COPS Grants 2026: Hiring Program Status, Match and Awards

COPS source review, Grantsights, November 6, 2026: Grantsights checked the FY2026 CHP notice (opens in a new tab) and its Application Resource Guide (opens in a new tab) against the COPS Hiring Program page (opens in a new tab), the COPS grants page (opens in a new tab), the statute at 34 U.S.C. 10381 (opens in a new tab), Grants.gov listings and USASpending.gov award records. Where official sources stop: the COPS Office doesn't say when FY2026 CHP awards will be announced beyond "on or after October 1, 2026," whether there will be an FY2027 round, or what your city can afford once federal money ends.

COPS Grants Status on November 6, 2026

All 12 FY2026 solicitations in the deadline table on the COPS grants page (opens in a new tab), 11 COPS notices plus one tribal notice, were marked closed when Grantsights checked on November 6, 2026. The tribal one, the Coordinated Tribal Assistance Solicitation (CTAS) that the Bureau of Justice Assistance runs, closed last, on October 22, 2026. Each COPS solicitation uses 2 deadlines: a Grants.gov step for the SF-424 form and a later JustGrants step for the full application.

Deadlines come from the COPS grants page. Funding amounts come from DOJ's June 9, 2026 release (opens in a new tab), which announced nearly $700 million in COPS notices, and its July 21, 2026 release (opens in a new tab) for $25 million more. The CHP figure is the exact amount in the notice. The June release also lists the COPS Technology and Equipment Program, $400 million that Congress directed to named projects; it isn't a competition, so there's nothing to apply for unless your project was named.

The only award list for FY2026 on the COPS grants page on November 6 was the 2026 CAMP list (opens in a new tab): 7 state agencies, from the North Carolina State Highway Patrol at $1,485,000 to the Louisiana State Police at $2,000,000. A request for a 2026 CHP award list at the same address pattern returned "not found." According to the FY2026 CHP FAQ, awards were expected "on or after October 1, 2026." USASpending.gov showed no COPS award signed after October 10, 2025 as of November 6, 2026, not even the 7 CAMP awards the COPS Office has listed, so federal spending data trails the agency's own lists. Whether FY2026 CHP decisions are made but unpublished, public pages don't say.

On Grants.gov (opens in a new tab), the only posted COPS notice on November 6 was an FY2027 invitational award of up to $3,000,000 for school resource officer training, closing November 10, 2026. Its only eligible applicant is the National Association of School Resource Officers. No FY2027 CHP notice was posted or forecast.

How COPS Hiring Program Money Moves

CHP has 1 step between Washington and your agency: the COPS Office awards the grant straight to the applicant. There's no state pass-through, no formula allocation and no state deadline in between. According to the FY2026 FAQ, CHP "is not a 'formula' program" but a competitive one, scored on fiscal health answers, crime data and community policing plans.

The competition isn't one national pile, though. The FY2026 Application Resource Guide says the COPS Office splits CHP funds so half go to agencies serving more than 150,000 people and half to those serving 150,000 or fewer, and that each state or territory with eligible applicants gets at least 0.5% of hiring funds. The 0.5% floor comes from the statute, which says each qualifying state "shall receive" at least 0.5% unless every application from that state was funded.

That split explains a pattern in the data. In the FY2025 award list, 6 big cities took the maximum 50 officers at $6,250,000 each (Chicago, Cincinnati, Dallas, Houston, Milwaukee and San Francisco), while 96 of the 228 listed awards were for a single officer. Small agencies compete mainly against other small agencies.

The money then runs over a 60-month period of performance, with 36 months of salary inside it to allow time for recruiting. Positions must be filled on or after the award start date, and the FY2026 notice says costs incurred before the start date are unallowable. Recruits can be paid from the grant while in the academy only if that's the agency's normal practice with locally funded recruits, according to the FY2026 FAQ.

Who Can Apply and What the Application Asks For

Eligibility has 3 tests in the FY2026 notice. The applicant must be an established and operating law enforcement agency, meaning the jurisdiction passed authorizing legislation and has a current operating budget. It must have primary law enforcement authority, defined as the first responder to calls for all types of crime in the area. And state and local government applicants must comply with 8 U.S.C. 1373, which bars them from restricting officials from sharing immigration status information with federal authorities.

A town that buys policing from a neighboring sheriff applies itself, not the sheriff. School districts and tribes appear among past winners: the FY2025 list includes Holmes County School District in Mississippi (1 officer, $235,986), Newman International Academy in Texas (1 officer, $125,000) and the Akiachak Native Community in Alaska (1 officer, $162,563). Nonprofits, police foundations and unions can't apply for CHP.

