Microgrants Open Now — 2026

All 31 microgrants, banded by ceiling

Every open program with a published maximum of $10,000 or less, grouped into three bands because a $500 award and a $10,000 award are not the same decision. Each row carries the catalog’s application-hours estimate, what an hour of that application is worth at the ceiling, and any published fee. Filter by band, state, deadline type, fee or effort.

SourcesWashington State Department of Commerce — STEP Export Voucher Program·MassCEC — Clean Energy Internship Program for Employers·Foundation for Contemporary Arts — Emergency GrantsChecked 5 September 2026.

What the microgrant applications actually ask

Which of these close next

One of the eighteen closes on November 6, 2026: Sephora Beauty Grant. After that, the Business Freedom Grant has a review round closing November 15, 2026 and a final deadline of December 31, 2026; the Tory Burch Foundation Fellows Program closes November 17, 2026; the Amber Grant for Women closes November 30, 2026; the Freed Fellowship Grant closes November 30, 2026; the HerRise MicroGrant closes November 30, 2026; the Hey Helen Grant closes November 30, 2026; the IFW Startup Accelerator Grant closes November 30, 2026; the YippityDoo Big Idea Grant closes November 30, 2026; the Hiring Our Heroes Small Business Grant closes December 15, 2026; the Outta Excuses Small Business Empowerment Grant closes December 31, 2026; the SecretSoS Small Business Grant closes December 31, 2026; the Her Agenda Breakthrough Grant closes January 19, 2027. The Hustle Grant: Monthly (winner named on the 15th; The Hustle announces each cutoff in its newsletter). Seated Together Small Business Microgrant: Rolling; reviewed in quarterly cycles. Hustler's MicroGrant: Applications open monthly (no published closing date). Awesome Foundation Micro-Grant: Rolling; most chapters choose a project each month. Thiel Fellowship: Rolling: applications are accepted year round. Each link opens that grant’s page with the draft form ready.

What each form asks, shortest application first. The question wording for each grant is on its own page, and a dash means we found no hard cap on the form.

Two things follow from the table. A short form is not an easy one: a 250-character limit leaves room for one or two sentences, so every word has to carry a fact. And four of the eighteen publish point or percentage weights, which differ from funder to funder, so read them before deciding where to spend your words.

GrantCompass drafts all eighteen of these applications from your own answers: four short questions, a free preview with no card, and $9 for the full draft. We use only what you tell us, and you submit it yourself on the funder’s form. Start from the box above, or read how the drafting works.

Closing in November 2026

4 microgrants have a firm cut-off between today and November 30, 2026, sorted soonest first. Every one is a grant, and several of them reopen — a monthly or quarterly close is a cadence, not a last chance.

The three bands, and why they are different decisions

Every list of microgrants prints them as one pile. They are not one pile. The work is roughly constant across the bands while the money is not, so the calculation a founder should run changes completely between them.

Which are worth the hour

The best hours on this page are the shortest ones. AdIQ Cares publishes a 15-minute application against a $2,500 award — about $10,000 for the hour. (The Galaxy Grant, the other 15-minute form, closed its round on October 31, 2026; the next round has not been announced.) Skip and HerRise come next at roughly $2,000 an hour. Then the Hey Helen Grant at $4,000 an hour for its $10,000 ceiling. None of these asks for a business plan, and that is exactly why they attract thousands of entrants.

The worst hours are not the small awards — they are the small awards with institutional paperwork. Colorado’s pre-approved equipment grant is the floor of this page at roughly $125 an hour: four hours of registration and forms for up to $500 of hardware, delivered as equipment rather than money. Tampa’s microgrant is $300 an hour and gated behind a partner referral. Baltimore’s Facade Improvement Grant is $500 an hour, and it also wants a 1:1 match and pays only after the work is finished. Nobody writing a microgrant listicle says any of this, because the arithmetic is unflattering to the listicle.

Microgrants stop well short of larger awards, and which programs pay $50,000 to a small business lists the programs that go further.

