Assistance program
Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Program
$41.6 Billion committed in FY2022–FY2026
- Agency
- National Telecommunications and Information Administration, Commerce, Department of
- Assistance
- Not Applicable
- CFDA number
- 11.035
- What it does
- The Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration will provide federal funding for grants to eligible entities for broadband planning, deployment, mapping, equity, and adoption projects. The BEAD program will first focus on deploying broadband service to unserved areas, those without any broadband service at all or with slow speeds. The program will prioritize projects designed to provide fiber connectivity directly to the end user. It also will prioritize proposals that include affordability commitments to ensure that networks built using taxpayer dollars are accessible to all Americans. The BEAD Program next will focus on provision of broadband to underserved areas—those that have access to broadband service of at least 25 Mbps downstream/3 Mbps upstream but less than 100 Mbps downstream/20 Mbps upstream, again prioritizing fiber services that are both fast enough to accommodate Americans’ future needs and affordable. To the extent an eligible entity has funds leftover after meeting these two statutory priorities, funds will be allotted to connect community anchor institutions such as libraries and community centers that lack a 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) connection.
- Who benefits
- Not Applicable
- Who applies
- Any State of the United States, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands.
- Authorized by
- Statute 135, p. 429
- Program site
- http://www.ntia.gov ↗
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