US Nonprofit Search — IRS Form 990 Financials

Search 1.8 million US tax-exempt organisations by name, state, cause area and 501(c) subsection, then pull the Form 990 financials the IRS publishes for each one — revenue, expenses, assets, liabilities, contributions, officer compensation — for the latest year or for every year on file.

The data is the IRS's own. It reaches you through ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, which is free and needs no key.

What one organisation looks like

EIN 53-0196605, American National Red Cross, fiscal year ending June 2023:

Field	Value
name, city, state	American National Red Cross · Washington · DC
nteeCode, category	P210 · Human services
subsection, rulingDate	501(c)(3) charity · 1938-12-01
latestFiscalYear, formType	2023 · 990
totalRevenue	3,217,077,611
totalExpenses	2,971,106,889
surplus	245,970,722
totalAssets	4,028,321,133
totalLiabilities	1,008,326,202
netAssets	3,019,994,931
contributions	919,126,379
programRevenue	2,167,924,872
filingsWithFinancials, filingsPdfOnly	13 · 11
propublicaUrl	projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/530196605
irsPdfUrl	the scanned 990 those figures came from

Those seven money figures cross-check exactly against the Form 990 the Red Cross publishes itself at redcross.org. Nothing here is estimated or modelled; it is the filed return.

Turn on Include one row per filing year and you also get a filing row for each year, linked by ein, carrying about thirty line items — investment income, royalties, gross rents, net gain on asset sales, fundraising gross income and direct expenses, gaming income, membership dues, officer compensation, other salaries and wages, payroll taxes, professional fundraising fees, tax-exempt bonds, secured mortgages, unsecured notes. Red Cross revenue reads 3,217,077,611 for 2023, 3,182,229,338 for 2022 and 3,090,183,560 for 2021.

Searching

Four filters, combinable:

• Search terms — one per line. Each line is a separate search with its own summary row.
• State — two-letter abbreviation, the state the organisation files from.
• Cause area — the ten NTEE major groups.
• Tax-exempt subsection — 501(c)(3), 501(c)(4), and so on.

humane society + Wyoming + Environment and animals + 501(c)(3) matched 8 organisations. Adding a minimum revenue of 250,000 left two: Casper Humane Society at 1,034,354 and Red Desert Humane Society at 377,846.

Leave the search terms empty and the filters alone become a browse. Vermont + Arts, culture and humanities + 501(c)(3) returns 782 registered organisations, no keyword needed.

Or skip searching and put EINs straight in. 53-0196605 and 530196605 are both accepted.

How long a run takes

Every search result costs a second request. The search index is thin — it carries a name, a city and an NTEE code and no money at all — so the financials come from a per-organisation lookup. There is no bulk endpoint.

In practice that is fast. A 300-organisation run over animal rescue in Texas took 12.5 seconds end to end with four requests in flight. A thousand organisations takes under a minute. But the cost is linear in results, so maxResultsPerSearch is the setting that decides your run time.

Not every organisation has financials

This matters more than anything else in the output. Of those 299 Texas animal-rescue organisations, 205 had no financial figures at all — a valid IRS registration, an EIN, an address, and nothing else.

They are not missing. Organisations under 50,000 dollars of gross receipts file the 990-N e-Postcard, which asks for no numbers, so there is nothing to publish. Broad searches over small local charities will be mostly registrations. Narrow searches over hospitals, universities and foundations will be mostly complete. The summary row reports withoutFinancials for each search so you know which kind of result you have before you open the file.

Set a minimum total revenue to drop them, and anything else below your threshold, in one step.

Three different forms

An organisation files a 990, a 990-EZ or a 990-PF depending on its size and type, and the three forms are not the same document. A full 990 carries 68 fields, a 990-EZ 47, a 990-PF 126 — and they use different names for the same thing. Net assets is totnetassetend on a 990, totnetassetsend on a 990-EZ and tfundnworth on a 990-PF.

The Actor normalises all three onto one set of field names, so totalRevenue means total revenue whatever was filed. Where a form genuinely does not collect something the field is simply absent rather than zero: a 990-PF has no program service revenue line, so private foundations have no programRevenue.

