Assistance program
Assistance to High Energy Cost Rural Communities
$67.0 Million committed in FY2018–FY2026
- Agency
- Rural Utilities Service, Agriculture, Department of
- Assistance
- Project Grants
- CFDA number
- 10.859
- What it does
- The purpose of this grant program is to assure access to adequate and reliable energy services for persons in extremely high energy cost communities by providing financial assistance to acquire, construct, extend, upgrade, and otherwise improve energy generation, transmission, or distribution facilities serving the community.
- Who benefits
- Projects must serve rural communities in which the annual average residential expenditure for home energy is at least 275 percent of the national average. Energy cost eligibility benchmarks are included in the published Notice of Funding Availability.
- Who applies
- Eligible applicants include States, political subdivisions of States, for-profit and non-profit businesses, cooperatives, associations, organizations, and other entities organized under the laws of States, Indian tribes, tribal entities, and individuals. The governments and entities located in any U.S. Territory/possession or other area authorized by law to receive the services and programs of the Rural Utilities Service or the Rural Electrification Act of 1936, as amended, are also eligible.
- Authorized by
- 7 U.S.C. § 918a
Committed by fiscal year
* FY2026 is year-to-date — the fiscal year is still in progress, so its total is still filling in. The striped band and dashed line mark that provisional stretch.
Top recipients
By dollars committed.
How to read these numbers
- Committed through this program
Money committed under this assistance listing (its CFDA program), counted in the year each action happened.
- How it's paid
Most programs pay out one way — a grant, or a direct payment to individuals; the flow bar only appears when a program genuinely mixes types.
- Some recipients aren't itemized
For entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, the government reports one aggregate instead of naming tens of millions of people, so the recipient roster isn't part of the public record.
- Awards, counted once
An award count is the number of distinct awards with at least one action that year — each counted once, however many times it was amended.
- The colored bars
Every bar on this page splits by how the money moves:
Direct payments