The New York Nonprofit Data Project
How many nonprofits are there in New York City? Who do they serve? Where are they located? How big are they?
These questions can be answered by the New York Nonprofit Data Project, a joint project of The Center for Nonprofit Strategy and Management, Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, Baruch College and Nonprofit New York that publishes occasional reports on the nonprofit sector in New York. The goal of the project is to provide policymakers, workers in the nonprofit sector, and the general public an accurate picture of how many registered nonprofits there are in New York, where they are based, what fields they work in, and what their income and assets are.
The reports are based on publicly available data, primarily from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), which has been disaggregated for the New York area.
The 2021 report documents 46,214 organizations registered in all 501c categories in the 5 boroughs of New York City. See the full report.
In addition, there are several websites with data on US nonprofit organizations that can be disaggregated to focus on New York City. The features of the sites vary, but they generally allow searches by location, as well as sorting by key factors such as finances, target population, etc. The sites primarily use the data from tax returns — Form 990 or equivalent – and so accuracy depends on the quality of the reporting to the IRS and on the machine-read extraction of the data. On the following websites, the figures for New York City vary considerably, depending on whether the sites use raw data or data cleaned to remove duplications, whether the focus is on the five NYC boroughs or the metropolitan area, whether they include all 501c organizations or only 501c3, etc.
- IRS Exempt Business Master File. The raw data from the tax returns of the 1,855,251 501c organizations that report to the IRS. The national data can be downloaded by state and region.
- IRS Search for Tax Exempt Organizations. See additional searches for individual organizations and for categories of organizations by location.
- Guidestar by Candid: Search for organizations by name, state, city, county zip codes metropolitan statistical areas, as well as by key characteristics such as finances, populations served, number of employees, diversity of staff and board.
- Pro Publica’s Nonprofit Explorer. Search by name, state, field of work, 501c category, names of employees or board members.
- Wikicharities: Search by name, location and topic. This site also features an interactive map that allows you to zoom in on organizations by locations. (But note that these are only the locations of the registered offices of organizations and do not accurately reflect location of their services).
- Cause IQ: Search for organizations by category and location. Once a location is specified there is additional data on employment and finances.
- George Mason University Nonprofit Employment Data Project, Nonprofit Works: An interactive site that allows users to explore nonprofits along a range of indicators.
- 501c3lookup.org: Additional access to the IRS data by name, location and activity.
There are additional sites that allow searches by organization name only. Some of the sites rate the organizations on key organizational criteria.
