About NonprofitTruth
Is this nonprofit spending wisely?
What we do
NonprofitTruth turns IRS Form 990 filings into readable spending, compensation, and financial-efficiency breakdowns for every U.S. 501(c)(3) that files a full return. The goal: give donors, board members, and policy researchers the same view of a nonprofit’s financial discipline that institutional funders see.
We focus on U.S. nonprofit finances and executive pay. Every page on nonprofittruth.com is built from ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer, the IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search, and IRS Form 990 filings, cited and linkable so readers can trace any number back to its source.
Who runs this
NonprofitTruth is built and maintained by the NonprofitTruth Team. We're a small group working on making public U.S. nonprofit finances and executive pay data easier for non-specialists to read. If you have a correction, a data tip, or a question about how a number was derived, the contact email below reaches us directly.
Who this is for
NonprofitTruth is built for donors, board members, nonprofit staff, foundation program officers, and investigative reporters covering the U.S. nonprofit sector.
Why this exists
Public data on U.S. nonprofit finances and executive pay is technically free, but practically locked behind file formats, acronyms, and paywalled dashboards. NonprofitTruthexists to close that gap: take the raw federal and public-sector data, and turn it into pages a normal person can read in thirty seconds.
How we work
- Primary source only. We pull from ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer, the IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search, and IRS Form 990 filings and cite the exact dataset and version on every page.
- No invented numbers. If a figure is not in the underlying public data, it does not appear on nonprofittruth.com. We never generate synthetic statistics to fill gaps.
- Methodology, in plain English. We pull IRS Form 990 filings via ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer API and compute four efficiency factors: program-spending ratio (50% weight), revenue growth consistency over five years (20%), fund reserves relative to expenses (20%), and CEO compensation ratio against revenue (10%). The composite produces a 0-100 efficiency score and a letter grade A-F.
- Refreshed on a schedule. Refreshed every four months as ProPublica processes newly available 990 batches from the IRS. Individual organizations re-grade when a new filing posts; the score is stamped with the filing year so changes are traceable.
- Corrections welcome. Readers flag issues all the time. When the source fixes a record, NonprofitTruth follows.
Known limitations
IRS releases Form 990s 12-24 months after the organization’s fiscal year-end, so current-year operations are not reflected. Smaller organizations that file the 990-N e-postcard are listed without financial detail. CEO compensation is reported on Schedule J only when the filing organization meets the size thresholds; small organizations show zero CEO compensation either because the executive is unpaid or because compensation is paid via a related entity (common for hospital and university systems).
Why we built this
The IRS Form 990 has been public for decades — every U.S. 501(c)(3) above the smallest threshold files one annually, and the document is technically downloadable from the IRS or ProPublica without restriction. But reading a single 990 requires familiarity with tax-accounting conventions; reading hundreds of them comparatively requires substantial data engineering. Most donors never see the underlying numbers, and many board members rely on what management reports.
NonprofitTruth exists to do the data integration once and surface the relevant numbers on a single per-nonprofit page: program-spending share, revenue trend over five years, executive compensation against organizational size, financial reserves. Each number links to its source on the underlying 990, so anyone questioning the calculation can verify it directly.
The efficiency grade is a single-letter summary of those underlying factors, useful as triage when comparing organizations and as a quick check when evaluating one in isolation. It is not a substitute for understanding the specific programs an organization runs, the field it operates in, or the marginal value of an additional dollar of funding — but it is a defensible starting point.
What the efficiency grade can and cannot tell you
The four factors in our rubric — program spending, revenue stability, reserves, CEO compensation — are the dimensions of financial discipline that institutional funders and third-party charity raters (BBB Wise Giving Alliance, Charity Navigator, CharityWatch) have used for decades. The rubric is opinionated about weights — program spending dominates at 50% — but the directional logic is widely shared across the sector.
What the grade does well: it identifies nonprofits whose overhead is out of line with the sector norm, whose revenue is in trouble, whose reserves are precariously thin, or whose executive compensation is unusual relative to scale. Any of those signals warrants follow-up from a donor or board member.
What the grade does not measure: the actual programmatic effectiveness of the organization. A nonprofit can grade A on the rubric and still be running ineffective programs; a nonprofit can grade C on the rubric and still be doing field-leading work whose costs are structurally high. The financial grade is one input. For the impact dimension, the rubric defers to program-specific evaluation (GiveWell, foundation site visits, independent program research) rather than trying to encode it into a single number.
How to read a nonprofit page on this site
Each /nonprofit/[slug] page on this site has four substantial blocks. The header shows revenue, expenses, assets, program spending, and the efficiency grade. The narrative section translates those numbers into plain English, branched on the specific shape of the organization (large hospital system vs. small community group vs. mid-sized advocacy organization).
Below the narrative, we show the multi-year revenue trend, the program-spending ratio over time, executive compensation history, and the breakdown of the efficiency rubric into its four factors. Each chart links directly to the underlying ProPublica entry and the IRS Form 990 PDF for verification.
For donors comparing several organizations, the most useful entry points are the category pages (e.g., /category/health, /category/education) and the state-level rankings (e.g., /state/california/most-efficient). Those pages rank by efficiency grade within a peer group, which controls for the structural differences between, say, a large hospital system and a small food bank.
Independence
NonprofitTruth is an independent publication. We are not funded, owned, or directed by any of the agencies, companies, or organizations that appear in our data. Hosting is paid for by advertising — see our Privacy Policy for details — and we do not take paid placements, sponsored rankings, or "remove-my-entry" fees.
History
NonprofitTruth launched in 2025 as part of a small portfolio of independent public-data sites. It has been maintained and updated continuously since.
Contact
Tips, corrections, data-partnership questions, and press inquiries: hello@nonprofittruth.org. More options on our contact page.