NonprofitScan — US nonprofit tax filings, made searchable
Nearly two million tax-exempt organizations and close to seven million IRS filings, distilled into profiles a donor can actually read.
Opening up nonprofit finances
US charities disclose their finances every year through IRS Form 990 — a public document that almost no member of the public ever reads, because it lives in bulk archives and dense PDFs. NonprofitScan is one of my own products, and its whole premise is simple: take that archive, structure it and put a search box in front of it.
Donors researching a charity before giving, journalists tracing an organization's money and students mapping the sector all land on the same need — trustworthy numbers without the archaeology. The site serves them summaries first and always keeps the original filings one click away.
Platform capabilities
- Search that meets you halfway: organization name, EIN, city or state all work from the same box.
- Financial profiles summarising revenue, expenses and assets straight from Form 990 data.
- Cross-organization comparison of the key financial magnitudes.
- Layered filters by state, NTEE code and filing year.
- Original IRS PDFs linked from every profile, so any figure can be checked at the source.
- A free Charity Checker aimed squarely at donors doing due diligence.
Data depth and scale
This is federal-archive territory: nearly 2 million organizations, each with its filing history. Browsing by NTEE category reveals the sector's shape — human services counts 158,381 organizations, recreation and sports 115,179 — and the featured table surfaces giants whose reported annual revenue runs into the tens of billions of dollars, exactly as filed.
Take it for a spin: Visit nonprofitscan.com.
Engineering behind 1.9M+ profiles
A dataset this size rules out template CMSs from the start. The site runs on a purpose-built Laravel + PHP backend with a MySQL layer indexed so that name, EIN and geography lookups stay instant despite millions of rows underneath.
Organic reach is engineered through programmatic SEO — per-organization and per-category pages with unique titles, descriptions and structured data, tied together by an internal-linking hierarchy that keeps a site of this scale crawlable. No plugins, no page builders; every byte is accounted for.
Common questions
What data powers NonprofitScan?
IRS public records, full stop. The platform is built from the annual Form 990 information returns that US tax-exempt organizations must file — 6,975,298 filings indexed so far — and each profile links back to the original PDF documents for verification.
How many nonprofits can I look up?
The homepage counts 1,988,151 tax-exempt organizations across all 50 states plus DC, organised into 26 NTEE categories. Religion-related groups are the largest slice at 204,354 organizations, ahead of education at 188,592.
What financial details does a profile show?
Revenue, expenses, assets and executive compensation as reported in the organization's 990 filings, presented as readable summaries rather than raw tax forms. You can also compare those figures across organizations.
Is there a quick way to vet a charity before donating?
Yes — the free Charity Checker tool was built exactly for that scenario, and the standard search accepts a name, an EIN, a city or a state if you prefer digging into the full profile.