Business Grants That Award Every Month
Twelve US funding programs, selected from the GrantCompass catalog and checked against their funders’ own pages, make up this slice of grants whose cycle repeats inside one calendar year — and four of them pick a winner every calendar month. Those four — the Amber Grant for Women, the Freed Fellowship Grant, the HerRise MicroGrant and the Awesome Foundation Micro-Grant — make 72 award decisions between them in a year. Three more programs run quarterly, including the NASE Growth Grant, which our catalog moved from monthly to quarterly on September 3, 2026, and five are rolling with a monthly review rhythm, which is a different thing and is labelled as such below.
Updated October 1, 2026. Statuses, cadences and the planner were recomputed against the GrantCompass catalog on October 1, 2026. Every cadence, cutoff, fee and award figure printed in prose for these twelve programs was re-checked against the funder’s own page on August 24, 2026; the one cadence change since, NASE’s move to quarterly, comes from our catalog’s September 3 correction. Recomputed monthly, permanent URL.
See every program you qualify for — free →A two-minute eligibility check ranks all 736 US programs against your business and puts the recurring ones on a watch list. No card.
The twelve, and what a year of keeping up with them costs
All 12 programs with a within-year cadence, grouped monthly, quarterly, then rolling. Set a horizon and a cadence below and the planner adds up what following that group actually costs you in submissions, hours and entry fees, and how many award decisions your submissions would be entered into. The figures come from the table’s own rows, so filtering the table changes the sums.
| Program | Cadence | Award | Effort per attempt | Entry fee | Competition | Decisions a year | Status on Oct 1, 2026 | Win Layer |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amber Grant for Women WomensNet awards three separate $10,000 grants a month (Monthly, Startup and Business Category) and rolls three monthly winners into $50,000 year-end grants. The $15 fee is waivable on request. | Monthly Every month — three awards | $10,000 × 3 monthly, plus three $50,000 year-end | 2.5 hr | $15 | 5/5 | 36 | Open — next cutoff 11:59pm ET, last day of each month (next: October 31, 2026) | 7 locked |
| Freed Fellowship Grant Judged against Freed’s published five-part rubric: Context, Content, Community, Chemistry, Commerce. Year-end grant is drawn from that year’s Fellows. | Monthly Every month — one Fellow | $500 monthly, plus a $2,500 year-end grant | 2 hr | $19 | 4/5 | 12 | Open — next cutoff midnight ET, last day of each month (next: October 31, 2026) | 7 locked |
| HerRise MicroGrant For businesses at least 51% owned by a woman of colour. A $15 administrative fee is charged at submission and is not refunded. | Monthly Every month — one winner | $1,000 | 30 min | $15 | 5/5 | 12 | Open — next cutoff 11:59pm, last day of each month (next: October 31, 2026) | 7 locked |
| The Awesome Foundation Micro-Grant Each chapter is independently funded by about ten trustees contributing $100 each, sets its own theme, and awards with no strings. Amount and cadence vary by chapter. | Monthly Every month — per local chapter | About $1,000 per chapter | 2 hr | None | 4/5 | 12 | Open — chapters review on their own monthly rhythm | 7 locked |
| NASE Growth Grant Requires paid NASE membership. Annual members may apply immediately; monthly members wait ninety days after joining. NASE may award less than requested. | Quarterly Four winners a quarter | Up to $4,000 | 4 hr | None | 3/5 | 16 | Not counted as open — quarterly review, no dated window; membership required | 7 locked |
| North Dakota Agricultural Products Utilization Commission (APUC) Grant Deadlines are January 1, April 1, July 1 and October 1. Only the first fifteen qualifying applicants each quarter are invited to present. | Quarterly Four deadlines a year | Varies by category | 24 hr | None | 3/5 | 4 | Open — quarterly; next deadline January 1, 2027 | 6 locked |
| Breva Thrive Grant Our catalog marks this open; the funder’s own page does not. Corrected in the maintenance trail below. One winner per quarter, no application fee. | Quarterly One award a quarter | $5,000 | 4 hr | None | 5/5 | 4 | Not yet counted as open — Q3 closed July 31; under the funder’s rules the Q4 window opens October 1, 2026 | 7 locked |
| Chicago Small Business Improvement Fund (SBIF) Chicago runs application windows district by district on a published rollout calendar, so the cadence is monthly in aggregate but annual for any one address. | Rolling Rolling — monthly windows by district | Up to $150,000 | 10 hr | None | 3/5 | continuous | Open — rolling, by TIF district | 7 locked |
| Michigan Business Development Program (MBDP) Not a recurring award. The Michigan Strategic Fund board meets monthly; awards above $1 million need board approval, smaller ones are signed by a designee. | Rolling Rolling — monthly board meetings | $10,000 to $10M+, negotiated | 40 hr | None | 3/5 | continuous | Open — rolling, discretionary | 6 locked |
