The Short Answer
Yes. Most tax-exempt organizations in the United States, including 501(c)(3) charities, 501(c)(4) advocacy groups, and other nonprofit entities, are required to file IRS Form 990, and those filings are public record. Form 990 includes detailed compensation information for the organization's officers, directors, trustees, key employees, and highest-compensated staff.
So if you want to know what a nonprofit executive director, CEO, or CFO earns, you can look it up. The data comes straight from what the organization reported to the IRS.
Look up nonprofit executive salariesWhat Form 990 Actually Shows
Form 990 reports compensation in two places. Part VII lists every officer, director, trustee, and key employee along with their reportable compensation from the organization. Schedule J goes further for certain highly-compensated individuals, breaking down their pay into base compensation, bonus and incentive pay, other reportable compensation, retirement and deferred compensation, and nontaxable benefits.
The numbers you see are annual figures matching the organization's fiscal year. So if a nonprofit's fiscal year runs July to June, the compensation covers that period, not the calendar year.
Who Shows Up in the Data
Not every employee at a nonprofit appears on Form 990. The filing includes officers, directors, and trustees regardless of compensation. It also includes "key employees" who meet a three-part IRS test involving compensation over $150,000, significant organizational responsibilities, and ranking among the top 20 highest-paid. Beyond that, the five highest-compensated non-officer employees earning more than $100,000 must be listed.
In practice, you'll reliably find executive-level roles: executive directors, CEOs, CFOs, COOs, development directors, and similar positions. You won't typically find mid-level staff or entry-level employees unless they happen to be among the highest paid.
What the Numbers Include
The compensation figures reported on Form 990 go beyond just base salary. For individuals on Schedule J, you can see base compensation reported to the IRS (W-2 or 1099 income), bonus and incentive compensation, other reportable compensation, retirement plan contributions and deferred compensation, and nontaxable benefits like health insurance.
The total compensation figure adds all of these together. A CEO with $200,000 in base pay and a one-time $100,000 retirement contribution, for instance, will show $300,000 in total compensation even though the ongoing salary is lower. Keep this in mind when comparing nonprofit executive pay across organizations.
How to Look Up Nonprofit Salaries
You can request Form 990s directly from the IRS, but that's slow and impractical if you need to compare across organizations. The raw filings are also available as XML data from the IRS, but parsing those yourself requires technical skills.
Lucido ingests raw IRS Form 990 XML filings and turns them into a searchable compensation database. You can look up specific organizations by name or EIN, filter by role, location, and organization size, and compare executive pay across peer organizations.
Compare nonprofit executive payCommon Questions
Do all nonprofits have to disclose salaries?
Most tax-exempt organizations filing Form 990 do, yes. However, churches and certain religious organizations are exempt from filing Form 990 entirely, so their compensation data is not publicly available. Very small nonprofits filing Form 990-N (the e-Postcard) don't report individual compensation, and mid-sized organizations filing Form 990-EZ have limited compensation reporting compared to the full Form 990.
How current is the salary data?
It depends on the filing method. E-filed returns can appear on IRS systems within a few months, but the full cycle from filing to availability on public platforms is often 12 to 18 months. Lucido updates monthly as new filings are released by the IRS.
Can I find salaries for a specific person?
Form 990 lists compensation by position and name within each organization. You can search for an organization and see who is listed, but there's no single index of all individuals across all nonprofits.
Can someone look up my nonprofit salary?
If you're an officer, director, key employee, or among the five highest-compensated employees at a 990-filing nonprofit, yes. Your name and compensation will appear on the public filing. This applies to the specific individuals the IRS requires organizations to report, not to all staff.
Are nonprofit salaries public in every state?
The Form 990 filing requirement is federal, so it applies uniformly across all 50 states. Some states have additional reporting requirements for charities registered there, but the core salary disclosure comes from the IRS, not state law.
Are 501(c)(3) salaries public?
Yes, and not just 501(c)(3) organizations. The Form 990 filing requirement applies to most tax-exempt entities, including 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations, 501(c)(6) trade associations, and others. Any organization that files a Form 990 must disclose executive compensation as part of the public record.