This report uses the following definitions drawn from the NSF HERD Survey:
We define the following terms for philanthropy, adapted from Conn et al. (2023):
The primary data source for this section is the NSF National Center for Science & Engineering Statistics (NCSES) National Patterns of R&D Resources, published in February 2025. The NSF indicates that some data for 2022 are preliminary and may be revised later. Similarly, the data for 2023 include estimates and are likely to be revised later. We note that NSF takes great care to collect high quality data on the funding sources and performers for R&D expenditures and avoid instances of double counting.
To adjust for inflation and enable meaningful comparisons over time, all historical funding amounts have been converted to constant 2023 dollars. We use the Bureau of Economic Analysis Gross Domestic Product Implicit Price Deflator for this conversion, consistent with NSF’s approach.
To estimate legacy philanthropy at universities, we employ the approach of Conn et al. (2023), which uses a variety of sources to approximate that 25% of university institutional funds used for research are derived from past philanthropic giving. For nonprofit research organizations, our own analysis of the investment income and expenditure data in IRS form 990s indicates that 15% of nonprofit support at nonprofit research organizations can be attributed to legacy philanthropy.
To project federal R&D expenditures for FY 2024-2026, we extrapolated data by assuming that each federal agency will obligate funding for basic research, applied research, and development to each performer at the same relative percentages as the agency did in 2024, according to the NSF Survey of Federal Funds for Research and Development. We use the total R&D funding for each agency as enacted by law for FY 2024 and FY 2025 and as requested in the President’s Budget for FY 2026. We will revise these estimates as updated NSF data are released and as the FY 2026 budget is enacted.
The primary data source for this section is the NSF National Center for Science & Engineering Statistics Higher Education Research & Development Survey. We combine the most recent survey data (FY 2023, published in November 2024) with the survey results from the 12 previous years in which consistent data are available. In some cases, it was necessary to adjust the names of the fields and hierarchical structures to match the taxonomy of the 2023 data.
This section refers only to R&D at universities, although similar data are available for nonprofit research organizations in the Nonprofit Research Activities Survey for 2020-2022. The next data release (FY2023) is scheduled for October 2025.
We adjust for inflation by converting all funding amounts to constant 2023 dollars as noted above.
The primary data source for this section is the NSF National Center for Science & Engineering Statistics Survey of Graduate Students and Postdoctorates in Science and Engineering. We combine the most recent survey data release (FY 2023, published in January 2025) with historical survey data for all full-time graduate students (1980-2023), doctoral students only (2017-2023), master’s students only (2017-2023), and postdocs (2010-2023) in science, engineering, and health fields. We combine the data for science and health fields under the discipline “Science.”
NSF made some changes to the field and subfield classifications in 2017 and 2020, so there are some inconsistencies in the longitudinal data for graduate students and postdocs. For example, see the data on Agricultural and Veterinary Sciences and Molecular Biology.