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 2026. The NSF indicates that some data for 2023 are preliminary and may be revised later. Similarly, the data for 2024 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 2024 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 2025-2026, 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 2025 and FY 2026. We will revise these estimates as updated data are released.
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 2024, published in December 2025) with the survey results from the 13 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 latest data.
An additional data source for this section is the Nonprofit Research Activities Survey, which provides similar data for nonprofit research organizations. We combine the most recent survey data (FY 2023, published in October 2025) with the previous two years for which data are available. The next data release is expected in October 2026. We note that this survey is more limited in scope and has a different taxonomy than the Higher Education Research and Development Survey.
We adjust for inflation by converting all funding amounts to constant 2024 dollars for the university data and to constant 2023 dollars for the nonprofit research organization data, using the conversion method noted in the previous section.
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 2024, published in February 2026) with historical survey data for all full-time graduate students (1980-2024), doctoral students only (2017-2024), master’s students only (2017-2024), and postdocs (2010-2024) in science, engineering, and health fields. Part-time students are excluded in our analysis. 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.
Similarly, NSF reclassified some institutions as ineligible for this survey in 2024, resulting a small decrease in the number of graduate students. For more information, see https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf25346.
This section relies on two sources from the NSF National Center for Science & Engineering Statistics described above. University R&D expenditure data are from the Higher Education Research & Development Survey (FY2024, published in December 2025). NSF notes that the aggregated state and national totals based on this survey differ slightly from the National Patterns of R&D Resources dataset that we use in the “R&D Overview” section of this report, primarily due to varying consideration of pass-through funds and academic year reporting versus calendar year approximations. For more information, see https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb202326/notes (Note 2). We note that the data for Johns Hopkins University includes nearly $1.3 billion in R&D expenditures by the Applied Physics Laboratory, which is a University Affiliated Research Center. There are 14 additional University Affiliated Research Centers across the U.S. ranging in size from $2 million to $213 million in 2024; for more information, see the NSF Survey of Federal Funds for Research and Development (2024-2025, published in May 2026) (Tables 44 and 45).
The data on graduate student and postdocs in science and engineering are from the Survey of Graduate Students and Postdoctorates in Science and Engineering (FY2024, published in February 2026). For engineering and health related fields, we present the field level data as subfields. This section of the report provides the ability to include part-time students in addition to full-time students, although the funding source data are only available for full-time students.
This section uses data collected and provided by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). We present the latest available Main Science and Technology Indicators data, released in March 2026, with a time series beginning in 1992 and extending in some cases to 2025. The next data release is expected in March 2027. There is a lag in reporting for some countries, and not all countries report every variable. We present map values and rankings based on the most recent year reported. Consistent with the OECD data source, most R&D expenditures are reported in constant 2020 dollars and adjusted for purchasing power parity to account for inflation and differences in cost of living and pricing across countries. In some cases, such as for basic research expenditures, it is necessary to present the data in current year dollars. We also present basic research and R&D expenditures as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) to assess a nation’s investment relative to the size of its economy.
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):