Medical research

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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Source and date

Data as of
Published

The data

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