Menopause Research Funding: NIH Data and Statistics, 2007–2025

The National Institutes of Health reported $78 million for its Menopause category in fiscal year 2025, up from $56 million in fiscal 2023. That is a $22 million increase — 39.3 percent — across the current three-year RCDC series.

Before that category existed, a different federal reporting system tracked menopause money for thirteen years. We transcribed it. Adding those historical rows to the current FY2023–FY2025 figures gives a nominal reported-year total of $701.773 million across sixteen fiscal years — a cross-method sum, not a continuous trend.

And the $617 million total that circulates online? It is reproducible. It is the through-FY2024 total you get when you leave out $6.687 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act money that NIH reported in a separate table for FY2009 and FY2010.

Data downloads: Download the publication-ready CSV

Everything below explains how each number was produced, which comparisons are safe, why credible sources publish different totals, and which large figures in menopause coverage are authorizations, awards, or broader women’s-health amounts rather than the NIH Menopause category.

NIH’s current RCDC table reports $56 million for the Menopause category in FY2023, $59 million in FY2024, and $78 million in FY2025. The newest figure is therefore $78 million, and the category increased 39.3 percent from its first published year to its third.

NIH published the FY2025 actual categorical data on June 23, 2026. The release says the annual support levels are based on grants, contracts, intramural projects, and other mechanisms used across NIH. It also says NIH changed parts of its reporting methodology beginning in FY2025 to improve consistency and reduce double counting across certain funding sources. Categories affected by at least 2 percent display recalculated FY2023 and FY2024 figures in parentheses; the Menopause row does not display parenthetical revisions.

Until FY2023, NIH did not publish a standalone Menopause RCDC amount. That does not mean NIH funded no menopause research before then. The National Academies’ review explains that new RCDC categories are not retroactively applied to earlier fiscal years. The historical record therefore has to be reconstructed from the older ORWH reporting system instead.

RCDC is a computer-based public-reporting system. It scans text from a project’s title, abstract, public-health relevance statement, and specific aims; matches that text to scientific concepts; and compares the result with the fingerprint NIH developed for each category.

Three consequences matter when anyone quotes the number.

RCDC categories overlap. One project can appear in Menopause, Aging, Cardiovascular, Mental Health, or another category at the same time. The amounts across categories cannot be added together as though they are separate slices of the NIH budget.

NIH does not expressly budget by RCDC category. NIH did not begin FY2025 with a dedicated $78 million menopause line item. The $78 million is the annual support level produced when NIH categorized the funded portfolio after awards and projects were in place.

The public figure is rounded to whole millions. NIH reports $78 million, not an unrounded project-level total in the summary table. That limits the precision of percentage changes calculated from it.

The Congressional Research Service reports that NIH’s FY2025 program level was $46.995 billion, excluding the separate $1.5 billion ARPA-H appropriation. The $78 million Menopause category equals about 0.17 percent of that NIH program level — roughly one dollar for every $600. That comparison is only scale; it is not a mutually exclusive budget share because RCDC categories overlap.

Sponsors of the current menopause bill state that 75 million women in the United States are in perimenopause, menopause, or post-menopause. Using their figure as the denominator:

About one dollar and four cents per woman, per year.We show the arithmetic so anyone can substitute another denominator. The 75 million figure is a bill sponsors’ estimate, not a Census Bureau count, and we label it that way.

This dataset shows what two federal reporting systems reported for menopause-related research and makes changes within each system visible. It does not show whether the amount was adequate, whether every menopause-relevant project was captured, or what scientific value the money produced.

Plenty of credible people argue that menopause research is underfunded. Naturehas said so in an editorial. Members of Congress have said so. The National Academies concluded that women’s-health grant funding was low and unevenly distributed.

But “underfunded” is a conclusion, not a measurement. It needs a benchmark: affected population, disease burden, unmet clinical need, comparable-condition funding, economic cost, available scientific opportunity, or another standard stated in advance.

So this page separates three things:

1. Verified reported facts— what an issuing body published, with a date.
2. Reproducible calculations— arithmetic shown from those published values.
3. Editorial or policy judgments— attributed to the people or institutions making them.

There is no shortage of advocacy on menopause funding. There is a shortage of a clean, dated, reproducible account of what the numbers actually are.

We assembled the dataset from official NIH and Office of Research on Women’s Health publications, kept the raw historical components, preserved the separately reported ARRA money, marked the reporting break, and did not estimate a missing year.

