Every engineer you pay can earn you back ~$7,400 a year.
The federal R&D credit turns engineering payroll into cash against payroll tax, even before you're profitable. Most early-stage startups never claim it.
- Qualifies as a small business
- Projects documented from GitHub
- Form 6765 ready for your CPA
Startups do qualifying R&D every sprint. Few turn it into cash.
The window to claim is shorter than founders think.
From payroll to cash in four steps.
Ready to get your money back?
Leave with a CPA-ready claim packet, or get matched with a filing partner.
Get the money, and keep the proof.
Everything between "I'm owed a credit" and cash in the bank. Start with Maya's walkthrough to see the whole path.
The public data behind the credit.
Who claims, where R&D money flows, and the rules that change the value.
Follow Maya from estimate to cash.
Maya is CEO of Lumen Labs, a fictional AI startup that just raised a $5M seed round. Every step shows what she does, how long it takes her, and which public data powers it.
Maya's calendar
Real dates for a calendar-year C-corp filing on April 15.
Your commit history is your R&D record.
Most teams already have dated evidence of experimentation in Git. We scan commit messages for R&D signals and turn them into linkable evidence for your claim.
From estimate to cash in seven steps.
What a startup files, in order. Tick each step as you go.
File with your own CPA
Download a claim packet: your estimate, the filing checklist and your project log.
Get matched with a filing partner
We introduce you to a vetted R&D credit provider. You choose exactly what to share.
Every public API and dataset we use.
What each source powers, how fresh it is, and what it can't tell you.
| Source | API or dataset | Powers | Freshness | Limits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IRS Statistics of Income | Pub 16, Table 14 · Research credit tables | Who claims, growth, startup gap | Snapshot TY2022, 2015, 2013 | C-corps only; size breakdown last published for 2013 |
| USAspending.gov API | POST /api/v2/search/spending_by_geography/ | SBIR/STTR by state; NSF + NIH university awards by state and county | Live + snapshot, FY2024–25 | SBIR is a keyword proxy, not SBIR.gov totals |
| Grants.gov Search2 API | POST api.grants.gov/v1/api/search2 | Open federal grants by vertical | Snapshot 2026-10-22, tries live | Browsers are often blocked by CORS |
| GitHub REST API | GET /repos/{owner}/{repo}/commits | Commit evidence for your claim | Live on request, with consent | Public repos; 60 requests an hour without sign-in |
| Census County Business Patterns | CBP 2022, NAICS 5417, 5112, 5415, 3254, 334 | Pool of R&D-intensive businesses by state | Snapshot 2022 | Establishments, not firms; industry isn't eligibility |
| NSF NCSES | HERD survey · State Indicators | University R&D context | Snapshot FY2023 | Correlation, not causation |
| US Atlas (TopoJSON) | us-atlas 3.0.1 via jsDelivr | County heatmap shapes | Static | — |
| IRS forms and law | Form 6765 · Form 8974 · IRC §41, §174A | Estimator rules and the filing guide | 2026 rules | Not tax advice |
| State credit rules | KPMG, Aprio, CLA summaries; CA SB 711, TX SB 2206, MI 2024 law | 21 states in the estimator and map | Hand-compiled Oct 2026 | No public API; rules change yearly |
What leaves your browser
45% of claimants, 4.6% of the money
IRS research-credit claims by company size, tax year 2013. The IRS has not published a size breakdown since, so this is context, not today's picture.
Share of claimants vs share of credit dollars
How many eligible companies actually claim?
No public source measures this, so here's a transparent model. Move the assumptions.
Default is the IRS count of C-corp claimants (tax year 2022). Including S-corps and partnerships would raise it, so treat the claim rate as a lower bound. Census counts establishments, not firms, so the "not claiming" figure is a rough range, not a measurement.
Estimated eligible firms by state
Top 12 states. Darker segment = estimated not claiming, at the national rate.
How the model works, and what it would take to do better
- Eligible pool: Census County Business Patterns 2022 establishments in R&D services (5417), software publishers (5112), computer systems design (5415), pharma (3254) and electronics (334), multiplied by your eligibility share.
- Claimants: IRS count of companies filing Form 6765.
- State view: each state's pool, and how many would be unclaimed if the national rate held there. No state claim counts are published.
- To get a real number: IRS SOI special tabulations by state and entity type, state revenue credit reports (Iowa, California and others publish claimant counts), Census business R&D surveys (BRDIS/BERD), and Form 8974 payroll-offset counts.
Manufacturing still leads. Software is catching up.
IRS Statistics of Income, Publication 16 Table 14 (Form 6765), tax year 2022, the latest published. C-corporations only.
Claimants by sector, 2015 vs 2022
Information (incl. software) claimants tripled; total claimants rose 75% and credit dollars roughly tripled.
Credit dollars by sector
Number of claimants by sector
Average credit per claimant
Software and IT firms appear under Information and Professional services.
Founders don't fail on eligibility. They fail on paperwork.
Click a hurdle for the fix. From practitioner guidance and IRS audit themes, not a survey.
Every state plays by different rules
Pick a lens, then click a state for its credit rules, funding ecosystem and national ranks.
to see its rules and ranks.
Where federal R&D money clusters
SBIR/STTR and university NSF/NIH awards by county, FY2024–25, from USAspending. Hover a county.
Loading map…
Top 8 counties
Does university R&D drive tech?
Correlation (r) across 50 states, from this app's data.
Official maps: NSF State Indicators · NSF HERD survey
The university landscape, and other blind spots
NSF and NIH awards to higher-education institutions, FY2024–25, from USAspending. NSF's HERD survey counts $108.8B of total academic R&D (FY2023).
Top 10 institutions
Top 10 states
Blind spots founders miss
Rules that quietly shrink or delay the money. Click to open.
Open federal opportunities, by vertical
From the Grants.gov Search API. Federal grants are national: eligibility, not location, is what varies. SBIR/STTR is reauthorized through 2031 and adds a "strategic breakthrough" Phase II award of up to $30M. Remember: grant-funded work can't also count toward the R&D credit.
What could your startup claim?
Six quick questions about your company. Your estimate updates as you answer.
Where is your company based?
State credits range from nothing to cash refunds.
Who is building your product?
Count W-2 engineers, data scientists and technical product people.
How much of their time goes to R&D?
Building new or better technology where the answer wasn't known. Not routine maintenance or support.
What else do you spend on R&D?
Only US-based contractors count, at 65% of what you pay them.
Tell us about revenue.
Under $5M, with first revenue in the last 5 years, unlocks the payroll-tax offset.
History and burn.
Past R&D spend changes your rate. Burn turns the result into runway.
Build the record before anyone asks for it
Log each project as you go, in the shape the IRS asks for.
Why this matters in 2026
Refund claims must name each business component, the research, who did it, what they sought to learn, and the costs. From tax year 2026, Form 6765 Section G asks for this project by project. Small businesses taking the payroll offset, and original returns with QREs of $1.5M or less and receipts of $50M or less, may skip Section G, but these records are still your audit defense.
Log a project
Record completeness
Checks that each field is filled in, not whether the IRS will accept it.