About the data

CharitySense turns the public record of US nonprofits into something you can actually search. The dataset indexes 752,090 organizations drawn from 5M+ IRS Form 990 filings, with financial-health, governance, growth, and efficiency metrics computed on top of the raw returns.

What's included

• Every US 501(c) organization that has filed an IRS Form 990, 990-EZ, or 990-PF — about 752,000 active orgs, going back multiple filing years per org.
• Identity (EIN, legal name, DBA, address, state, NTEE category, founding year, mission).
• Latest-year and historical financials: total revenue, total expenses, total assets, total liabilities, net assets / fund balance breakdowns, program expenses, salary and benefit costs, grants paid, foreign activities.
• Governance fields straight from the 990 (board size and independence, conflict-of-interest policy, whistleblower policy, document retention, audited financials, compensation review, related-party transactions, material diversion).
• Officer / director / highest-paid-person compensation as reported.
• Derived CharitySense rating — a 0-1 percentile vs. all rated orgs, combining financial health, governance, program-vs-overhead ratio, and growth signals. Not a Charity Navigator score; computed independently from the raw filings.
• Web-enrichment (where available) for donation categories, accepts-zakat / published zakat policy, foreign-country focus, and other donor-intent signals — backed by crawled evidence URLs.

What's excluded

• Non-US charities (CharitySense doesn't cover, e.g., a Karachi-based local NGO — Pakistan-related work surfaces here through US-registered 501(c) orgs that operate there).
• Real-time data: 990 filings are historical, often lagging 12-24 months behind operations.
• Sub-organizational programs that aren't broken out on the 990.

Source

Raw filings come from IRS Form 990 e-file XML, supplemented by the NCCS Master BMF for category and US-state metadata. Updates land continuously as the IRS publishes new e-file batches.

For programmatic access, see the developer API. For agent integration, see /INSTRUCTIONS_FOR_AGENTS.md.