Free UK grant finders for charities: what each one covers and what it leaves out

A UK charity can find most open grants without paying for a database, by using the free finders run by government, the lottery distributors, the national infrastructure bodies and the open-data community, each of which covers one source well. The gaps are that none of them covers everything, most require registration, and only a few track deadlines. This guide lists eight free finders and the paid Northern Ireland service GrantTracker, what each covers, and what it leaves out, as checked on 26 October 2026.

Government grants

GOV.UK Find a grant is the Cabinet Office service for government grants. It lets you search and filter grants, check eligibility and see how to apply, and the site says more grants and functionality will be added as the service develops. It covers government departments and some arm's-length bodies, not trusts, lottery funding or local funders. OpenGrant ingests it as one of its sources, so its records appear on the charities page alongside everything else.

GOV.UK finance and support for your business is the older business finder, listing 173 schemes on 26 October 2026 by region and type. Much of it is loans, advice and local programmes, but community grants such as a Breckland scheme for charities, CICs and schools appear too.

Innovation Funding Service lists Innovate UK and UKRI competitions, 29 of them on 26 October 2026, with opening and closing dates and eligibility. It is the authority for innovation grants; Innovate UK's OpenGrant page listed 46 open or forthcoming schemes drawn from it on the same day.

Lottery funding

The National Lottery Community Fund programme finder filters by nation, amount band and status, and each entry shows a decision time. On 26 October 2026 its first page ran from Small Eco Awards (£300 to £20,000, 12 weeks) to the UK Fund (£500,000 to £5 million, 36 weeks). OpenGrant listed 17 open or forthcoming schemes from the Fund, including Awards for All England; see how to apply to Awards for All England. The other distributors, the National Lottery Heritage Fund, Arts Council England, Creative Scotland and Sport England, each publish their own programme lists.

Grants already made

GrantNav, from 360Giving, is free and open: 1,565,468 grants from 355 funders on 26 October 2026, searchable and downloadable under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. It answers "who has funded organisations like mine?" better than anything else, and nothing about what is open now. GrantNav versus OpenGrant explains how to use it with a finder of open calls.

National finders

• Funding Scotland, run by SCVO: a "free online search engine" listing funders with a track record in Scotland, with recently opened funds and deadlines on the front page. A My SCVO account is required; members get extra features.
• Funding Wales, run by WCVA for Third Sector Support Wales: free search of hundreds of grant and loan opportunities from local, national and international sources, with registration required and a steer to your County Voluntary Council for application support.
• GrantTracker, developed by NICVA: "Northern Ireland's leading funding toolkit", with tracked-scheme reminders at nine, three and one weeks before deadlines, a weekly email of new and reviewed schemes and a monthly digest. This is a paid alternative: its about page lists £165 a year, or £115 for NICVA members, checked 26 October 2026. It is not one of the eight free finders.

Each of these is the best starting point for its nation, and each is strongest on the national and local funders that UK-wide tools miss.

Directories and signposting

Charity Excellence Funding Finder is a free directory for registered users, with sections for small charities and unregistered groups, filters by amount and category, and links to other funding lists. It gives no count of funders and does not show whether programmes are open; see Charity Excellence versus OpenGrant. Community foundations are the other free directory worth knowing: each publishes its live funds, and OpenGrant lists them, such as Somerset Community Foundation's 16 schemes on 26 October 2026.

OpenGrant's free tier

OpenGrant brings open calls from the publishers above together in one place, with a source link and last-verified date on each record. On 26 October 2026 it listed 1,021 open, rolling and forthcoming schemes: 396 for charities and community groups, 525 for small businesses, 56 for schools, and monthly deadline pages showing 138 schemes closing in October and 121 in November. Every scheme with full criteria and a weekly alert for your filters is free with an account. What costs £29 a month is the funder research layer: register data and 360Giving evidence on 49,000 or more trusts, the peers lookup and exports. What OpenGrant lacks, as its comparison page says, is hand-written programme summaries and the long tail of small trusts that publish nothing online.

What the free finders leave out

Three gaps are common to all of them. First, small grant-making trusts that have no website and publish no data: they exist only on the charity registers and in paid trusts directories. Second, deadlines: coverage varies; Funding Scotland and OpenGrant show deadlines across funders, and the paid GrantTracker service provides deadline reminders. Third, criteria detail: the national finders and Charity Excellence give a summary and send you to the funder; GOV.UK Find a grant and OpenGrant carry eligibility, but the funder's own page is always the authority. For how to turn these tools into a shortlist, read the complete guide to charity grants, and for the paid options and their prices see GrantFinder alternatives. Descriptions of each service are taken from its own site on 26 October 2026 and may change.