Small Business Grants Open Now — September 2026

Find grants open in your state and industry

Filter the 100 highest-priority open programs by state, industry, and funding type — sorted by closing date, soonest first. This covers the top 100 of the 168 open programs by urgency and award size; every one of the full 168 is in your free GrantCompass report.

SourcesUSDA Farm Service Agency — Organic Certification Cost Share Program (OCCSP)·North Carolina Film Office — North Carolina Film Incentives·Washington State Department of Commerce — STEP Export Voucher Program·Wyoming Business Council — Business Ready Community Grant and Loan Program·Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation — Funding Criteria for Early-Stage Social Enterprises·City of Chicago Department of Planning and Development — Neighborhood Opportunity Fund HomeChecked 5 September 2026.

Closing in the next 60 days

These 32 programs have a firm deadline between now and November 6, 2026, sorted soonest first. Apply to the 25 closing this month before anything else on this page.

How “open now” is defined, and what it isn't

A program counts as open on this page only if its GrantCompass catalog status is active and one of two things is true: it accepts applications on a rolling, year-round, or continuous basis (126 programs), or it has a published deadline on or after September 7, 2026 (42 programs). We excluded 63 active grant-type programs whose next intake is described only in general terms (“opens next spring,” “quarterly, dates vary”) without a specific tracked date, and 0 more whose last tracked deadline has passed without a new round being published — they may well reopen, but we won't claim “open now” for a program without a concrete open window. 18 of the 168 open programs publish no numeric award ceiling (formula- or payroll-based awards); they still count toward the totals here and appear in your full match report.

The numbers behind “open now”

Of the 736 US funding programs in the GrantCompass catalog, 410 are structured as grants (as opposed to loans, tax credits, or other program types). 231 of those 410 grant programs are currently active, and 168 of the 231 are verifiably open today by the definition above.

Key takeaways

• 168 of 736 catalog programs are open today. “No deadline listed” on a search engine doesn't mean nothing is open — it means you need a source that tracks status, not just dates.
• Rolling beats deadline-chasing. 126 of the 168 open programs have no fixed cutoff at all — apply on your schedule, not a countdown.
• 10 programs close within the next two weeks — SBIR Phase II — NIH (PHS Omnibus) (Sep 8), STTR Phase II — NIH (PHS Omnibus) (Sep 8), USDA NRCS Wetland Mitigation Banking Program (WMBP) (Sep 8), SBIR Phase I — NIH (PHS Omnibus) (Sep 8) — if one fits your business, that's today's priority, not this page.
• State programs dominate the open list (80 of 168) — check your state's economic development agency even if you've already ruled out federal grants.
• This page refreshes monthly. Bookmark grantcompass.co/small-business-grants-open-now rather than a dated search result — the URL stays the same, the data doesn't.

Frequently asked questions