We used the official Report of the Advisory Committee on Research on Women’s Health biennial reports. Their budget tables separately listed:

• Menopause
• Menopausal hormone/nonhormone therapy

The source tables reported amounts in thousands of dollars. We divided each value by 1,000 to express it in millions, then added the two rows to produce one assembled amount for each fiscal year.

The FY2009–FY2010 report placed American Recovery and Reinvestment Act money in a separate table rather than inside the ordinary category rows. We retained all four ARRA amounts as separate fields. They total $6.687 million. We include them in the reconciled historical total and show the total without them as a separate calculation.

The former Moyer collection ended. ORWH then used RCDC and an internal intersection tool to analyze women’s-health funding, but no directly comparable standalone menopause value was published for these three years. We assigned nothing. A blank means not separately reported on a directly comparable basis, not zero.

We retained the public Menopause row exactly as NIH reported it: FY2023 $56 million, FY2024 $59 million, FY2025 $78 million. We did not invent unrounded figures.

We treat the historical and current values as separate series. A total spanning both is labeled a cross-method nominal sum of reported years. We do not use that total to claim one uninterrupted trend, and we do not adjust for inflation.

The workbook includes every annual source component, the formula used for each assembled amount, source URLs and verification dates, comparability groups, a source-concordance table, a claim ledger, a data dictionary, and a version log. The historical cells were transcribed from long archival PDFs. The raw values remain visible so every row can be checked against its source.

Sixteen fiscal years have a published menopause-specific amount in this concordance. Thirteen come from the older ORWH/Moyer reporting system, three come from the current RCDC category, and the three years between them remain a visible reporting gap.

All figures are nominal millions of U.S. dollars.

What the historical segment shows.Within the older segment — and only within it — the assembled amount was $56.922 million in FY2007 and $15.907 million in FY2019, a nominal decline of 72.1 percent over thirteen years. The last year produced the steepest single-year drop: $30.956 million in FY2018 to $15.907 million in FY2019, down 48.6 percent. The category tables do not identify a single cause. A change can reflect projects, budgets, category definitions, or classification. We report the change and do not invent the explanation.

What the current segment shows. The current RCDC series increased from $56 million to $59 million to $78 million. The FY2025 value is 39.3 percent above FY2023. Three rounded points are enough to describe the published three-year series. They are not enough to prove a durable long-term trend, and they cannot be cleanly joined to the older segment.

The years are blank because federal reporting changed, not because menopause research received no money. The old Moyer reporting collection stopped, and the successor approach did not publish a standalone menopause figure that can be treated as the same series.

The ORWH FY2021–FY2022 report explains that HHS stopped requesting Moyer Report data beginning in FY2020. ORWH then used the RCDC system and an internal Search and Visualize intersection tool to examine women’s-health spending. The National Academies later described the change as a reporting discontinuity and warned that categories used after FY2022 might not be directly comparable with prior years. It also noted that new RCDC categories are not retroactively applied to earlier fiscal years. So the public record has a three-year hole exactly where the methodology changed.

We did not fill it. Anyone charting the data should show FY2020–FY2022 as a visible gap:

• No zero-height bars
• No line connecting FY2019 to FY2023
• A label reading: No directly comparable standalone value published

A zero would manufacture a collapse that the source record does not show.

The figures disagree because they measure different things: annual NIH category support, historical category rows, grant-only analyses, specific awards, global R&D, proposed authorizations, or broader women’s-health portfolios. The number is not useful until its scope and legal status travel with it.

The common failure is treating a C, D, or E as though it were an A or B.

Historical ORWH/Moyer tables used separately reported, non-overlapping rows and published the ARRA money separately.

Current RCDC uses NIH-wide definitions and text mining across grants, contracts, intramural projects, and other mechanisms. Categories can overlap.

The National Academies analyzed NIH grants using systematic abstract curation and human adjudication. Its work is not the same as the full RCDC mechanism set.

Impact Global Healthuses a defined global R&D survey scope. It excludes some research in which menopause is only an exposure or contributing factor, so its global total can be lower than NIH’s broader national category without either figure necessarily being wrong.

Because it leaves out the separately reported ARRA rows. Combining the two historical ORWH rows for FY2007–FY2019 with the FY2023–FY2024 RCDC values gives $617.086 million without ARRA and $623.773 million with it.

This is the cleanest source reconciliation in the dataset.

A secondary chart published a rounded $617 million total through FY2024 and described the same broad source approach. Following that approach while omitting the separate ARRA table reproduces $617.086 million. That is a source-treatment difference, not evidence of misconduct. ARRA was a separate one-time appropriation, and NIH itself reported those values separately. We include them, show the no-ARRA calculation, and let the label travel with the number.

