Tax-exempt organizations in the United States

The national picture

1,975,975

Organizations recognized

Registration, not activity. Nothing in this file is revoked.

1,650,468

Recognized under 501(c)(3)

The charitable subsection. The file contains almost thirty others.

722,964

With a Form 990 on record

The rest file a postcard with no financial detail, or need not file.

136,500

Private foundations

Recognized as one. 125,263 have a Form 990-PF on record.

$4.6 trillion

Revenue reported

$4,632,760,069,328

Summed across filings, each for a different year. Not a national total for any one year.

576,240

No classification code

The IRS assigns a code at registration and rarely revisits it.

Counts come from the IRS Business Master File; money comes from Form 990 filings, each describing whichever year that organization last reported. Taken on October 14, 2026.

Every ranking, organization page and money figure below is about the 722,964 organizations with a Form 990 on record. The counts above are the whole register.

What stands out

Six findings. From the IRS register and the Form 990 returns on record, each one assembled from values a query returned.

• 722,964 of the 1,975,975 tax-exempt organizations on the IRS register, 36.6%, have a Form 990 on record, and every revenue figure on this hub is about them and no others. Organizations with a Form 990 →

  The rest are on the register and in every count of organizations here; their finances are not in the returns this hub reads.

• Health organizations were 3.4% of the nonprofits with a Form 990 on record and reported 41.0% of their $4.6 trillion in revenue, 89.3% of it from program services rather than contributions. Health Care →

  Program service revenue is what an organization is paid for the services it exists to provide. A share of revenue is not a share of the sector’s work.

• The 100 nonprofits with the most revenue reported $948.8 billion, 20.5% of the $4.6 trillion reported by all 722,964 with a Form 990 on record. The 100 largest by revenue →

  Each figure is from the organization’s latest return, so the years are not all the same, and revenue is what was reported, not what was kept.

• The largest grantmaker is not a private foundation: Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund, which files the public-charity Form 990, paid $15.3 billion in grants, against $8.1 billion from Gates Foundation Trust, the private foundation that paid the most; 3 Form 990 filers paid more than it. Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund →

  Grants paid on each organization’s latest return. A private foundation files Form 990-PF; every other organization in this list files Form 990.

• The 125,263 private foundations with a Form 990-PF on record paid $134.3 billion in grants, 7.1% of the $1.9 trillion they held at market value. Private foundations →

  Grants from each foundation’s latest return, over the assets it reported at the end of that year. A foundation’s required payout is computed differently, and this is not it.

• Montana has 1,083 tax-exempt organizations on the IRS register for every 100,000 residents, the most of any state, and Utah 372, the fewest. Montana →

  The District of Columbia, a single city, has 2,047. Counted by the state on the register, and including organizations of every size.

What they do

These are the IRS’s own categories, from the code it assigns an organization at registration. 576,240 organizations carry no code at all and appear in none of them.

Revenue on a Form 990 includes contributions, grants, program service revenue and investment income. It is not a company’s sales, and the years differ between rows because organizations file on their own fiscal years.

Also ranked

Every state

• Alabama 26,440
• Alaska 5,878
• Arizona 31,700
• Arkansas 16,404
• California 203,805
• Colorado 36,502
• Connecticut 23,749
• Delaware 10,529
• District of Columbia 14,200
• Florida 114,851
• Georgia 62,701
• Hawaii 9,679
• Idaho 10,569
• Illinois 75,114
• Indiana 44,650
• Iowa 30,339
• Kansas 18,568
• Kentucky 22,861
• Louisiana 24,098
• Maine 10,385
• Maryland 43,818
• Massachusetts 44,202
• Michigan 56,832
• Minnesota 40,399
• Mississippi 15,898
• Missouri 44,280
• Montana 12,397
• Nebraska 14,915
• Nevada 13,586
• New Hampshire 9,562
• New Jersey 53,855
• New Mexico 11,324
• New York 125,130
• North Carolina 59,487
• North Dakota 6,823
• Ohio 77,494
• Oklahoma 22,534
• Oregon 27,028
• Pennsylvania 82,237
• Rhode Island 6,675
• South Carolina 32,575
• South Dakota 7,469
• Tennessee 39,235
• Texas 155,577
• Utah 13,160
• Vermont 6,606
• Virginia 54,568
• Washington 42,812
• West Virginia 11,851
• Wisconsin 39,461
• Wyoming 6,159

Analysis

Each brief is prose written around values a query returned. Every figure in one is re-checked against its query before it can merge, so a number in the text cannot drift from the data behind it.

• "Revenue" means four different things depending on the nonprofit

  Every organization here reports a figure called total revenue, and the Internal Revenue Service prints it in the same box on the same form. Across 26 NTEE major groups it describes four different activities.

  American Factbook Research · September 27, 2026

• A hundred organizations hold a fifth of reported nonprofit revenue

  The Internal Revenue Service has a Form 990 on record for 722,964 organizations. Between them they reported $4.6 trillion of revenue.

  American Factbook Research · September 27, 2026

• A quarter of large nonprofits have no classification, and the gap is not random

  Every category page on this site is built from one column of the IRS's organization file: a National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities code, assigned when an organization is recognized. It is how you can ask what a nonprofit does.

  American Factbook Research · September 20, 2026