| Connecticut Innovations Proof-of-Concept Fund Connecticut Innovations responds to a pitch deck within about a week, then runs diligence for anywhere from three months to two years. | Rolling Rolling — reply within a week | $50,000 to $100,000 convertible note | 20 hr | None | 5/5 | continuous | Open — rolling, year-round | 6 locked |
| Tennessee Film and Entertainment Incentive (F&E Incentive) Applications must be filed at least four months before principal photography. Music video productions are explicitly eligible. | Rolling Rolling — committee review | Up to 30% of qualifying Tennessee spend | 20 hr | None | 2/5 | continuous | Open — rolling, four-month lead time | 6 locked |
| Portland Small Business Repair / Restore Grant Reimburses documented vandalism, break-in and graffiti repair within six months of the damage. Prosper Portland closes it when the money is gone. | Rolling Rolling — until the fund empties | Up to $10,000 | 4 hr | None | 2/5 | continuous | Open — first come, first served | 6 locked |
A monthly grant is only useful if you remember it exists on the 29th. The free eligibility check ranks all 736 US programs against your business, and starring a recurring one puts its month-end cutoff on the watch we run for you — every month, not once.
See your matches — free →Which business grants award every month?
Four US programs in this slice pick a winner every calendar month. The Amber Grant for Women awards three separate $10,000 grants a month through WomensNet and rolls three monthly winners into $50,000 year-end grants. The Freed Fellowship Grant selects one $500 Fellow a month plus a $2,500 year-end grant. The HerRise MicroGrant awards $1,000 a month. Each Awesome Foundation chapter funds about $1,000 a month independently. The NASE Growth Grant, listed here as monthly in August, now chooses four winners each quarter according to our catalog and sits with the quarterly programs.
Those four were the whole supply of true monthly grants in our catalog when this slice was verified, and it is worth saying plainly how small that was. Four programs out of 665. Two of the four are restricted by ownership: Amber and HerRise fund women-owned and women-of-colour-owned businesses respectively. Freed and the Awesome Foundation are open to anyone, and the Awesome Foundation is not one program at all but a network of independently funded local chapters that each pick a theme. Since then the catalog has grown to 736 programs and added further monthly microgrants — among them the Hey Helen Grant ($10,000, closing on the last day of each month), The Hustle Grant and the Coach K Legacy Grant ($1,000 each) — which have not yet been checked at the funder for this page.
The largest monthly cheque in this slice is $10,000, from Amber, and the Hey Helen Grant, added to our catalog since, also lists $10,000 a month. Every other true monthly award here is about $1,000 or less. A page promising monthly six-figure grants is describing either a rolling programme with continuous review, which is a different thing and is in the third group below, or something that does not exist.
Three cadences hide inside the phrase “monthly grant”
The twelve programs on this page do not all mean the same thing by “monthly”, and conflating them is how a founder ends up waiting for a decision that was never scheduled. Every row in the table above carries one of these three labels.
The third group is where the confusion is expensive. The Michigan Business Development Program appears in every “monthly grants” list that scrapes cadence language, because the Michigan Strategic Fund board meets monthly. It is not a recurring award: it is a negotiated, discretionary incentive for job-creating projects, sized case by case, where awards above $1 million need board approval and smaller ones are signed by a designee. Nobody wins it by submitting a good application in March and trying again in April.
The same caution applies to the other four rolling programs, but less severely. Chicago’s Small Business Improvement Fund opens district by district on a published rollout calendar, so the city is doing something monthly while any one address gets one window. Portland’s Repair and Restore Grant is first come, first served until the fund is empty. Genuinely continuous programs are covered separately in our guide to grants with no deadline.
Can you apply to the same grant more than once?
For the four monthly programs, repeated entry is the design rather than a loophole. WomensNet’s published rules for the Amber Grant define the year-end grants as awards to three of that year’s monthly winners, which only makes sense as a repeating cycle, and the Freed Fellowship draws its $2,500 year-end grant from the Fellows it selected month by month. What repeats is the cycle; whether one applicant may re-enter is set program by program, and two of the four do not say.
