Nonprofits in
California

Nonprofit Explorer includes summary data for nonprofit tax returns and full Form 990 documents, in both PDF and digital formats.

The summary data contains information processed by the IRS during the 2012-2019 calendar years; this generally consists of filings for the 2011-2018 fiscal years, but may include older records. This data release includes only a subset of what can be found in the full Form 990s.

In addition to the raw summary data, we link to PDFs and digital copies of full Form 990 documents wherever possible. This consists of separate releases by the IRS of Form 990 documents processed by the agency, which we update regularly.

We also link to copies of audits nonprofit organizations that spent $750,000 or more in Federal grant money in a single fiscal year since 2016. These audits are copied from the Federal Audit Clearinghouse.

Every organization that has been recognized as tax exempt by the IRS has to file Form 990 every year, unless they make less than $200,000 in revenue and have less than $500,000 in assets, in which case they have to file form 990-EZ. Organizations making less than $50,000 don’t have to file either form but do have to let the IRS they’re still in business via a Form 990N "e-Postcard."

Nonprofit Explorer has organizations claiming tax exemption in each of the 27 subsections of the 501(c) section of the tax code, and which have filed a Form 990, Form 990EZ or Form 990PF. Taxable trusts and private foundations that are required to file a form 990PF are also included. Small organizations filing a Form 990N "e-Postcard" are not included in this data.

There are 27 nonprofit designations based on the numbered subsections of section 501(c) of the tax code. See the list »

For those interested in acquiring the original data from the source, here’s where our data comes from:

• Raw filing data. Includes EINs and summary financials as structured data.
• Exempt Organization profiles. Includes organization names, addresses, etc. You can merge this with the raw filing data using EIN numbers.
• Form 990 documents. Prior to 2017, these documents were obtained and processed by Public.Resource.org and ProPublica. Bulk PDF downloads since 2017 are available from the IRS.
• Form 990 documents as XML files. Includes complete filing data (financial details, names of officers, tax schedules, etc.) in machine-readable format. Only available for electronically filed documents. Electronic data released prior to October 2021 is also available through Amazon Web Services.
• Audits. PDFs of single or program-specific audits for nonprofit organizations that spent $750,000 or more in Federal grant money in a single fiscal year. Available for fiscal year 2015 and later.

The data powering this website is available programmatically, via an API. Read the API documentation »