Now discount it by your odds, because the ratio does not include them. A fifteen-minute application that anyone in the country can file is competing against everyone; a ten-hour application that only a low-income microenterprise in one city can file, through a City-approved partner, is competing against a far smaller pool. On raw arithmetic that grant looks like a worse hour. On expected value it is very often the better one, and the same logic makes a single city’s facade program more winnable than any national monthly draw. 15 of the 31 programs here are tied to a single state or city, across 11 states — and those are the ones a national list will never show you.

The application fees nobody prints

5 of the 31 programs on this page charge a non-refundable application fee, between $15 and $25. All 5 are private or foundation-run; no government program in this slice publishes one. 5 state explicitly that applying is free. The remaining 21 say nothing either way, which is not the same as saying it is free.

In absolute terms the fees are small. Against the award they are trivial if you win: $15 on the Hey Helen Grant’s $10,000 is 0.15%, and $25 on the Her Agenda Breakthrough Grant’s $5,000 is half a percent. The number that matters is the other one — the fee is 100% of your cost when you do not win, and most applicants do not win. The Freed Fellowship is the clearest case: $19 to enter, a $500 monthly award, and a cycle that repeats every month, so a founder who enters all year has spent $228 chasing $500. That can still be a rational bet. It should be a knowing one.

A fee is not by itself a warning sign — Her Agenda and HerRise are long-running, well-documented programs, and several waive or halve the fee for members and subscribers. What should stop you is a fee that scales with the award, a fee paid to a third party rather than the funder, or a “grant” that asks for bank details before it has selected anyone. None of those patterns appear in this slice. Where a program on this page charges, the amount is in the fee column of the table above.

How to tell a real microgrant from a fake

The fee section above covers whether a $15 entry is worth paying; this covers whether the program is real. Fakes borrow real grants’ names and arrive as texts, emails and direct messages. The Federal Trade Commission’s rule for grant offers holds here too: “Never share your financial or personal information with anyone who contacts you.”

If a message does any of these, do not reply. Report it to the Federal Trade Commission at ReportFraud.ftc.gov, and tell the real funder that someone is using its name.

See which grants you qualify for, from the funders themselves →

Cash, reimbursement, or equipment — it matters more than the number

Reimbursement is the quiet condition on the upper band. Every state export voucher here works this way, as do the facade and storefront programs: SF Shines and Portland’s repair grant both pay against receipts for completed work, and Baltimore’s FIG combines reimbursement with a 1:1 match and prior approval. MassCEC’s internship program reimburses a wage you have already paid. None of that makes them bad — they are among the most winnable programs on this page, because far fewer businesses can float the cost — but they are working-capital decisions, not free money.

Two rows are not cash at all. Colorado’s pre-approved equipment grant ships you LED fittings and aerators from a fixed catalogue. The South Carolina Apprenticeship Tax Credit is the one program here that is not a grant at all: it reduces a South Carolina income tax bill by up to $4,000 per apprentice per year, which is worth exactly nothing to a business that does not owe South Carolina income tax. It is on this page because it appears on published microgrant lists, labelled, rather than quietly counted as a grant.

The reimbursement that costs nothing extra. The exception worth knowing is USDA’s Organic Certification Cost Share, which pays back up to 75% of a certification fee you were always going to pay, up to $750 per scope, with no competition and no scoring. It was defunded in early 2025 and restored on July 4, 2025 through FY2029, which is why several lists still show it as dead. Any certified organic operation qualifies; you apply through your state agriculture department, which sets its own window.

If you need licensed kitchen space rather than cash, see who funds commissary and shared kitchens.

The ones that come back — and why the calendar is the hard part

14 of the 31 programs on this page run on a repeating cycle — monthly, quarterly, twice-yearly, or in Skip’s case twice a week. Missing one is not losing an opportunity; it is waiting thirty days.