Where the funder is explicit, it is explicit. Amber charges its $15 fee per application, which is a straightforward statement that applications are per-cycle rather than per-person, and the fee is waivable on request. NASE, now quarterly, ties eligibility to membership rather than to a single attempt, so a member stays eligible from one review to the next; annual members may apply immediately and monthly members ninety days after joining. The Awesome Foundation is a network, so the same project can reasonably go to more than one chapter whose theme it fits, which is a different kind of repetition again.
Where the funder is silent, we say so rather than guess. HerRise’s own pages state the $1,000 award, the $15 fee and the 11:59pm last-day cutoff, and say nothing about re-entry; the widely repeated claim that you may reapply every month appears on third-party listings and not in HerSuiteSpot’s terms. The practical workflow either way is boring and effective: keep one reusable answer set covering what the business is, what the specific milestone is and what the money buys, note which month you sent what, and check each funder’s own terms before re-entering. Track the cutoffs in the database and we will watch them for you.
The month-end cluster: four in this slice, and a fifth since
Four programs in this slice, chosen from the 665-program GrantCompass US catalog in August, carry a deadline written as the last day of the calendar month: the Amber Grant for Women, the Freed Fellowship Grant, the HerRise MicroGrant and the Breva Thrive Grant. Three of the four are open now and share the same next-cutoff pattern: the last day of each month (next: October 31, 2026). The fourth, Breva, uses month-end to close a window that only awards quarterly. Since the slice was chosen, our catalog has added a fifth: the Hey Helen Grant, whose rounds close at 11:59pm Eastern on the last day of each month.
The cutoffs are not written the same way, and the difference matters at 11pm. Amber closes at 11:59pm Eastern on the last day of the month. Freed closes at midnight Eastern on the last day of the month, which is one minute later and, depending on how you read midnight, arguably a different day. HerRise closes at 11:59pm on the last day of the month without naming a zone in its own summary. Anyone treating “month end” as a single deadline is trusting three funders to agree, and they do not.
Month end also moves. February gives 28 days, four months give 30 and seven give 31, so a habit built on “the last Sunday” or “the 30th” drifts out of sync twice a year. This is the specific reason a recurring grant is easy to intend and hard to actually do, and it is why the deadline watch on a starred program is free on GrantCompass rather than a Pro feature. Women-founder programs dominate this cluster; our women’s business grant calendar lays that whole calendar out month by month.
What a year of recurring applications actually costs
Following all four true monthly programs for a year costs 84 hours of application work and $588 in entry fees, and puts your submissions in front of 72 award decisions. Following all twelve programs on this page costs 306 hours and the same $588, against 96 scheduled decisions — because the eight non-monthly programs add most of the work and only a quarter of the decisions.
- A single monthly sweep is 7 hours and $49. Amber at 2.5 hours and $15, Freed at 2 hours and $19, HerRise at 30 minutes and $15, and the Awesome Foundation at 2 hours and nothing.
- The money on the table in any one month is $12,500. That is Amber’s $10,000, HerRise’s $1,000, an Awesome chapter’s $1,000 and Freed’s $500, before Amber’s three $50,000 year-end grants.
- The recurring group is more contested than the catalog average. Median competition across the twelve is 3.5 out of 5, and the four monthlies sit at 4.5, against a median of 3 across all 410 grants in the catalog. Recurring cycles attract repeat applicants, which is the cost of the same feature that makes them attractive.
- Fees are concentrated in the fast, small awards. Three of the twelve charge to enter, all three are monthly, and none charges more than $19. The nine programs with no entry fee include every award above $5,000 except Amber’s.
Which three deserve a standing slot in your calendar
Hand-picked after reading all twelve records and re-checking each funder’s own page, weighing cadence, award size, entry cost and the public competition score. Written once by hand and left untouched by the monthly recompute, which rewrites only the table and planner above it.
Pick 1 · monthly · 2.5 hours · competition 5/5 · $15, waivable
Amber Grant for Women
It is the most contested program on this page and it is still first, because the structure is unusually generous to a repeat applicant. WomensNet awards three $10,000 grants a month across three tracks — a general monthly grant, a startup grant and a rotating business-category grant — which means three chances rather than one, and then selects three $50,000 year-end grants from that year’s monthly winners. Winning once therefore buys a second, much larger lottery ticket automatically. At 2.5 hours per attempt and a $15 fee that WomensNet waives on request, it is the only monthly program where the ceiling is high enough to matter to a real business.
