funding in general). During a shutdown, NSF staff will not be able to respond to any questions; with some shutdowns, government websites go dark (in the past I’ve archived ones), and deadlines might be pushed back (but do not count on it). Potential applicants should thus stay on top of this news and prepare.
Original post (Sept 4, 2025):
The US National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) has long been a way of supporting students going into grad school. In the US, students going to grad school in the sciences are often paid, and have tuition covered, for teaching or doing research (more common in PhD programs than Masters programs, and support can vary). The NSF GRFP pays students (typically more than university stipends) to do their work, without needing to use their time for other research or teaching (both can be valuable, but time is limited). It is an investment by the government in a student’s career; unusually for NSF, it’s an investment in the person rather than the project.
Historically, deadlines were in mid-October, but so far this year the old solicitation has not been updated and so the program isn’t taking proposals yet. A big question for students is whether it will run at all.
There’s some good news. An August 28, 2025, article on the American Institute of Physics site focused mostly on a new model on having fellowships co-funded by government and industry, but it had some details on the traditional GRFP, too:
“An NSF spokesperson said GRFP will continue this year and that the solicitation is currently in development. They did not comment on whether the fellowship model that emerges from the UIDP workshop might replace GRFP.
“Most years, the solicitation goes out in July, allowing applicants 90 days to submit before the deadline in mid-October, former GRFP program directors Susan Brennan and Gisèle Muller-Parker said. They added that NSF may push back the application deadline to November or December, but that doing so would make it hard for the agency to finalize its decisions by its usual April deadline.
“The delay may be a result of current federal funding proposals for NSF. The president’s budget request proposes a 55% cut to GRFP for fiscal year 2026, while the Senate Appropriations Committee’s bill proposes flat funding, which would support 2,000 new fellowships, according to the bill report. The Senate and House are scheduled to return from their August recess next week and have until Sept. 30 to pass their funding bills.”
As of this morning (Sept. 4, 2025) there hasn’t been a new solicitation. NSF has a policy that “Applicants have a minimum of 90 days from NSF’s announcement of a funding opportunity to prepare and submit a proposal.” Policies have been more fluid lately, but assuming that policy still holds, then the earliest possible deadline is Dec. 3, 2025. It’s still probably a good idea to prepare earlier, but at least there’s a chance the call will still go out (but it’s still uncertain how many awards will be possible given funding changes).
There also used to be a dedicated website for GRFP info: https://www.nsfgrfp.org/, which now resolves to the NSF page for the upcoming solicitation. The Internet Archive has an older version of the website which has some good information.
(I posted much of the above on BlueSky last week, but discoverability isn’t great there, so I made this blog post).
Under recent solicitations, people could apply to the GRFP twice: once as undergrads, and once (typically in their second year) in grad school. Since the people in the first set might also be applying to grad school, the https://applyingtoeeb.info page I made may have some helpful info, too.
To subscribe, go to https://brianomeara.info/blog.xml in an RSS reader.
Citation
@online{o'meara2025,
author = {O’Meara, Brian},
title = {GRFP 2025},
date = {2025-09-04},
url = {https://brianomeara.info/posts/grfp_2025/},
langid = {en}
}