Capital appropriations are an important but often forgotten component of the public contribution to funding higher education. In fiscal year 2021, nearly $13 billion was appropriated for capital projects at public institutions, representing 11.6% of the total state contribution to higher education. When compared to general operating support and state financial aid programs, there is very little information on public capital appropriations. In an effort to fulfill this data need, SHEEO has started collecting information on total capital appropriations as part of the annual State Higher Education Finance (SHEF) data collection. This issue brief highlights the mandatory and optional data elements that SHEEO is now collecting annually and provides an initial snapshot of the first two years of data. The data show that capital appropriations tend to be more volatile than the rest of state support, to which they are only loosely correlated. These data also show that states use capital appropriations to fund a variety of projects and that these uses change based on the projects funded each year.