How much of the CARES Act was grants versus loans or loan guarantees?

1. What the question really asks — definitions and why they matter

As enacted, the CARES Act mixed three legal tools: direct grants (money given without repayment), loans or loan guarantees (money lent or promised against loss), and loans that could be forgiven — a hybrid that operates as a loan initially but can become a grant if forgiveness conditions are met; legal summaries and practice guides treat PPP’s forgivable loans as “forgivable bridge loans” and note tax and accounting consequences of forgiveness ^{[6] [1] [7]}. Determining “how much was grants versus loans/guarantees” therefore requires not only listing statutory appropriations but also classifying programs (direct grant, loan, guarantee, or conditional-forgiveness loan) and tracking subsequent forgiveness decisions — information that the provided sources partially list but do not fully reconcile into a single total ^{[1] [7]}.

2. The headline grant lines that are clearly grants on paper

The statute set aside explicit grant money, most prominently a $150 billion pool for COVID-related expenses distributed to states and localities — with $139 billion allocated to states in one cited summary — and smaller targeted grant pots such as $100 million for Short-Time Compensation (work-sharing) support; other grant authorizations show up across health, education, and homeless assistance lines in statutory summaries ^{[1] [2] [5]}. The EIDL program included a rapid $10,000 advance that was explicitly non‑repayable (an emergency grant/advance), and other grant-authority items and emergency student/education grants are described in program summaries ^{[3] [4]}.

3. The large loan and guarantee authorities

Alongside grants, the CARES Act authorizes substantial loan and guarantee authorities: the PPP was created as a $349 billion pool of SBA loans (initially structured as loans) and the law gave Treasury and the Federal Reserve roughly $454 billion to backstop corporate lending facilities and guarantees — statutory language and program summaries emphasize these as loans, loan guarantees, or facilities designed to lend into markets ^{[1] [4] [5]}. The act also expanded SBA EIDL lending up to $2 million per borrower in some cases and other traditional loan programs were modified ^{[3] [8]}.

4. The gray zone — forgivable loans that act like grants in practice

Multiple legal and practitioner sources emphasize that PPP loans could be forgiven if recipients met payroll and use criteria — when forgiven, those loans “essentially turn into grants” and are treated as non-taxable under the statute’s drafting ^{[1] [3] [7]}. That conditional nature is central to any “grants vs loans” accounting: statutorily PPP and certain EIDL advances began as loans but many observers and practitioners treated forgiven balances as the economic equivalent of grants; the sources document the mechanism and expectations but do not produce a single post‑forgiveness dollar tally in the materials provided here ^{[1] [3] [7]}.

5. Bottom line, caveats and what the provided reporting cannot say

From the supplied documents, clear statutory amounts include $349 billion in PPP loans (forgivable in many cases) and roughly $454 billion in Treasury/Fed loan and guarantee authority, plus identifiable direct grant pools such as roughly $150 billion for state/local COVID expenses and programary grants including a $10,000 EIDL advance and $100 million for STC support ^{[1] [5] [3] [2]}. The sources do not, however, present a complete reconciled ledger that classifies every appropriation as “grant” versus “loan/guarantee” after forgiveness and actual disbursement outcomes, so an exact percentage split cannot be calculated from these materials alone — further reconciliation would require comprehensive appropriation tables and post‑enactment disbursement/forgiveness data not included in the provided reporting ^{[1] [5] [7]}.