Every FRC Grant for the 2027 Season: Deadlines & Amounts

The most important date on an FRC business lead's calendar isn't kickoff. It's November 17, 2026 at 5:00 p.m., when FIRST's initial event registration payment comes due for the 2027 season. Season registration is $6,500 for every team this year, and that buys you one Regional event or two District events. Additional Regional events run $3,200 each, additional District events are $1,000, and those invoices are due January 21, 2027 at 5:00 p.m. ET. District Championship is $4,000. FIRST Championship is $6,000. Every grant in this article exists to get you to November 17 with the first bill already handled.

As of today, August 3, 2026, here is exactly where things stand for the 2027 BIOCORE presented by Haas season. Two FRC grants are live on the FIRST Team Grant Portal: BAE Systems closes September 13 and Boston Scientific closes September 30. Gene Haas has been accepting 2026/2027 applications since May 1. John Deere's portal is open with a November 6 FRC deadline. The Intuitive Foundation portal closes in the second week of this month. NASA has not posted a 2027 cycle at all. Two FRC grants — Digital Citizen Fund and Dow — already closed in June.

Every date and dollar figure below came from the grant's own page or from firstinspires.org today. Where a program hasn't published its 2027 numbers, I say so plainly rather than recycling last year's date and hoping it holds. "Not yet posted" means exactly that: check the source before you build a budget around it.

Every 2027 FRC grant at a glance

Two honest caveats on that table. First, most corporate sponsors routed through FIRST decline to publish a dollar figure, because the pool gets divided among however many qualified teams apply. Boston Scientific states outright that the amount and type of grants differ every year. Don't budget a specific number against these; budget the possibility. Second, the Gene Haas amounts are the most-cited figures in the FRC community and appear on multiple regional partner sites, but the Foundation's own application page lists neither an amount nor a close date. Apply on the assumption you'll find out when you're notified.

The September deadline cluster

Three FRC grants stack up between September 11 and September 30, and that's not a coincidence. Kit and Kickoff registration opens September 24, 2026, Round 1 event preferencing runs September 24 through October 1, and FIRST has said season registration payment becomes available "in September" without naming a date. Sponsors time their close dates so award decisions land before teams are locked into a payment.

Here's the sequence to work backward from:

• September 11 — Argosy new-team grant closes (California new teams)
• September 13 — BAE Systems FRC Grant closes
• September 24, 12:00 p.m. ET — Kit and Kickoff registration opens; event payment becomes available; Round 1 event preferencing opens
• September 30 — Boston Scientific FRC Grant closes
• October 1 — Round 1 preferencing closes; late registration opens October 2
• October 15–22 — Round 2 event preferencing
• October 29 — Unrestricted Regional and additional in-district registration opens
• November 6 — John Deere FRC grant deadline
• November 12 — Pre-Kickoff Virtual Kit Release
• November 17, 12:00 p.m. ET — Kit and Kickoff registration closes
• November 17, 5:00 p.m. — Initial event registration payment due
• January 9, 2027 — Kickoff, 12:00 p.m. ET
• January 21, 2027 — Additional event fees due
• February 20, 2027 — Week Zero
• March 3 – April 18, 2027 — Competition weeks 1 through 7
• April 28 – May 1, 2027 — FIRST Championship, Houston

The practical read: if you want grant money applied to your registration rather than reimbursed after the fact, your applications need to be in by the end of September. That's seven weeks from today, and two of those weeks are the back half of August when nobody on your team is checking email.

The single most expensive mistake here is paying early. FIRST's grant FAQ is unambiguous: "If there is a possibility you are receiving a grant, you must wait to pay until you receive instructions from FIRST." And then the part that stings — "FIRST will not be able to make changes to orders after checkout." A team that pays $6,500 on September 25 and gets a NASA award in November does not get $6,500 back automatically. Wait.

National grants worth your time

The FIRST Team Grant Portal is the front door

Almost every corporate FRC grant is administered through the FIRST Team Grant Portal, which means one login, a consistent application format, and funds that land as credit on your team account rather than as a check you have to deposit somewhere. FIRST notes that new opportunities get posted throughout the year, so a portal you checked in June is not the same portal in August — Boston Scientific's 2027 grant only opened July 28, 2026.