According to the FY2026 FAQ, applying takes an active registration in the System for Award Management (SAM) with a Unique Entity Identifier (UEI), then 2 submissions:

1. Grants.gov (opens in a new tab): the SF-424 Application for Federal Assistance, with estimated federal and local shares.
2. JustGrants: standard applicant information, the CHP survey questions (fiscal health, crime and community policing), the web-based budget worksheet with narrative, the SF-LLL lobbying disclosure if it applies, optional letters of support and, for school resource officers (SROs), any existing school agreement.

The COPS grants page warns that SAM now requires a notarized letter appointing the entity administrator before a registration is activated, for new and existing entities. The SAM.gov registration guide walks through the steps; start it months before the next notice.

How FY2026 Applications Were Scored

According to the FY2026 CHP Application Resource Guide, the first scoring pass weights 33.3% on fiscal need, 33.3% on crime and 33.3% on community policing. Agencies below a minimum community policing score are dropped, then a narrative review checks that the plan matches the chosen problem or focus area. Scores are then raised for "additional consideration" factors, and the COPS Office reviews match waivers, applies the population split and checks past DOJ grant performance.

The FY2026 notice gave additional consideration to:

• Cooperation with federal officials on illegal immigration (state and local governments only), and coordination with the Homeland Security Task Force (law enforcement applicants only)
• A catastrophic incident since January 1, 2025, a commitment to hire at least 1 military veteran, a self-identified rural jurisdiction, and applicants unfunded in FY2025 for lack of money
• Accurate race and ethnicity reporting in the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS)
• Agencies below budgeted strength, states with "safe harbor" anti-trafficking laws, and commitments to recruit officers from the community served
• Focus areas marked for extra weight: violent crime (with more weight for fentanyl, gun law enforcement, trafficking, gangs and drug markets), school-based policing, squatting and encampment enforcement, nuisance abatement, homeland security and combatting domestic terrorism

There's a catch with the weighted focus areas. The notice says an agency choosing one must devote 100% of its funded positions to it and can't change scope later. Grantsights' view: pick the focus area your department will actually staff for 4 years, not the one that looks best on paper. A small department that picks school-based policing for points takes on an SRO memorandum with the school within 90 days of the award letter and a 40-hour basic course from the National Association of School Resource Officers for each funded SRO.

What CHP Pays For and What It Won't

CHP pays for 2 things, according to the FY2026 Application Resource Guide: approved full-time, entry-level salaries and fringe benefits for new or rehired sworn officers, and up to 2% of the federal award for direct administrative costs. Everything else is listed as unallowable.

Per the FY2026 notice, officer requests are capped at 20% of the actual sworn force, with a maximum of 50. An agency with 30 sworn officers can ask for 6, and an agency with 10 or fewer can ask for 1. The grant can't be used to fill positions already funded in the budget, and the retention requirement under another COPS hiring award can't be met with a new CHP award.

What Changed in the FY2025 and FY2026 Rules

The 2025 rounds rewrote the program's priorities while keeping its money rules almost the same. Grantsights compared the FY2024 Grants.gov listing (opens in a new tab), the FY2025 notice (opens in a new tab) and the FY2026 notice on November 6, 2026.

"Not checked" means Grantsights couldn't open the FY2024 notice itself and relied on its federal listing. Both the FY2025 notice and the FY2026 guide also bar using COPS funds for projects that "provide or advance diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility," for governments that "failed to protect public monuments," and for schools that require COVID-19 vaccination to attend in person. Read those restrictions before you write a community policing narrative from an old template.

What the COPS Office's Pages Don't Tell You

The COPS Office's pages answer the 3 headline questions (how much, what match, who's eligible) clearly. They leave out the arithmetic that decides whether a city should accept.

1. The 25% match is a floor, and it's usually much higher. The FY2026 FAQ admits that "in many cases it is higher," because the $125,000 cap covers 3 years, not 1. Most departments underestimate this.
2. Year 4 is all yours. Each position must be kept for 12 months after 36 months of federal money, added to the budget over the existing sworn force. Absorbing it through attrition doesn't count.
3. The waiver is real, but comparative. Waivers go to agencies showing "severe fiscal distress" compared with the rest of the applicant pool. In the FY2025 list, 24 of 228 awards paid more than $125,000 per officer, consistent with a waiver: Petersburg, Virginia got $5,664,825 for 17 officers, about $333,000 each.
4. Public award lists lag. FY2025 awards were signed October 10, 2025, but the FY2025 award list PDF on the COPS site carries a January 13, 2026 creation date in its file properties. On November 6, 2026, there was no FY2026 CHP list, so don't read silence as a rejection.
5. Windows are getting shorter. The time from posting to the step 1 deadline fell from 57 days to 44 over 4 rounds.