Organisations also switch forms between years. Castleton Free Library in Vermont filed a 990-EZ from 2011 to 2022 reporting 187,679 in revenue, then a full 990 for 2023 reporting 613,042. Both years are in the output with formType saying which is which.

Private foundations get their own fields where the form provides them: the Gates Foundation's 2023 990-PF returns 7,810,137,842 in revenue, 76,951,451,400 in assets and 7,200,556,970 in grantsPaid.

Who uses this

Grantmakers and foundations screening prospective grantees, and checking a nonprofit's finances before a cheque goes out. Fundraising and development teams building prospect lists by cause and geography. Journalists and researchers tracking where charitable money goes. Due-diligence and compliance teams verifying that a counterparty is a real 501(c)(3) in good standing. Nonprofit consultants benchmarking a client against comparable organisations in the same state and cause area. Anyone building a charity directory who would rather not scrape one.

Scope and limits

The most recent year with figures is usually one to two years back. The IRS releases machine-readable extracts long after the return is filed. The Red Cross had its FY2024 return available as a scanned PDF while FY2023 was still the newest with extracted numbers. When that happens the Actor reports it as newerPdfOnlyYear and newerPdfOnlyUrl rather than quietly looking out of date.

A 990 is not audited financial statements. It is a tax return, filed on the organisation's own fiscal year, using the IRS's definitions. It will not always agree with the consolidated statements in an annual report, and a fiscal year ending in June is labelled by the year it ends in.

State means the state of registration. A national organisation headquartered in Washington DC files from DC regardless of where its programmes run.

A search reaches 10,000 results. The search backend stops counting and paging there. Narrow by state or cause area to get past it; the summary row sets matchesCapped when you have hit the ceiling.

Chapters and affiliates file separately. Searching for a well-known national charity returns the national entity and its separately incorporated local affiliates as distinct EINs, because that is how they file.

Output

Three row types in one dataset, distinguished by rowType:

• summary — one per search, pushed first, carrying the query, the filters applied, totalMatches, how many were inspected, how many were returned, how many fell below your revenue floor and how many had no financials.
• organization — one flat row per organisation, with the latest year's headline financials folded in.
• filing — one row per fiscal year, linked to its organisation by ein, only when you ask for them.

Source and licence

ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer API, projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/api. The underlying data is the IRS Exempt Organizations Business Master File and the IRS annual extracts of Form 990 financial data, both US federal government works in the public domain. ProPublica's terms ask that the data be credited; the Actor puts ProPublica's own data_source string on every organisation row so the extract date travels with the data.

Queried live on every run. No key, no account.

Frequently asked

Why is totalRevenue empty for so many results? Because those organisations file the 990-N e-Postcard, which collects no figures. See "Not every organisation has financials" above. Set a minimum revenue to exclude them.

Why is the latest year 2023 and not last year? The IRS publishes machine-readable extracts well after returns are filed, and ProPublica publishes what the IRS gives it. Where a newer return exists as a scan only, newerPdfOnlyYear tells you so and newerPdfOnlyUrl links the PDF.

What is an EIN that returns nothing? An EIN not in the Business Master File. The row comes back with found: false and an explanation rather than being dropped, so a list of EINs comes back the same length it went in. In a 300-result Texas search, exactly one hit had no master-file record behind it.

Can I get the full Form 990, not just the totals? Not as data. The Actor returns the extracted financial line items plus irsPdfUrl for the scanned return and fullFilingUrl for ProPublica's rendered version of the complete filing, including the schedules and the officer compensation table.

Does netAssets mean the same on every form? Yes as a concept, and the Actor maps all three forms onto it. It is end-of-year net assets or fund balances, which for a private foundation is reported as total fund net worth.

Do I get charged for an organisation with no financials? Yes — it is still a returned organisation with a verified registration, address, NTEE classification and exempt status, which is often exactly what a due-diligence check needs. Set a minimum revenue if you only want filers.