Grant visibility lives in your Dashboard under Team Finances, in the "Funds & Grants" section. Lead Coach 1, Lead Coach 2, and the Team Admin can see it; nobody else can. If a sponsor tells you that you've won and the credit doesn't appear within five business days, email teamgrants@firstinspires.org rather than assuming it's in transit.

NASA: not open yet, and that's normal

The NASA Robotics Alliance Project grant is the single best deal in FRC, because it covers your entire first Regional registration or your District registration, paid straight to FIRST. It is also the one people panic about every August.

As of today, robotics.nasa.gov has not published a 2027 application page. The most recent grant post is the 2025-2026 cycle, which went live September 1, 2025 and closed Tuesday, September 30, 2025 at 11:59:59 p.m. EDT. Awards for that cycle were announced November 15, 2025, with 114 teams listed under Program Growth Grants — 57 rookie, 43 year-two, and 14 new veteran. If NASA repeats that pattern, expect the 2027 page to appear around the start of September with a September 30 close — but that is a pattern, not a posted date, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

What's worth knowing now, from the last published cycle: eligibility ran to US-based Rookie, Year-Two, and New Veteran teams only, with an explicit note that "There are no Veteran grants being offered this year." Year-Two teams had a real bar to clear — they had to have secured $5,000 in corporate funds and be willing to mentor another robotics team. And NASA cannot fund teams outside the United States. There's also a compliance piece teams forget: every student had to complete an online entrance survey before kickoff and an exit survey at season's end. Our NASA FRC sponsorship grant guide walks through the application itself.

If you're a rookie or second-year team, put a recurring calendar check on robotics.nasa.gov for the first week of September. Don't wait for someone to post it on Chief Delphi.

Gene Haas Foundation

The Gene Haas Foundation's application page says it "will be accepting applications for the FIRST Robotics (FRC & FTC) 2026/2027 Competition Season after May 1, 2026." That window is open right now. No close date is posted, but the portal adds a soft one worth respecting: "Funding begins in late August, applications received after September 1st will receive funding in January of the following year," and "Grant funding will close when funds have been exhausted for that school /competition year." Teams outside the US and Canada have a hard window — "eligible to apply between May 1, 2026, to September 15, 2026."

The eligibility framing matters more than most teams realize. Haas funds "student team sponsorship grants for approved competitions (FRC, FTC, SAE, etc.) in which students design and build a product that utilizes CNC machining." Your application should actually describe machining — a gearbox plate you milled, a swerve module you fabricated, shop access you're trying to fund. A generic "we need help with registration" ask reads as a poor fit.

There's one hard restriction, stated in all caps on their site: grant funds cannot be used for any product Haas Automation manufactures or that a Haas Factory Outlet sells, including Haas Tooling or a service call to repair machines. So don't propose buying a Haas mill with a Haas grant. Raw stock, tooling from other vendors, registration, and travel are the safe asks. More detail in our Gene Haas and Intuitive Foundation grants guide.

Intuitive Foundation: this one closes in days

The Intuitive Foundation publishes its FRC grant timeline in relative terms rather than fixed dates. For the 2027 competition season: final reports from previous recipients were due the third week of May, the application portal opened the first week of June, the portal closes the second week of August, and grant notifications go to FIRST in the third week of October.

The Foundation publishes only a month-and-week window, never a calendar date, so "second week of August" works out to roughly August 9–15, 2026 — days from now. Verify the exact cutoff on their page before assuming you have time; note also that their published schedule still carries a stale "November 2025" payment line under a 2027-season heading. If you are a returning team that has not started this application, it is the highest-urgency item on this page.

Eligibility rules out rookies entirely: "any non-rookie team registered with FIRST may submit an application," and you must have competed in at least one official FIRST competition and be registered with FIRST for the current season. If you received an Intuitive grant last year and never filed your final report, you're disqualified. Amounts aren't published — the Foundation says only that "top scoring teams are funded at intervals based on their ranking," and that incomplete applications will not be reviewed. Questions go to FIRST@intuitive-foundation.org.

John Deere

The 2026-2027 John Deere FIRST Grant Application is open on Submittable with an FRC deadline of November 6, 2026 (FLL Challenge and FTC close September 25; FLL Explore, December 18). John Deere supports "teams participating in any FIRST program that are either located in an eligible John Deere home community, or supported by a committed, in-person John Deere employee serving as a mentor or coach."