The current federal bills contain authorizations, not enacted menopause appropriations. As of July 31, 2026, none of the dedicated measures in this ledger had become law.

The bill’s fixed-dollar provisions add to $55 million a year for five years:

The headline is not wrong, but calling all $275 million “menopause research funding” is. Only part of the bill is research, and even that $25 million line covers both NIH research and broader HHS public-health research and data work. Authorization is not appropriation. The bill would create permission for future spending; it would not itself prove that the money was provided.

NIH is the largest named public funder in the sources reviewed here, but it is not the only one. ARPA-H has two specific ovarian-function and menopause awards, AHRQ has an open research-interest notice without a dedicated amount, and the global G-FINDER series measures a narrower R&D portfolio.

ARPA-H’s Sprint for Women’s Health includes two projects centered on ovarian function and menopause:

These are named award ceilings, not the NIH RCDC Menopause total and not evidence that exactly $13.5 million had already been disbursed.

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality published a Special Emphasis Notice announcing continued interest in health-services research on the diagnosis, treatment, and management of perimenopause and menopause symptoms. The federal Office on Women’s Health lists it as open through December 20, 2027. A Special Emphasis Notice tells applicants that the agency wants proposals in an area. It does not carry a standalone award amount.

Impact Global Health’s G-FINDER program reported $28 million in global menopause R&D funding in 2023, with NIH providing 85 percent of the total. Its 2024 report says menopause funding then fell by $7.7 million, or 26 percent. That global figure can be lower than NIH’s RCDC amount because the scopes differ. G-FINDER includes basic research when menopause itself is the outcome of interest and excludes some work in which menopause or aging is only an exposure or contributing factor. RCDC is broader and uses a different categorization process. The $28 million headline is rounded. We do not subtract the reported $7.7 million decline to manufacture an exact 2024 total from rounded inputs.

No funding total proves adequacy on its own. The answer changes with the benchmark, and the benchmark has to be named.

Here are four defensible frames, each answering a different question.

The National Academies used a separate grant-analysis method: systematic abstract curation coupled with human adjudication. It found an average of 8.8 percent of NIH research-grant spending related to women’s health from FY2013 through FY2023, with the share declining from 9.7 percent to 7.9 percent. The committee also said its analysis could not determine an ideal funding level. That last sentence matters. A serious “underfunded” claim needs both the observed amount and a defensible standard for what the amount should be.

What this dataset establishes without a normative benchmark is narrower:

• NIH now reports $78 million for the FY2025 Menopause category.
• The current series increased 39.3 percent from FY2023 to FY2025.
• The public historical record changes methodology and has a three-year standalone reporting gap.
• The through-FY2025 cross-method reported-year sum is $701.773 million including separate ARRA rows.
• Large figures in legislation, global R&D, women’s-health research, and specific awards are not interchangeable with the NIH Menopause category.

Three live developments determine what this page should track next: the new FY2025 RCDC release and methodology note, the pending NIH menopause-workshop report, and federal bills that remain proposals rather than enacted appropriations.

On June 23, 2026, NIH published actual FY2025 categorical data and disclosed a reporting-method update intended to improve consistency and reduce double counting across certain sources. Future comparisons must check whether NIH revises prior-year values or changes the Menopause category definition.

NIH held its Pathways to Prevention workshop, Advancing Research to Improve Health During the Menopausal Transition, on April 15–17, 2026. The official workshop page says the independent panel’s report will be available for public comment and was still pending when the page was last updated July 7, 2026. The panel’s recommendations are for the broader research community. NIH says they are not NIH or federal-government policy.

S.4503 and H.R.9090 would authorize research, public-health, education, training, and care infrastructure for FY2027–FY2031. Authorization language can shape future programs, but it is not the same thing as enacted budget authority or an award.

We would rather put the caveats next to the numbers than let a reader discover them after quoting us.

