How to Look Up Nonprofit Salaries

Where Nonprofit Salary Data Comes From

Every tax-exempt organization with gross receipts over $200,000 must report executive compensation on IRS Form 990. These filings are public record, which means anyone can look up what a nonprofit pays its CEO, CFO, or other top staff.

The question is how you access the data. You can read the raw filings yourself, or use a database that has already extracted and organized the compensation records.

Option 1: Read the Raw IRS Filings

The IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search (TEOS) is a free tool where you can search for any tax-exempt organization by name or EIN (Employer Identification Number). Once you find an organization, you can download its Form 990 filings as PDFs.

Compensation data appears in different places depending on which form the organization files. On the full Form 990, Part VII lists every officer, director, trustee, and key employee by name along with their reportable compensation. Schedule J goes further for highly-compensated individuals, breaking out base pay, bonus, retirement contributions, and benefits. On Form 990-EZ, compensation reporting is more limited, and Form 990-N (the e-Postcard for the smallest organizations) does not include any individual compensation data at all.

This method is free and authoritative, since you are reading the original filing. The downside is that it is slow. Each filing is a separate PDF, the search only covers one organization at a time, and there is no way to compare salaries across organizations or filter by role.

Option 2: Search a Compensation Database

Services like Lucido extract compensation data from the raw IRS 990 XML filings and make it searchable. Instead of reading individual PDFs, you can search across hundreds of thousands of organizations at once.

You can search by job title to see what a role pays across the nonprofit sector, filter by organization size, location, or mission area, and compare compensation across peer organizations. This is the fastest way to answer questions like "what do nonprofit CFOs in California earn?" or "how does our Executive Director's pay compare to similar organizations?"

You can also look up a specific organization to see all reported compensation records, including individual names and titles. The data is the same as what appears on Form 990, but it has been parsed, normalized, and indexed so you can search and filter it rather than reading one PDF at a time.

Browse by role like Executive Directors or CFOs, or explore compensation data by state.

Understanding the Numbers

The compensation figures on Form 990 represent total compensation, not just base salary. This includes base pay reported to the IRS, bonus and incentive compensation, other reportable compensation, retirement plan contributions and deferred compensation, and nontaxable benefits like health insurance.

A CEO with $200,000 in base pay and a one-time $100,000 retirement contribution will show $300,000 in total compensation for that year, even though the ongoing salary is lower. This is important context when comparing across organizations or tracking changes over time. Learn more about reading Form 990 compensation data.

Who Appears on Form 990

Not every employee at a nonprofit is listed on Form 990. The filing includes officers, directors, and trustees regardless of compensation. It also includes key employees who meet a specific IRS test involving compensation over $150,000 and significant organizational responsibilities, plus the five highest-compensated non-officer employees earning over $100,000.

In practice, you will reliably find executive-level roles: executive directors, CEOs, CFOs, COOs, development directors, and similar positions. Mid-level staff and entry-level employees generally do not appear.

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