In decentralized school systems where core funding comes from local governments, the central government sometimes provides grants on top of the core funding (e.g. Title I in the US). In Sweden, such grants have grown from around 3 % of compulsory school costs in 2010 to 7 % in 2023. The grants, which typically are tied to specific purposes, are a way for the government to exercise control over various school policies in a decentralized system. However, for the grants to have an impact, providers must claim their entitlements which requires submitting a detailed plan for fund usage and not all providers do this, especially not smaller private providers. We study how the size of the grant entitlement affects providers’ take-up decisions. This is a margin that readily can be adjusted by e.g. merging smaller grants to a single larger. We exploit variation from a large grant in Sweden that allocated substantially more money to providers with a socioeconomic student composition below a certain threshold value. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that take-up among private providers increased from 70 % to 88 % as the grant amount increased from about 4 % to 13 % of the total cost per student. Importantly, the effect on take-up appears to be sticky as it remains in a later year when the compensatory part was removed from the grant and all providers were entitled to the same amount per student.