Grant Budget Template for Nonprofits

Take the categories, their names and their order from the funder's form, not from a standard list. For many US federal grants that is the SF-424A, whose instructions set out eight cost categories, Personnel through Other, followed by indirect charges¹. Foundations often want fewer lines, or a format of their own.

Before you price anything, read the instructions and the funding notice for these answers:

• The budget period, and whether the funder wants a column for each year
• Whether indirect costs are capped, and what the cap is a percentage of
• Whether you must match, at what rate, and of what: the funder's share or the total project cost
• Costs the notice rules out, even where general rules would allow them
• Where consultants, stipends and rent belong on the form

If the instructions leave one open, ask the program officer in writing and note the reading you took.

Every figure should come from something you could hand a reviewer: a salary schedule, a quote, the lease, a recent invoice. Personnel is each salary times the share of time that person will really spend on the project. Avoid last year's total plus a percentage, and round numbers that look picked to fill a ceiling.

Then put each cost where the form expects it. The SF-424A instructions¹ keep consultants, contractors and subrecipients out of Personnel. They list individual consultants under Other, and put subawards and evaluation contracts under Contractual.

Federal rules define equipment as an item that lasts more than a year and costs at least $10,000 a unit, or your capitalization threshold if that is lower². Below that line, even a laptop that will last five years is a supply.

Indirect costs, such as accounting, personnel administration and executive salaries, serve many projects at once. In the US, federal agencies generally must accept your negotiated indirect cost rate³. Without one, you may charge a de minimis rate of up to 15% of modified total direct costs³. Once you elect it, it applies to all your federal awards until you negotiate a rate.

Rates only compare on the same base. Modified total direct costs² leave out equipment, rent, participant support costs and the part of each subaward above $50,000, among other items. A cap written as a share of total direct costs sits on a bigger base, so turn both into dollars before you compare them.

Caps often fall short of what a grant really costs to run. Ann Goggins Gregory and Don Howard of the Bridgespan Group describe one case in the Stanford Social Innovation Review (2009). When a nonprofit added up its staff's reporting hours on a government grant, it found it was spending about 31% of the grant's value on administration⁴. The funder allowed only 13% for indirect costs.

Foundations set their own rules. The MacArthur Foundation, for one, adds 29% of project costs to its project grants to cover indirect costs⁵. Read each funder's policy instead of assuming a number.

Read what the match percentage applies to before you multiply. A 25% match of the federal share on a $400,000 request is $100,000. A 25% match of total project cost on the same request is $133,333, a third more, because the match is part of the total.

Then test each contribution. Under the federal cost sharing rule⁷, it must be verifiable in your records and not counted toward any other federal award, among other conditions. Money a state passes through from a federal program counts as a federal award². So match already pledged to that kind of state grant can't count again on yours.

Value each kind by its own rule. Price volunteer time at rates consistent with what you pay for similar work, and donated space at no more than the fair rental value of comparable space.

One source of match is easy to miss: unrecovered indirect cost, the gap between what a cap allows and what your approved rate would charge. With prior approval, it can count toward the match⁷. Ask for it in the application, so it sits in the approved budget.

Your books don't use the funder's categories. Fringe may sit in two accounts, and one phone bill may serve the project and the whole office. Before you submit, map every budget line to the account that will carry it, one row for each account and category pair.

Check the totals both ways: each funder category against the accounts that feed it, and each account against everything it feeds. Every split needs a measurable basis and the document it comes from. The MacArthur Foundation's policy suggests splitting most shared costs by staff time, and rent by the space each program uses⁵.

Each financial report reapplies those bases, so writing them down now turns the grant report into a lookup instead of a reconstruction.

Write the budget justification once the numbers settle, in the form's order. Give each line its calculation, its source and what it pays for, naming the same activities as your grant proposal. The budget narrative tool drafts one from your finished budget lines.

To start faster, open the template on this page with Edit with AI. Give River your funder's form and chart of accounts, and it works through each step above, showing the arithmetic for every figure.