Pick 2 · quarterly since September 2026 · 4 hours · competition 3/5 · paid membership required
NASE Growth Grant
The least contested program on this page with a fixed award cadence, and the membership gate is exactly why. Requiring paid membership in the National Association for the Self-Employed removes most casual applicants, so a member is competing against a far smaller field for up to $4,000, with four winners chosen each quarter. Two details change the plan: NASE may award less than you request, so an ask tied to one specific purchase reads better than a round number, and monthly members must wait ninety days after joining while annual members may apply straight away. If you intend to make this a habit, join annually. If you intend to try once, the membership cost makes it a poor trade.
Pick 3 · monthly · 2 hours · competition 4/5 · free
The Awesome Foundation Micro-Grant
The only free monthly with no ownership or membership restriction of any kind, and the only one where the same idea can legitimately go to several decision-makers. Each chapter is funded by about ten trustees putting in $100 each, picks its own theme, and gives roughly $1,000 a month with no strings and no repayment. That structure rewards fit over polish: a chapter dedicated to food, or disability, or a single city will pick a modest project that is clearly theirs over an ambitious one that is not. Read a chapter’s past grantees before writing, and treat the 2,000-character project description as the whole application, because it is.
The two we would not put in a calendar. The Breva Thrive Grant is one $5,000 award a quarter against a national field, and its Q4 window was scheduled to open on October 1, 2026 under the funder’s rules — a quarterly lottery is not a habit. The Michigan Business Development Program is genuinely large money and genuinely rolling, but it is negotiated project by project with the state, so the right first move is a conversation with a regional MEDC project manager, not a submission. The HerRise MicroGrant sits just outside the three: at 30 minutes it is the cheapest recurring attempt anywhere, which is why it appears instead in our list of grants you can apply to in under two hours.
What changed since last month — this slice’s correction log
Cadence claims decay faster than most grant facts, because a funder can quietly stop running a cycle without ever announcing it. Two of these twelve were wrong when we re-checked them on August 24, 2026, including one our own catalog was showing as open.
- NASE Growth Grant moved from monthly to quarterly, and ten of the twelve count as open. Our catalog’s September 3, 2026 correction records four NASE winners chosen each quarter, so NASE now sits with the quarterly programs, the monthly group is four, and the slice’s scheduled award decisions rise from 92 to 96 while a year of keeping up with all twelve falls from 338 hours to 306. Under our open-now rule, NASE (quarterly review with no dated window) and Breva (Q4 window due October 1 under the funder’s rules, not yet dated in our record) are not counted as open; the other ten are. Prosper Portland’s Repair Grant now shows the verified $10,000 ceiling. Our catalog has also added monthly microgrants that have not yet been assessed for this slice, including the Hey Helen Grant, The Hustle Grant and the Coach K Legacy Grant.
- Breva Thrive Grant is not open, and our catalog said it was. The GrantCompass record marks the program active with a live monthly application window. Breva’s own page shows the Q3 2026 window closed on July 31 and the next window opening October 1, 2026. This record had been on our unverifiable list since our first full catalog truth sweep, because Breva publishes its cycle dates inside a vector graphic that automated fetching cannot read; a direct read of the page on August 24 resolved it. The open count on this page is therefore eleven of twelve, not twelve of twelve, and the row is labelled between windows.
- North Dakota APUC typical-award range was stale. Our record described recent awards of roughly $16,000 to $115,000. The two 2026 rounds the North Dakota Department of Agriculture has announced awarded from $35,000 to $183,750 in February and from $66,300 to $200,000 in May. The quarterly deadlines of January 1, April 1, July 1 and October 1 and the rule that only the first fifteen qualifying applicants each quarter are invited to present were both confirmed unchanged. Range queued for correction; this page prints no dollar range for the program.
- The HerRise “reapply every month” line came out. It is repeated across third-party grant listings and appears nowhere in HerSuiteSpot’s own pages, which state the $1,000 award, the $15 administrative fee and the 11:59pm last-day cutoff and nothing about re-entry. We now describe the cycle as repeating and the re-entry rule as unstated.
- No NASE membership price is printed. An earlier draft carried a monthly dues figure taken from a secondary listing. nase.org returned 403 to every attempt to read its own membership pages on August 24, so the number is not published here. The membership requirement itself, and the ninety-day wait for monthly members, are confirmed on the program’s own page.
- Michigan Business Development Program relabelled from monthly to rolling. It qualifies for this slice only because the Michigan Strategic Fund board meets monthly. Treating it as a recurring award alongside Amber or HerRise would be misleading, so it now carries the rolling label and an explicit note that it is a negotiated, discretionary incentive.
