Assistance program
Crime Victim Compensation
$1.3 Billion committed in FY2018–FY2026
- Agency
- Office of Justice Programs, Justice, Department of
- Assistance
- Formula Grants
- CFDA number
- 16.576
- What it does
- The primary purpose of these grants is to supplement state efforts to provide financial compensation to crime victims throughout the Nation for costs resulting from crime, and to encourage victim cooperation and participation in the criminal justice system. The Office for Victims of Crime (OVC), Department of Justice, administers the Crime Victim Compensation formula grant program. OVC annually awards a grant to each state, the District of Columbia, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico to support state crime victim compensation programs. These programs help pay for some of the expenses resulting from crimes involving violence or abuse. Performance Measure: Amount of Crime Victims Compensation program compensation dollars paid
- Who benefits
- Victims of crime that results in death or physical or personal injury and are determined eligible under the State victim compensation statute. State compensation statutes either declare that coverage extends generally to any crime resulting in physical or personal injury, or they list all specific crimes that can be covered.
- Who applies
- States, the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, and any other possession or territory of the United States who have an established eligible crime victim compensation program, and who meet the eligibility requirements discussed above.
- Authorized by
- an act appropriating funds for the Department of Justice in the current fiscal year.
- Program site
- http://www.ovc.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