• The two main segments were produced under different reporting systems.Comparisons within FY2007–FY2019 and within FY2023–FY2025 are more defensible than comparisons across the break.
• FY2020–FY2022 have no directly comparable standalone value in this concordance. We did not treat the years as zero and did not estimate them.
• The historical rows are a transcription. They come from archival PDFs. The raw components, formulas, and source files are published so every value can be checked.
• RCDC categories overlap; the older tables said their data were exclusive of overlap. The two systems do not count the portfolio in the same way.
• NIH changed parts of its reporting methodology beginning in FY2025. The Menopause row does not display the parenthetical prior-year recalculations used for categories affected by at least 2 percent, but the general change still belongs in the method record.
• Current RCDC figures are rounded to whole millions. Derived percentage changes are therefore calculations from rounded public values.
• All totals are nominal. Nothing in the cumulative calculations is inflation-adjusted.
• The $701.773 million total is not a complete estimate for FY2007–FY2025. It is the sum of sixteen fiscal years with reported values. It excludes the three-year gap rather than filling it.
• NIH is not all U.S. menopause research funding. This dataset does not comprehensively capture other federal agencies, state programs, pharmaceutical-company R&D, philanthropy, or international funders.
• Funding levels do not measure research output or quality. Dollars alone do not show the number, design, relevance, productivity, or eventual clinical effect of the projects.
• The per-woman calculation uses a sponsors’ estimate. The 75 million denominator comes from congressional bill materials, not the Census Bureau.
• Legislative status changes. The bill ledger is a snapshot verified July 31, 2026 and must be checked before any future update.

Open grants are a different question from historical spending, and they change much faster. Use live official sources rather than treating this page as a permanent grant directory.

• NIH Grants and Funding — search current notices and opportunities by menopause, perimenopause, ovarian aging, vasomotor symptoms, and related topics.
• HHS Office on Women’s Health menopause funding opportunities — federal notices collected in one place.
• AHRQ menopause research Special Emphasis Notice — listed by the federal Office on Women’s Health as open through December 20, 2027.
• The Menopause Society Research Pilot Funding Program — the 2026 cycle supports up to three pilot projects of $50,000 each; the Society says the next cycle will open in January 2027.

Eligibility, deadlines, and amounts can change. The issuing page is the controlling source.

Suggested page citation

The HRT Index Editorial Team. “Menopause Research Funding: NIH Data and Statistics, 2007–2025.” The HRT Index Research. Last verified July 31, 2026. https://thehrtindex.com/research/menopause-research-funding/

Suggested dataset citation

The HRT Index Editorial Team. Menopause Research Funding Data Concordance, FY2007–FY2025. Version 1.0. The HRT Index Research. Last verified July 31, 2026. https://thehrtindex.com/research/menopause-research-funding/

Publication name: The HRT Index Research· URL: https://thehrtindex.com/research/menopause-research-funding/· Last verified: July 31, 2026

Primary sources for the underlying values are listed below and beside every major table. When quoting an amount established directly by NIH, ORWH, ARPA-H, Congress, or another original producer, the issuing source remains the most precise citation for that underlying fact.

• NIH RePORT — Funding for Various Research, Condition, and Disease Categories
• NIH — New FY2025 Categorical Spending Data Available, June 23, 2026
• NIH RePORT — About RCDC
• NIH RePORT — RCDC Categorization Process
• NIH ORWH — FY2007–FY2008 Biennial Report
• NIH ORWH — FY2009–FY2010 Biennial Report
• NIH ORWH — FY2011–FY2012 Biennial Report
• NIH ORWH — Biennial Reports index (includes FY2013–FY2014 report files)
• NIH ORWH — FY2015–FY2016 Biennial Report
• NIH ORWH — FY2017–FY2018 Biennial Report
• NIH ORWH — FY2019–FY2020 Biennial Report
• NIH ORWH — FY2021–FY2022 Biennial Report
• NIH Office of Disease Prevention — Menopausal Transition P2P Workshop
• Congressional Research Service — NIH Funding, FY1996–FY2026 Request

• National Academies — A New Vision for Women’s Health Research, Chapter 4
• Impact Global Health — Funding for Sexual and Reproductive Health R&D, 2018–2023
• Impact Global Health — Funding for Global Health R&D in 2024

• S.4503 introduced text — Advancing Menopause Care and Mid-Life Women’s Health Act
• H.R.9090 — House companion
• H.R.6749 — Menopause Research and Equity Act of 2023
• S.1320 — Servicewomen and Veterans Menopause Research Act
• ARPA-H — Gameto award
• ARPA-H — Celmatix award
• HHS Office on Women’s Health — Menopause Funding Opportunities

• Natureeditorial — “Menopause research is globally underfunded”
• The Menopause Society — Research Pilot Funding Program

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The HRT Index earns referral revenue elsewhere on separately labeled provider-comparison pages. Those relationships had no bearing on the source selection, calculations, or conclusions here. No agency, manufacturer, funder, advocacy organization, or provider reviewed, funded, or influenced this page.

This page is educational research, not medical advice, a diagnosis, or a treatment recommendation.

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Dataset version 1.0, last verified July 31, 2026. Reuse with attribution to The HRT Index Research.