Data essays from the CharitySense Data team: what IRS Form 990 filings reveal about the U.S. nonprofit sector, charity ratings, public data, and where the money goes.
We processed 5.8 million IRS Form 990 filings across 790,744 organizations to map a roughly $4 trillion sector: about $4.37T in revenue and $9.7T in assets, with about $3.19T of program spending reaching programs (latest filings, mostly 2024). The typical nonprofit raises about $119,000 a year; the average is about forty-six times larger.
Understanding the U.S. nonprofit sector is expensive and uneven, yet the underlying IRS Form 990 records are already public. We walk the paid options and their costs (Cause IQ at $5,988/yr, Candid Premium at $1,199/yr, and others) and make the case for a free, deep, plain-English, agent-readable baseline across 790,744 organizations and about 5.8 million filings.
How the CharitySense nonprofit rating is defined and why: a weighted-mean index over five categories and eighteen metrics, shown as a 0-to-100 score. We measured the rating across 790,741 organizations to show the shape of the index, the five trust bands, the pattern by cause, and how low-deployment reserves and self-contradicting filings surface. Every number is derivable.