How much does NIH spend researching major diseases?

NIH put $7.0 billion into cancer research in fiscal 2025, more than any other major disease, followed by HIV/AIDS ($4.0 billion) and Alzheimer's and related dementias ($3.0 billion); opioid research got $825 million. The categories are NIH's own (RCDC), and a project that studies two diseases counts in both. These are totals of the projects listed in RePORTER, so they differ somewhat from NIH's published category estimates.

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Key facts

Measure: NIH funding (dollars). Written from the data below.

  • Cancer has the highest figure, $6.97B, followed by HIV/AIDS ($3.95B) and Alzheimer's and related dementias ($2.99B).
  • Malaria has the lowest figure, $209M, followed by Parkinson's disease ($234M) and Autism ($323M).
  • The highest is 33 times the lowest.

Source and date

Source
NIH RePORTER (National Institutes of Health), Research, Condition, and Disease Categorization (RCDC)
License
Public domain (U.S. government work)
Data as of
Published

Citation

Chartly. “How much does NIH spend researching major diseases?” Chart. Data: NIH RePORTER (National Institutes of Health), Research, Condition, and Disease Categorization (RCDC), https://report.nih.gov/funding/categorical-spending (data as of September 30, 2025). https://chart.ly/charts/nih-funding-by-disease (accessed October 15, 2026).

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The data

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Disease (NIH spending category) NIH funding (dollars)
Cancer 6,971,923,613
HIV/AIDS 3,952,073,353
Alzheimer's and related dementias 2,991,568,139
Heart disease 1,695,040,418
Obesity 1,086,443,218
Diabetes 1,011,114,540
Opioids 824,934,646
Breast cancer 691,680,360
Depression 665,483,530
Tuberculosis 561,007,295
Stroke 413,805,063
Lung cancer 384,789,881
Autism 323,222,681
Parkinson's disease 234,449,748
Malaria 208,907,222

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