Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences

The National Science Foundation funds basic research and education in behavioral, cognitive, and economic sciences through the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences program (CFDA 47.075), with the most recent grant award dated October 1, 2026.

The program has maintained steady activity over the past several years, disbursing 31,560 awards since 1990. Recent annual award volume declined from 827 awards in 2022 to 95 awards year-to-date in 2026, reflecting a significant contraction. The portfolio combines $5.22 billion in federal dollars obligated with $5.24 billion in total obligated dollars, indicating negligible cost-share. Approximately 99 percent of the portfolio consists of Project Grants, with Cooperative Agreements accounting for 1 percent.

NSF dominates funding concentration across its internal divisions. The National Science Foundation as a whole (across all sub-units) accounts for 26,095 awards and $3.76 billion in federal dollars obligated. Within SBE, the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences leads with 2,649 awards and $584.3 million obligated, followed by the Division of Social and Economic Science with 2,078 awards and $578.4 million obligated. The SBE Office of Multidisciplinary Activities contributed 563 awards totaling $215.1 million. The 27 distinct funding federal agencies in the portfolio contribute a combined remainder of less than 1 percent of total dollars.

Recent awards reflect a portfolio spanning cognitive neuroscience, language processing, learning sciences, and human-AI interaction. Representative recent grants include Project Grant 2605859 ($2,225,000 to study multi-regional neural dynamics and decision-making), Project Grant 2605896 ($2,043,141 investigating computational and neural mechanisms of speech motor learning), and Project Grant 2621434 ($1,499,998 building a multimodal dataset on student mathematical misconceptions). Smaller awards cluster in the $200,000–$900,000 range, with many sub-million individual grants supporting targeted cognitive science investigations.

Grant opportunities remain open, though recent postings are concentrated outside the SBE program core. The Expeditions in Computing program (solicitation 26-525, due July 27, 2027) funds up to $15 million over seven years for transformative computing research and explicitly welcomes neuroscience-inspired approaches to learning, memory, and reasoning. The Collaboratory to Advance Mathematics Education and Learning (CAMEL) program (solicitation 26-501, due October 5, 2076—a likely date error in the source) supports networks integrating science of learning research, education practice, and data science to generate high-value mathematics datasets for K–12. Neither is a direct Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences solicitation; the SBE program itself has no currently open standing opportunity listed in this portfolio block.