- The Freed Fellowship record pointed at a dead domain. Our stored source URL 404s on the grant path. Everything on the live programme site — the $500 monthly award, the $2,500 year-end grant, the $19 fee, the midnight-Eastern cutoff and the five-part rubric — re-confirmed unchanged, so this is an address fix rather than a fact fix.
- Amber Grant structure confirmed against WomensNet’s published rules. Three $10,000 grants each month across the Monthly, Startup and Business Category tracks; three $50,000 year-end grants awarded to monthly winners, one from each track; 11:59pm Eastern on the last day of the month; $15 fee waivable by email. Re-confirmed again on August 24, 2026.
This ledger appends. Next month’s recompute rewrites the table and the planner above it and adds new entries here underneath, so the record of what we corrected survives the refresh.
Every row above carries locked intel
Cadence, fees and effort are the free measures. Underneath each row sits a Win Layer: our analysis of who wins the program and why applications fail — which matters more here than anywhere, because a recurring cycle means a rejected application can be rewritten and resubmitted next month rather than shelved for a year. Seven of these twelve programs carry all seven fields on file and the other five carry six.
- Approval odds
- What winners look like
- How it is judged
- Rejection traps
- Required documents
- When cash actually lands
- Clawback risk
Pro unlocks all seven fields on all 736 programs, plus deadline alerts. $49/mo · $249/yr.
See what Pro unlocks →Put the month-end cutoffs on a watch list
This page is one slice, chosen on August 24, 2026 and recomputed on October 1, 2026. The database holds all 736 US programs with what is true about each: cadence, status, deadline and who it is genuinely for. Star the recurring ones and the watch runs every cycle, not once — which is the only version of a monthly grant habit that survives a busy August. Free.
- 1. Filter to the recurring programs
- 2. Star the ones you can enter
- 3. We watch every month end
The questions founders actually type
“Grants you can apply for every month”
Four in this slice, and this page names all of them; our catalog has since added a few more, such as the Hey Helen Grant and The Hustle Grant, not yet checked here. The reason the number is so small is that a monthly cycle is expensive for a funder: someone has to read and judge submissions twelve times a year instead of once, which only pays for itself when the cheque is small enough that the reading is the main cost. That is exactly the pattern in the data — three of the four monthly awards here are about $1,000 or less, and the fourth, Amber’s $10,000, is funded by a $15 entry fee across a very large applicant pool. Anything larger reverts to an annual or a rolling structure. If your search was really for “grants I can apply for right now” rather than repeatedly, the wider answer is on every small business grant open now, which counts everything currently accepting applications regardless of cadence.
“What grants close at the end of the month?”
Four in this slice, and three of them close together on the last day of each month (next: October 31, 2026): the Amber Grant at 11:59pm Eastern, the Freed Fellowship Grant at midnight Eastern, and the HerRise MicroGrant at 11:59pm. The fourth, Breva Thrive, uses a month-end close on a quarterly window that is due to reopen in October. The Hey Helen Grant, added to our catalog since, also closes on the last day of each month, at 11:59pm Eastern. Practically, that clustering is useful: one evening in the last week of the month covers three separate applications, and two of the three are under two hours. It is also a genuine trap, because all three fees are non-refundable and charged at submission, so a rushed entry costs real money as well as time. Set the reminder for the 25th rather than the 31st, or star the programs and let the deadline watch do it.
“Do monthly grants actually pay out?”
The four monthly programs on this page all publish named recipients or recipient counts, which is the practical test. WomensNet has run the Amber Grant continuously for years and publishes monthly winners, and the Awesome Foundation lists funded projects chapter by chapter. What none of them publish is an approval rate, which is why the free columns on this page measure competition on a 1-to-5 scale rather than a percentage — a score we can defend, rather than a number nobody discloses. Treat a recurring microgrant as what it is: a $500 to $10,000 outcome with a real but modest chance, worth a standing calendar slot precisely because the attempt is cheap, and worth nothing as a funding plan.
“Monthly grants for women-owned businesses”
Three of the four monthly programs are for women or women of colour: the Amber Grant for Women, the HerRise MicroGrant, and, informally, the Freed Fellowship, which explicitly encourages women and underrepresented founders without restricting eligibility. That concentration is the single clearest pattern in this slice — the recurring-microgrant format is dominated by women-founder funders, while the annual and government layers are not. It also means a woman-owned business gets more out of a month-end habit than most: the same evening covers Amber’s $10,000, HerRise’s $1,000 and Freed’s $500 tracks. The full month-by-month view, including the annual and quarterly women’s programs this page deliberately leaves out, is in the women’s business grant calendar.