How much does NIH spend on opioid research?
NIH funded $825 million of opioid research in fiscal 2025. The category began in fiscal 2018, when NIH launched its HEAL Initiative on addiction and pain partway through the year ($317 million); spending has stayed between $776 million and $947 million a year since 2019. 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.
- The latest figure, for 2025, is $825M.
- That is 2.6 times the 2018 figure, $317M.
- The highest was $947M in 2023.
- The lowest was $317M in 2018.
Source and date
- Source
- NIH RePORTER (National Institutes of Health), Research, Condition, and Disease Categorization (RCDC)
- Data as of
- Published
Citation
Chartly. “How much does NIH spend on opioid research?” 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-opioid-research-funding (accessed October 16, 2026).
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The data
Download data (CSV)The file has the numbers in this table, with the source, license and date. Please credit the source and Chartly.
| Fiscal year | NIH funding (dollars) |
|---|---|
| 2018 | 316,862,739 |
| 2019 | 940,301,078 |
| 2020 | 775,741,473 |
| 2021 | 892,605,619 |
| 2022 | 917,372,855 |
| 2023 | 946,927,308 |
| 2024 | 878,541,223 |
| 2025 | 824,934,646 |
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