Data sources and methodology

Nonprofit Figures republishes figures that organizations reported to the Internal Revenue Service and that the IRS makes available as open data. It calculates a few ratios and comparisons from those figures. This page lists every source and every calculation. Currently 2,964 organizations in 45states have a page.

Sources

All datasets are works of the U.S. federal government and are in the public domain (17 U.S.C. § 105). No source requires a key, a registration or a token; every file is downloaded from a public URL.

The e-file data are downloaded in batches and reduced to the fields named in this page. The IRS also states that figures are as reported by the organization and that its own processing can adjust them.

Which organizations get a page

An organization is published when all of the following hold:

• It is exempt under the IRS Business Master File status codes for unconditional or conditional exemption, and it is not excluded under the privacy rules below.
• It has at least three tax years of revenue and expense data in the IRS extracts and e-file data, and its latest year ends in 2022 or later.
• The IRS data give something to describe: a mission statement that passes the text filter, a program, management and fundraising expense split, or, for a private foundation, grants paid.

Among eligible organizations, the ones with the largest revenue and assets are published first, plus the largest organizations of each state and the private foundations with the highest grants paid. Publication proceeds in stages, so the set grows over time. The size ordering decides the order of publication only. It is not shown anywhere and it is not a rating.

What is calculated

Yearly series

For each fiscal year the page shows total revenue, total expenses and net assets. Years up to 2024 come from the Statistics of Income extracts. Newer tax periods come from the e-file data. When an organization has more than one return for the same period, the most recent one is used. Each fiscal year is one point; if the fiscal year changes and two periods fall in one calendar year, the later period is used. At most 14 years are shown.

Ratios

• Program expense ratio = program services expenses ÷ (program services + management and general + fundraising), Form 990 Part IX, latest year, only where the e-file data give all three amounts for the same period as the series.
• Months of reserves = net assets at year end ÷ (total expenses ÷ 12).
• Fundraising cost per dollar raised = direct expenses of fundraising activities ÷ gross income from fundraising activities, shown only where the Statistics of Income extract reports both.
• Revenue structure = contributions and grants, program service revenue and investment income as shares of their sum.

Comparisons

The percentile position of an organization is the share of comparable organizations with a lower value. The comparison group consists of organizations with the same NTEE major group in the same state that meet the eligibility conditions above except the content requirement. The group must contain at least 20 other organizations; if the state group is smaller, the same NTEE major group nationwide is used and the page states this. Revenue and months of reserves are compared on the latest year of the IRS extracts; the program expense ratio is compared among organizations whose e-file data include the expense split. A percentile describes a position and carries no assessment.

Similar organizations

The list at the bottom of each page names up to eight published organizations in the same NTEE major group and state whose latest revenue is closest.

What is left out, and why

The pipeline reads a fixed list of fields and nothing else. No natural person's data are published:

• Officers, directors, trustees, key employees, contractors and their compensation, donors, individual grantees, the return's signer and preparer, and the "in care of" name in the Business Master File are never read.
• Trusts described in section 4947(a)(2), trusts identified by name patterns such as "FBO" or "U/W", and organizations whose registered name is a person's name without any organizational word are excluded from the site.
• A street address is shown only for public charities with revenue of $500,000 or more and private foundations with assets of $10,000,000 or more. Otherwise the page shows the city, state and ZIP code. Address lines starting with "C/O" or "%" are dropped.
• The mission text is shown only when it contains no personal title, no "founded by", "in memory of" or "in honor of", no e-mail address and no phone number, and it is cut at a sentence boundary at 300 characters.

Anyone can ask for a page to be removed through the contact form (topic "Removal request"). We act on a request within 30 days and keep the identifier on a suppression list so that it stays out of later updates.

Update schedule and known limits

• The Business Master File, Publication 78 and revocation list are refreshed monthly; the e-file data are reprocessed quarterly.
• Organizations that file the 990-N or that are not required to file (for example many congregations) have no financial data.
• The Statistics of Income extracts cover the returns the IRS processed in a given year; returns filed late or amended later can differ from the e-file versions.
• For private foundations the extract for 2017 to 2019 is not published by the IRS, so their yearly series can have gaps in those years.

Corrections to source data should go to the IRS. For errors in how a figure is displayed here, use the contact form with the topic "Data correction".