This table is illustrative, not data. It shows the real local cost of one officer with a $100,000 entry-level salary and fringe package and no waiver.

Grantsights pulled each row from that round's federal listing (see Sources) on November 6, 2026; the JustGrants dates come from the FY2025 and FY2026 notices. A department that waits for the notice to start its SAM renewal, salary figures and council approval is working inside a 6-week window.

FY2025 COPS Hiring Program Awards: What USASpending Shows

The FY2025 hiring round produced 223 CHP awards with a positive obligation, totaling $152,900,348, in Grantsights analysis of USASpending.gov (opens in a new tab) records pulled November 6, 2026. According to USASpending data, all of them were signed October 10, 2025 under Assistance Listing 16.068. The median was $250,000 (2 officers at the cap), and the middle half ran from $125,000 to $597,986. Awards went to 49 states and territories.

By count, Texas led with 24 awards ($19,778,842), then Florida with 16 ($14,125,000), Ohio 11 ($10,090,792), California 9 ($9,750,000) and New Jersey 8 ($12,446,620). The largest was Augusta-Richmond County, Georgia, at $8,683,080 for 40 officers, followed by the U.S. Virgin Islands at $6,253,110 for 30. Dallas's $6,250,000 award sits under a multi-program ID suffix in USASpending, so it's outside the 223, and the COPS Office's own FY2025 CHP award list (opens in a new tab) totals 228 awards, 1,155 officer positions and $161,330,965. The two sources don't match line for line: USASpending shows $0 for Madera County, California, which the COPS list shows at $1,452,945.

Small agencies win too. For example, the City of Udall, Kansas received $51,500 for 1 officer in FY2025, and the Town of East Millinocket, Maine received $93,736 for 1. One city in Wisconsin, Sheboygan, received $375,000 for 3 officers, and Beaufort, South Carolina got the same for 3. Bucks County, Pennsylvania received $250,000 for 2.

The FY2024 round, reported under 16.710, looked similar: 233 awards with a positive obligation, $150,780,896, median $250,000, signed September 30, 2024. Los Angeles drew the largest, $9,544,040.

The Other COPS Office Grants and Who They Fit

CHP was 224 of the 742 FY2025 COPS awards with a positive obligation in Grantsights analysis of the same USASpending pull, award IDs starting 15JCOPS25, and $159,150,348 of the $377,030,390 total (Dallas included). The rest went to other solicitations, most signed the same day, October 10, 2025.

According to the COPS Office SVPP page (opens in a new tab), SVPP pays for locks, lighting, metal detectors, emergency notification technology and officer training at K-12 schools, with a $500,000 federal cap per award and a 25% match; private schools can't apply as primary applicants. The school safety grants guide covers SVPP alongside the separate BJA STOP program. Tribes get tribal resources money through CTAS, and the statute's tribal subsection, 34 U.S.C. 10381(k), sets the federal share of grants made under it at 100%; the tribal grants guide covers CTAS.

For nonprofits, the COPS nonprofit eligibility page (opens in a new tab) lists 4 doors: CPD Law Enforcement Products and Resources, PASS, the Collaborative Reform Initiative and Tribal Resources technical assistance. The statute allows this: 34 U.S.C. 10381(a) lets the Attorney General make grants to "other public and private entities." FY2025 CPD awards to groups outside government include the Police Executive Research Forum at $500,000 for guidance on real-time crime centers and the Indiana Law Enforcement Accreditation Commission at $297,565 to widen accreditation. Texas State University took the single PASS award, $10,200,000, for active shooter training.

Non-Federal Money Around a Police Hire

Foundation money almost never pays a sworn officer's salary, and 3 years of CHP payroll is far beyond what local funders give. Honest fit: a city police department rarely gets foundation grants directly. Its 501(c)(3) police foundation, K-9 group or citizens academy alumni association often does, for equipment, training, wellness programs and community events that CHP can't pay for.

The Grantsights community funder list lists private foundations that have given to community and civic causes, by state, drawn from their 990-PF filings. You can preview your own state free, and there's a refund within 30 days if it doesn't fit. It's foundation money, not federal grants, and it suits the nonprofit partner far better than the department.