Read "while funding remains available" as a real constraint, not boilerplate — the application can close before the posted date if the pool empties. The November 6 date is late enough to be a genuine backstop if your September applications don't land, but early enough to still hit the November 17 payment deadline. Apply in September anyway.

Regional and state grants

This is where teams leave the most money on the table, because nothing here appears on firstinspires.org. Regional and state Program Delivery Partners run their own funds, and the only reliable way to find them is to read your PDP's website and email your Regional Director directly.

The clearest current example is California. FIRST California is administering an Argosy Foundation new-team grant of $3,000 in unrestricted funds per team, available only to brand-new FRC teams starting in the 2026-2027 season. The deadline is September 11, 2026, it's first come, first served with limited funds, you apply by emailing your Regional Director, and funds are distributed through Hack Club Bank. "Unrestricted" is doing real work in that sentence — registration, parts, travel, food, whatever you need. That flexibility is rare and worth prioritizing over a restricted grant of similar size.

Argosy also funded a $1,000 FTC rookie grant, but read the fine print before counting on it: it is the "FTC SIM Argosy Rookie Team Grant," limited to FTC SIM users, applied for through FIRST Robotics Canada rather than the FIRST portal, restricted to FIRST Tech Challenge registration and products rather than unrestricted, and mutually exclusive with the FTC Hardship Grant. Its last cycle closed October 31, 2025 and no 2026-27 equivalent is posted.

Other partners run comparable programs, and California's structure is a good template for what to ask about: a rookie or new-team fund, a hardship fund, and sometimes a diversity or Title 1 fund. Send your Regional Director a short email this week with three questions — what team grants does the region offer this season, what are the deadlines, and is there anything that isn't listed publicly. Regional Directors generally know about money that never gets posted anywhere.

Boston Scientific's grant is worth calling out here too, because it's geographically scoped in a way that reads like a regional grant even though it lives on the national portal: only FRC teams within 60 miles of Boston Scientific locations in California, Indiana, Massachusetts, and Minnesota may apply. Their stated intent is making robotics affordable for students from economically disadvantaged schools and communities, and school or community economic data will be required. If you qualify on distance, pull your school's free-and-reduced-lunch percentage before you start the form.

What changed for 2026-27

FIRST made two structural changes this year that genuinely affect how you should plan, both announced in a June 17, 2026 blog post.

Grant funding now carries across seasons. This is the big one, and it reverses years of use-it-or-lose-it pressure. In FIRST's words: "Starting with the 2026-2027 season, grant funding applied to team accounts will be available for more than one season." Grant credit can be spent on "any purchases in the FIRST Storefront including team registration and event fees," and you can view each grant's expiration date inside the Storefront.

The catch is real, though: "Unutilized funding remaining on team accounts after its expiration date, will be removed and redirected to FIRST collective team funding." So carryover is not indefinite. Check the expiration date on every credit the moment it appears, and put that date in the same calendar as your registration deadlines.

Practically, this changes the math on over-applying. Previously, winning three grants that collectively exceeded your registration cost meant partially wasted awards. Now surplus credit can fund next season's registration — as long as you spend it before it expires.

Financial guarantors are now required for POs and tax exemption. If your team plans to apply a sales tax exemption certificate or pay with a purchase order, "the team profile will need to be associated with a financial guarantor." You set this up from the Team/Account Finances tab using an organization or institution EIN, or the international equivalent. School-based teams should do this now, in August, not in the November 16 scramble — getting an EIN and a signature out of a district business office is a multi-week errand.

Alongside those, the same post announced a refreshed FIRST Dashboard, a new FIRST Storefront slated to open in July 2026 where teams can add account credits, and Drive Base and Black Tote opt-outs folded into checkout when payment opens in September. Sales tax comes from a separate May 27, 2026 pricing post: FIRST "has updated its sales tax collection practices following a review by an independent tax consultant," registrations that include physical items "will be taxed based on the shipping address in applicable jurisdictions," and registration fees without physical items, "including event registrations, may also be subject to sales tax in certain areas." If your budget is built to the dollar, add a tax line.

What to have ready before you apply

Grant applications fail on missing paperwork far more often than on weak writing. Assemble this once, in a shared folder, and every subsequent application takes twenty minutes instead of two hours.

