Nonprofit Sector in Brief

The Nonprofit Sector in Brief Dashboard is an interactive tool that surfaces decades of IRS data on the U.S. nonprofit sector. Built and maintained by NCCS at the Urban Institute, the dashboard lets researchers, journalists, funders, and policy analysts explore how the sector has grown and changed without writing a line of code.

What you can do:

• Visualize four panel families: organization counts (1989–2026), finances — assets, revenues, expenses, and benefits (1989–2023), private foundation grantmaking (1989–2023), and donor advised funds (2021–2023).
• Filter by date range, geography (national → census region → state → metro/micro area or county), organization type across the 501(c) classifications, NTEE subsector, and expense-size band.
• Break down any metric by organization type, subsector, geography, or size with one click.
• Download any chart's underlying table as a CSV, or request a custom-cut Form 990 panel dataset delivered to your inbox.
• Share specific views — the URL captures your filter selections, so a link to a particular state's nonprofit revenue trend opens with those filters already applied.

Data is sourced from two NCCS holdings: the harmonized Core Series (standardized Form 990, 990-EZ, and 990-PF data, used for the finance and grantmaking panels) and the Business Master File (BMF) (every registered tax-exempt organization, used for the organization-counts panel, geocoded down to the census-tract level and refreshed through 2026).

Nonprofit Sector in Brief reports from 2009 to 2019 are linked at the bottom of this page.