These are statewide counts of all community giving from Grantsights analysis of 990-PF filings pulled October 29, 2026, for the 5 states with the most FY2025 CHP awards. None of it is limited to police. Before you ask anyone, check what a funder has given before with how to read a 990-PF. The Grantsights grant search tracks open federal and state notices, so the next COPS round will show up there once it's posted.

Common Mistakes in COPS Hiring Applications

These 6 mistakes come from the CHP rules themselves, and each can cost a round or a budget year.

• Budgeting a 25% match. A common mistake is copying "25%" into the council memo. Do the math with the $125,000 cap, as in the table above.
• Forgetting year 4. The retention year is fully local. A council that approves 3 years and not 4 is setting up a compliance problem.
• Filling budgeted vacancies. Using CHP to pay for a position already in the budget is supplanting. Agencies below budgeted strength must attest they won't do it.
• Picking a weighted focus area you can't staff. The notice locks 100% of funded positions to it for the life of the award.
• Hiring before the award start date. Pre-award costs are unallowable, and so is rehiring laid-off officers before the start date.
• Leaving SAM registration to the last week. The notarized administrator letter is a red flag for timing. Renew early.

Related Guides for Public Safety Funding

At least 6 Grantsights guides cover the money around a COPS grant. The DOJ grants guide lists every major Justice program, including Byrne JAG and victim services, and explains JustGrants. The federal grants for local governments guide shows where police funding fits among a city's other federal programs, and the matching requirements guide explains how cash and in-kind match are counted. Departments building a co-responder or wellness program can compare funders in grants for mental health programs, and fire and EMS chiefs sharing a city budget can read grants for volunteer fire departments.

FAQ: Common Questions

Are COPS grants open right now? No. All 11 FY2026 COPS solicitations were closed on November 6, 2026; the only posted notice is invitational.

When is the next COPS Hiring Program deadline? Not announced; no FY2027 CHP notice was posted or forecast on November 6, 2026.

How much does a COPS Hiring Program grant pay per officer? Up to 75% of entry-level pay and benefits for 3 years, capped at $125,000 per officer unless waived.

What is the COPS Hiring Program match requirement? At least 25% in cash, often more, plus 12 months of locally funded retention.

Who is eligible for the COPS Hiring Program? State, local, territorial and tribal law enforcement agencies with primary law enforcement authority.

Can a nonprofit or police foundation apply for COPS grants? Not for CHP; nonprofits can apply for 4 smaller COPS solicitations.

Sources

These 17 sources were checked November 6, 2026.

• COPS Office: COPS Hiring Program (CHP) (opens in a new tab)
• COPS Office: Grants, program deadline dates and award lists (opens in a new tab)
• COPS Office: FY2026 CHP Notice of Funding Opportunity (opens in a new tab)
• COPS Office: FY2026 CHP Application Resource Guide (opens in a new tab)
• COPS Office: FY2026 CHP Frequently Asked Questions (opens in a new tab)
• COPS Office: FY2025 CHP Notice of Funding Opportunity (opens in a new tab)
• COPS Office: 2025 COPS Hiring Program award list (opens in a new tab)
• COPS Office: 2026 COPS Anti-Methamphetamine Program award list (opens in a new tab)
• COPS Office: School Violence Prevention Program (opens in a new tab)
• COPS Office: Funding opportunities for nonprofit organizations (opens in a new tab)
• Grants.gov: FY26 COPS Hiring Program (O-COPS-2026-172611) (opens in a new tab)
• Grants.gov: FY25 COPS Hiring Program (O-COPS-2025-172413) (opens in a new tab)
• Grants.gov: FY24 COPS Hiring Program (O-COPS-2024-172009) (opens in a new tab) and FY23 COPS Hiring Program (O-COPS-2023-171633) (opens in a new tab)
• Grants.gov: FY2027 NASRO SRO training invitational (O-COPS-2027-172808) (opens in a new tab)
• DOJ: June 9, 2026 release on nearly $700 million in COPS notices (opens in a new tab) and July 21, 2026 release on $25 million more (opens in a new tab)
• govinfo.gov: 34 U.S.C. 10381, public safety and community policing grants (opens in a new tab)
• USASpending.gov: FY2025 CHP award to Augusta-Richmond County (opens in a new tab), plus the Grantsights pull of COPS award records through the USASpending.gov API on November 6, 2026, and the community statewide 990-PF pull of October 29, 2026