Your legal structure and EIN. Are you a school program, a 501(c)(3), or a program under a fiscal sponsor's 501(c)(3)? Gene Haas explicitly accepts public schools, private schools with 501(c)(3), or teams with their own 501(c)(3). John Deere's 2025-26 language required association with a public or private school or a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Know your answer and have the EIN and determination letter (or the district's tax-exempt letter) as a PDF.

A financial guarantor on your FIRST profile. Per the change above, you need this for purchase orders and tax exemption. Set it up in the Dashboard now.

A real budget. Not "we need money" — a line-item document showing $6,500 registration, an estimated parts spend, travel, and your confirmed income against it. Reviewers are reading dozens of applications and the ones with an actual spreadsheet attached read as competent. Our FRC budget calculator will get you a defensible set of numbers in about fifteen minutes if you're starting from scratch.

Your demographic and access data. Free-and-reduced-lunch percentage, Title 1 status, distance to the sponsor's nearest facility, percentage of team members who are girls or first-generation college-bound. BAE prioritizes Title 1 schools, Boston Scientific requires economic data, and Digital Citizen Fund funds majority-female rookie teams. You cannot answer these questions credibly on deadline day.

Employee mentor names, if applicable. Dow, John Deere, and Boeing all gate grants partly on having a company employee actively mentoring your team. If a parent works at one of these companies and shows up to builds, that's not a footnote — it's the whole eligibility case. Ask your parent list.

Last year's outcomes. Number of students, competitions attended, outreach events run, awards won, where your alumni went. Two or three specific numbers beat a paragraph of adjectives.

Grants that already closed, and when they come back

Missing a deadline is recoverable if you know when it reopens.

Digital Citizen Fund Rookie Team Grant closed June 1, 2026. It ran from February 2, 2026, awarding up to five grants of $5,000 each to US-based rookie FRC teams with all or at least majority-female membership. It's the largest single per-team FRC grant on the FIRST portal, and it opened four months before it closed. If you're founding an all-girls team, the 2028 cycle plausibly opens around February 2027 — watch for it.

Dow FRC Grant (US/Canada) ran May 26 to June 30, 2026. Dow's window is short, roughly five weeks, and it opens earlier than almost anything else. Dow also runs a separate international FRC grant of up to $3,000 for teams outside the US and Canada, which in the 2025-26 cycle ran September 1–30.

BAE Systems FLL/FTC grant closed July 8, 2026, though the FRC version is still open until September 13. If you also run FTC teams, note that BAE splits the programs into separate applications with very different deadlines.

REV Robotics #TeamREV has not posted a 2026-27 cycle and does not appear on the FIRST Team Grant Portal at all. Its last cycle ran in the late summer of 2025, offering a share of $100,000 across FTC and FRC, paid in REV store credit rather than cash, with teams already sponsored by another FIRST-centric vendor ineligible. I could not re-confirm those 2025 figures against revrobotics.com for this piece, so treat them as last-cycle context rather than a forecast, and check revrobotics.com directly in August.

Four more FRC grants ran last season and have not reposted for 2026-27. All four are worth a September check on the FIRST Team Grant Portal: the Arconic Foundation grant ($1,500 for FRC, last cycle August 11 – October 31, 2025), the Boeing FRC Team Grant (Boeing employee mentor required, last cycle October 20 – November 14, 2025), the Dow FRC International Team Grant (up to $3,000 for teams outside the US and Canada, last cycle September 1–30, 2025), and the Fikret Yüksel Foundation grant ($2,000 for teams based in Türkiye competing in Turkish regionals, last cycle September 25 – November 15, 2025).

The broader lesson: FRC grant season is not a season. It runs from February through December with clusters in June and September. Build a recurring calendar entry for the first Monday of every month that says "check the FIRST Team Grant Portal," and you'll stop missing windows.

How to write the ask

Most FRC grant applications are three to five short free-response boxes. Here's what actually separates a funded application from a rejected one.

Lead with the number and what it buys. "We are requesting $3,000, which covers 46% of our $6,500 season registration for the 2027 BIOCORE season." Not "we would be grateful for any support." Reviewers are allocating a fixed pool and they need to know what your slice does.

Answer the sponsor's actual mission, in their words. Gene Haas funds CNC machining, so write about machining. Boston Scientific funds access for economically disadvantaged communities, so lead with your school's economic data. BAE prioritizes Title 1 and proximity, so name the BAE facility and the mileage. Every one of these organizations tells you what they care about on the application page. The single highest-return editing pass is rereading their stated priority and making sure your first sentence matches it.