This is the structural difference between microgrants and the big state and federal programs, and it changes what a founder should actually be good at. A $500,000 manufacturing grant rewards a strong application. A $1,000 monthly microgrant rewards showing up every month with a reasonable one. The Awesome Foundation takes that furthest: 80-plus independent chapters, each awarding $1,000 a month against its own theme or city, and you may apply to more than one. NASE’s Growth Grant accepts applications any time and reviews them each quarter (April, July, October and January), so a member who applies today is judged in the next review. Secretsos runs quarterly and explicitly does not roll applications over — you resubmit each quarter or you are not in it.

The practical failure is not rejection, it is drift: a founder applies to three microgrants in one motivated week, wins none of them because most people win none of them, and never applies again. The programs that reward persistence are precisely the ones a person cannot hold in their head. That is what a deadline watch is for, and starring a program in the database puts it on one — free, no subscription.

How monthly microgrant winners are picked, and whether your entry carries over

What this means for how you enter. Where one entry lasts a year, entering again adds nothing unless the business has changed. Where entries expire with the round (HerRise, SecretSoS, Freed), you stay in only by entering again. And where only winners hear back, a quiet month is a no, not a delay.

Quarterly and twice-yearly rounds, and which of them are taking entries: small business grants open now →

A monthly entry routine for the month-end microgrants

Microgrants reward the founder still entering in month eight. This routine follows each funder’s own rules on closing day, carry-over and fee. For what each award pays over a year, see monthly grants for women, compared over a full year.

1. Once: build an answer bank.Your story at three lengths, one proof line with a real number, and a spending plan priced at $500, $1,000, $2,500 and $10,000.
2. Early in the month: the chapter windows.Some Awesome Foundation chapters take submissions only in a set window, such as the 1st to the 10th. Check your chapter’s page.
3. Mid-month: results, and one update.YippityDoo notifies around the 15th, Hey Helen announces by mid-month, Amber by the 21st. Add any new number to your proof line.
4. Last week: enter the month-end grants.HerRise, Freed, YippityDoo and Hustler’s each take a fresh entry for the month. Amber gets an entry if three months have passed since your last one. Hey Helen only if you have never entered, your entry is more than 12 months old, or something real has changed.
5. March, June, September and December: add SecretSoS.Its window is the calendar quarter, and entries do not roll over.

The lean version. One $15 Hey Helen entry sits in 12 rounds; Amber and SecretSoS add eight entries for $120. That is 20 draws for $135 a year. Add the $15-a-month grants only if you have something new to say each month, and Freed at $19 if its written feedback is worth that on its own. Amber waives its fee on request by email.

Start with the one entry that lasts a year: the Hey Helen Grant →

What a strong 250-character microgrant answer looks like

The Amber Grant tells applicants not to “sound corporate” and says it wants no formal business plan. Below is an illustration we wrote for an imaginary Tulsa bakery, not a real application or past winner. The character counts are exact.

The story question

The use-of-funds question

One story, three lengths

The same facts serve every form. Write the longest version first, then cut.

For the quickest forms overall, by the hours each one takes, see the easiest small business grants.

Draft your HerRise answers from your own facts: free preview, $9 for the full draft →

The numbers behind “microgrants open now”

31 programs from the 736 in the GrantCompass catalog are listed here: each publishes a ceiling of $10,000 or less and is open as of November 1, 2026. The median ceiling among them is $4,500 and the median application takes 3 hours.

• Microgrants are the one honest corner of this market. 30 of 31 are genuine grants. Among programs tagged veteran in the same catalog, only 2 of 21 open ones are; among those tagged rural, 6 of 28. Small awards attract fewer lenders dressing debt up as free money.
• Nearly half of this money is private. 15 of 31 programs are run by companies and foundations rather than government, which is the reverse of every larger band in the catalog and is why microgrants move faster and ask for less.
• Effort varies by a factor of forty, award by a factor of twenty. The applications run from 15 minutes to 10 hours; the ceilings from $500 to $10,000. The two are only loosely related, which is the entire argument for reading the effort column before the amount column.
• 15 of 31 are local. Tied to one of 11 states or a single city or county. These are the winnable ones, and they are the first thing a national listicle drops.
• 14 run on a repeating cycle. For this size of award, a calendar beats a better application.

Frequently asked questions