ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer
Search 1.9 million US nonprofits. Every Form 990 filing, executive salary, audit flag, and financial trend — free, no account required.
What should journalists know about ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer?
The single best free tool for nonprofit financial research. 1.9 million active organizations, 18 million tax filings, $4.1 trillion in total revenue tracked. ProPublica indexes every Form 990, 990-EZ, and 990-PF the IRS releases — then makes it actually usable. You get revenue, expenses, executive compensation, board members, and multi-year financial trends without reading a single PDF. But you can also pull the original 990 PDFs when you need line-item detail. Since late 2023, the platform added email alerts for filing updates, full-text search across e-filed documents, state-level pages ranking top nonprofits and highest-paid executives, and visual flags for organizations with audit deficiencies or reported theft. The December 2024 update added searchable audit data from the Federal Audit Clearinghouse — 33,400 organizations that spent $750K+ in federal grants. You can now filter for going-concern warnings, material noncompliance, and significant control deficiencies. No other free tool surfaces this data so cleanly. GuideStar (now Candid) offers richer self-reported profiles and grantmaking data but requires an account and paywalls deeper features. Charity Navigator rates charities but only covers organizations above $1M revenue. ProPublica wins on raw data access, speed, and zero friction.
Checking executive compensation at any US nonprofit. Tracking revenue and expense trends over time. Finding organizations flagged by auditors for financial problems. Pulling original 990 PDFs for Schedule B (donor lists on private foundations), Schedule I (grants made), or any line-item detail. Bulk analysis via the free API. Investigating whether a nonprofit is solvent, overpaying executives, or misusing federal grant money.
Churches and religious organizations exempt from filing 990s. Small nonprofits under $50K revenue filing 990-N e-Postcards (not in the database). Real-time financials — 990s are filed annually with 6-18 month lag from fiscal year end, and IRS processing adds further delay. Self-reported program impact data (use GuideStar/Candid for that). International nonprofits. Private foundation donor lists on Schedule B are available, but public charity donor lists are redacted by the IRS.
Security & Privacy
Data is scrambled while being sent to their servers
Data is scrambled when stored on their servers
Where servers are located — affects which governments can request your data
Privacy policy summary
No account required for core functionality. Email alerts require only an email address. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom — no advertising, no data sales. Standard web analytics may be present. The data you're searching is already public record (IRS filings). ProPublica has disclosed that the IRS has accidentally included Social Security numbers in some 990 filings, and ProPublica has worked to redact these.
How to protect yourself:
No account needed for searching or API access. Cross-reference 990 data with the organization's own audited financial statements — 990s are self-reported and not audited by the IRS. Check the Federal Audit Clearinghouse flags now surfaced in the tool for organizations spending $750K+ in federal grants. Use Schedule B on private foundation 990-PFs for donor lists. Compare executive compensation against similar-sized organizations using state pages. Use the API (no auth required) for bulk analysis across multiple organizations — 25 results per page, paginated. For the fullest picture, pair with GuideStar/Candid for self-reported program data and Charity Navigator for third-party ratings.
Nonprofit-operated public database of government records. No account required. Minimal data collection — email alerts are the only feature requiring personal information. The underlying data is public IRS filings. ProPublica has a strong track record on data handling and has proactively addressed IRS data quality issues (SSN redaction, nonpublic form removal). No authentication on the API means no credentials to protect.
Who Owns This
Known issues
IRS data lag is the biggest problem. The IRS has fallen behind on releasing 990 data — at one point nearly 500,000 filings were delayed. COVID-era staffing issues caused months-long gaps in the IRS's monthly data uploads to its public Amazon S3 bucket. Summary data processed by the IRS covers 2012-2019 calendar years (generally FY2011-2018 filings), though individual filings are more current. The IRS has twice accidentally uploaded nonpublic forms, and has failed to redact Social Security numbers from some filings — ProPublica removed 990 PDFs temporarily in the past while these issues were resolved. Form 990-N e-Postcards (filed by small orgs under $50K) are not included. The API reduced results per page from 100 to 25 in September 2023 with no documented rate limits. The 527 Explorer for political nonprofits is a separate tool with different data coverage.
Pricing
Free. No account required for searching. Email alerts require an email address. API is free with no authentication. No rate limits documented, though PDF downloads are rate-limited.
This is an editorial assessment based on publicly available information as of 2026-04-02, using our published methodology. Independent security review is pending. Security posture can change at any time. This is not a guarantee of safety.
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