Use one concrete student outcome. "Four of our six 2026 seniors are studying engineering, three at in-state public universities" beats any amount of language about inspiring the next generation. Specific, verifiable, unglamorous.

Show that you raised money too. Grantmakers fund teams that are already fundraising, not teams that are only applying for grants. NASA's Year-Two eligibility literally required $5,000 in secured corporate funds. If you've raised $2,000 from a local machine shop, say so with the number. It signals your program survives whether or not this particular grant lands.

Be specific about the gap. "Without this grant we cover registration but cannot attend a second event" is a fundable problem. "We need money for the team" is not.

The same discipline that wins grants wins corporate sponsors, and the two pipelines feed each other — a company that sponsored you in cash is also a company whose employees might qualify you for a mentor-gated grant. If corporate outreach is the weaker half of your funding plan, start with how to get FRC sponsors and adapt the FRC sponsorship letter template rather than writing from a blank page.

Frequently asked questions

Can a rookie FRC team get its entire $6,500 registration covered by grants?**

Historically, yes, and NASA is the reason. In its last published cycle, the NASA FRC Sponsorship Grant covered a rookie team's first Regional registration or District registration in full, paid directly to FIRST rather than reimbursed. Stacking that with a state or regional new-team grant — California's $3,000 Argosy grant, for example — could cover registration and leave money for parts. The caveat for 2027 is that NASA has not published an application page as of August 3, 2026, so do not build your budget assuming it. Apply broadly, keep a fundraising plan that works without it, and treat a full-registration grant as upside.

What happens if I pay my registration and then win a grant?

This is the most common expensive mistake in FRC finance. FIRST's guidance is direct: if there's any possibility you're receiving a grant, wait to pay until you receive instructions from FIRST, because FIRST cannot make changes to orders after checkout. Grant funds are applied as credit to your team account and spent through the FIRST Storefront, so a payment you already made isn't retroactively swapped out. If you're waiting on a September decision, hold payment until you hear — the initial payment deadline is November 17, which leaves plenty of room.

Is the NASA FRC sponsorship grant still running for the 2027 season?

Unconfirmed as of August 3, 2026. NASA's Robotics Alliance Project site has not posted a 2027 application page, and the most recent grant post is the 2025-2026 cycle, which opened September 1, 2025 and closed September 30, 2025. NASA did award that cycle — 114 teams were listed under Program Growth Grants in the November 15, 2025 announcement — so the program was running as recently as last season. Check robotics.nasa.gov in early September rather than assuming either outcome.

Do I need 501(c)(3) status to apply for FRC grants?

Not always, but it widens the field considerably. Gene Haas accepts public schools, private schools with 501(c)(3), or teams holding their own 501(c)(3). John Deere's recent cycles required association with a public or private school or a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. School-based teams generally qualify through the district's tax-exempt status without incorporating separately. Independent community teams usually need either their own 501(c)(3) or a fiscal sponsor. Separately, if you want to use purchase orders or apply a sales tax exemption certificate through FIRST, you now need a financial guarantor tied to an organization EIN on your team profile.

Can I apply for and stack multiple FRC grants in one season?

Yes, and you should. The grants listed here have different sponsors, different eligibility criteria, and no shared cap, so a team near a BAE facility in a Boston Scientific state with a John Deere parent mentor can legitimately apply to all three. Starting with the 2026-2027 season, surplus grant credit is also less wasteful than it used to be, because FIRST now lets grant funding on team accounts carry into future seasons — though each credit has an expiration date visible in the Storefront, and unused funds past that date are removed and redirected to FIRST collective team funding. One exception to watch: REV Robotics excludes teams already sponsored by another FIRST-centric vendor.

**I missed the September deadlines. What's still available for the 2027 season?

John Deere is the main one, with an FRC deadline of November 6, 2026, though it can close earlier if funding runs out. Beyond that, your best moves are regional. Email your Regional Director and ask what's still open in your area, since PDP-administered funds often aren't posted publicly and sometimes run on rolling review. Also check the FIRST Team Grant Portal monthly rather than once — Boston Scientific's 2027 grant only appeared on July 28, 2026, and FIRST notes that new opportunities are posted throughout the year. Finally, remember that additional event fees aren't due until January 21, 2027, so a late grant can still fund a second competition even if it misses the November registration payment.