Horowitz Foundation Grant 2026 - $10,000 for PhDs

What is the Horowitz Foundation Grant?

The Horowitz Foundation Grant is a $10,000 award for PhD candidates in the social sciences who are deep enough into a dissertation to have a defended proposal and far enough from finishing to still need the money. The Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy runs it from New Brunswick, New Jersey, with a stated purpose of advancing research and understanding across the major fields of the social sciences, and it does that deliberately at the bottom of the academic ladder rather than the top. Applications close on 1 December 2026 at 11:59pm EST and winners are announced the following June.

Start with how the money actually arrives, because it changes how you should budget. The $10,000 comes in two parts: $7,500 when you are selected, and $2,500 once the project is complete. Most fieldwork plans assume a lump sum. If yours does, adjust it now, because for the duration of the research you are working with three quarters of the headline figure and collecting the balance at the end.

The eligibility rules are narrow in exactly one place and unusually generous everywhere else. You must be a current PhD or DrPH candidate actively working on a dissertation, and you must already have defended your proposal or had your topic approved by your department. Hold a doctorate already and you are ineligible, which quietly rules out the postdocs who might otherwise be the strongest applicants for a small research grant. Against that, the Foundation applies no citizenship test and no institutional restriction at all: any country, any university in the world. For a US-based funder that is rare, and it makes this worth a look for doctoral candidates outside the American system who usually find these pages irrelevant. Eligible fields run from anthropology, area studies and economics through political science, psychology, sociology and urban studies, with newer areas such as evaluation research explicitly included, and preference going to work on contemporary issues with policy relevance.

What you submit is refreshingly short: personal details with a few short answers, a brief project overview, a project description capped at 750 words, a CV, and contact details for one recommender. All of it in English, all through the online portal, and none of it reviewed if a piece is missing. Two things deserve your attention more than the writing itself. First, the recommendation form is due at the same moment your application is, and the Foundation states plainly that an application without one is not reviewed, so ask in October rather than late November. Second, 750 words is a hard limit that punishes the standard academic instinct to establish the literature before saying anything. Lead with the question, name the decision or debate your findings would inform, and spend the space on what you will actually do. The Foundation publishes its previous recipients by year back to 2000, which is the most useful reading you can do before writing a word. If you are collecting research funding options this autumn, the Nathan Cummings Foundation grant guide and the Rising Explorer Grant guide cover two more. Applications open on the Horowitz Foundation apply page.