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October Round: Oct 10 to 31, 2025

The Finnish Cultural Foundation awards grants for scientific and artistic work as well as for projects and acquisitions from the October round of applications.

Applications close at 4 pm Finnish time on the last day of the application period.

Eligible Applicants

Eligible applicants include all Finnish nationals and people and organisations residing or working in Finland. Others are eligible as well, provided their application demonstrates clear, strong ties to Finland or Finnish culture.

Type of Grants

In the October round of applications, it is possible to apply for a regular working and/or expenditure grant or a special purpose grant, such as Additional Million-euro Funding to Science, Art for Everyone, Eminentia, Non-fiction Books, Popularization of Science and Arts, Support for Romani Language and Culture and The Life of a Finnish Statesperson. The Application Guidelines for Grants apply to all of these. Special purpose grants also have their own detailed additional guidelines.

The grants open for application will be confirmed and grant guidelines updated annually before the application period opens. The grants introduced below apply to the October 2024 Application Round.

When will we announce the grant decisions

The grant decisions will be notified by email a few days before the end of the January round of applications in the first week of February.

Grant-funded work may begin no sooner than February. An expenditure grant may only be used for expenses dated from February onwards.

Information about the October Round

On average, around one in ten applications are successful in the October round. Success rates vary between science and the arts because of the different levels of funding available to different fields.

Hundreds of full-year working grants are awarded in science and the arts. They typically account for almost half of the total number of grants awarded. More than 150 of the full-year grants are awarded on a multi-year basis. Four-year grants are the most competitive.

The number of large grants of €100.000 or more is low, usually around twenty per year. The number of grants above €200.000 varies from more to less than ten. There are almost 150 small grants of less than €6 000 per year.

The median size of grants awarded is around €30 000 per year in science and less than €20 000 in the arts.

The youngest recipients are under 10 years old, the oldest over 80. The vast majority of grants are awarded to young applicants.  The grants are widely distributed across Finland.