Publishing grants data
Grant duration: improving our understanding of UK grantmaking
24 November 2025
Why grant duration matters for analysing grants data, and how funders can share data to help us fill gaps in our understanding.
Information about the duration of grants provides vital context for understanding and analysing the grantmaking picture.
For example, our understanding of the scale of a grant changes depending on whether it’s for a single year or for five years, but without knowing how long a grant is intended to cover – the duration – we can’t see the difference. Information on the duration of grants also makes it possible to produce annualised amounts, which can be compared more accurately, and to see which grants are currently active. This makes duration data key to analysing and understanding funding trends over time, and that’s why we recommend that all grantmakers who publish data using the 360Giving Data Standard include information on the duration of their grants.
In this blog, we provide guidance on how funders can update their data to include this crucial information, or let people know that duration isn’t relevant to their grants.
The current state of duration data
While many funders who publish 360Giving data recognise the value of sharing grant durations, there are still significant gaps in the 360Giving data.
Around two-thirds (65%) of publishers share some form of duration information, but less than half (42%) of all grants published include durations. You can see how these gaps affect sector-wide analysis in UKGrantmaking, where the grant duration chart shows large segments of grants data with unknown duration in grey.
When duration data is missing, it creates ambiguity, making it much harder to interpret the information correctly. A blank field could be caused by one of several things:
- the funder wasn’t aware or hadn’t considered including this information,
- the funder doesn’t have any duration data readily available in their systems,
- the duration isn’t relevant to that specific grant type (such as one-off unrestricted grants or capital funding).
To reduce this ambiguity and increase the usefulness of the data for analysis, we are recommending an approach to improve the data.
Guidance on sharing duration data
First, consider whether duration is relevant to your grantmaking. If it is, use one of the two options available in the 360Giving Data Standard to include this information. If not, we have a recommended way for declaring when duration isn’t relevant to your grants.
1. For grants with a defined duration
If you provide grants with a specified duration and have this data available, the steps to start including it are straightforward. The 360Giving Data Standard provides two main ways to share information about grant duration. The option you choose should align with the data you already capture in your grantmaking systems. The options are:
- Use start and end dates. If your systems capture the intended start and end dates for the grant-funded activities, map these directly to the 360Giving fields: Planned Dates:Start Date and Planned Dates:End Date. Data users can then easily calculate the duration of each grant.
- Use duration. If you capture the length of the grant directly, use the Planned Dates:Duration field. The Standard asks for duration in months. If you capture duration in years (e.g., 1 year, 3 years), you must convert this data accordingly (e.g., 1 year becomes 12 months, 3 years becomes 36 months).
- If you have both start and end dates and duration data available, you can include all three fields.
Look out for the consistency of your data between the duration and the grant amount. If you share grants with multi-year durations, then the amount awarded should be for the full length of the grant. If your funding commitments are for a single year, then the grant award should be the amount for that year.
If you provide grants with a specified duration but don’t capture this information, consider building it into your internal data collection and preparation processes. Depending on your grantmaking approach, there may be straightforward steps you can take. For example:
- For programmes where all grants have the same length (e.g., 12 months), you can populate the default duration value for all those grants.
- If you fund activities aligned to a specific financial year, populate the Planned Dates:Start Date and Planned Dates:End Date with the first and last days of that year.
2. For grants without a defined duration
If grant duration is not relevant for some or all of your grants, such as one-off unrestricted awards or capital funding, it is still important to identify this to avoid ambiguity.
Our recommendation is to include the Planned Dates:Duration field, but populate the value with 0.
This makes it clear to data users that the duration is intentional – it’s not missing or unavailable. Grants marked with a duration of 0 will be treated differently from blanks in analysis.
3. If you have a mixture of grants with and without a defined duration
If you currently share duration data for some grants, please populate the Planned Dates:Duration field with 0 for all other grants where duration is not relevant.
However if you only share Planned Dates:Start Date and Planned Dates:End Date, you will need to add the Planned Dates:Duration field and populate it with 0 for grants where duration is not relevant.
How to get started
Making these updates will benefit you directly because users, including other funders, researchers, and policymakers, will be able to more accurately interpret your grants data. At the same time, increasing the amount of duration data shared will bring collective benefits by making sector-wide analysis, such as that available on UKGrantmaking, far more useful.
That’s why we’re asking funders who don’t currently share duration information in your 360Giving data to plan to include it in your next data publication. We’re here every step of the way to support you to include duration data, so get in touch with our Helpdesk with any queries or if you need further guidance.