Contents
- Nonprofit operating expenditure statistics by organizational size
- Expense ratios, reserves, and financial resilience
- Program spending and mission delivery expenses
- Staffing, salaries, and professional fees
- Nonprofit journalism operating expenses: a sector-specific view
- FY 2023 expenses in the NCSES nonprofit research survey
- Sources
Nonprofit operating expenditure statistics by organizational size
A useful starting point is to distinguish how much organizations spend from how spending changes over time. GivingTuesday’s analysis of U.S. private charities filing Form 990-PC or 990-EZ tracks organizations with more than $50,000 in annual revenue. Organizations below that threshold are excluded. Its revenue-size bins are reassigned annually, and the reported dollar changes are nominal, so they are not adjusted for inflation.
Across the pre-COVID period from 2012 through 2019, expense growth across the report’s revenue-size bins clustered around zero percent per year. In 2020, expenses fell across groups, with Large and Very Large organizations cutting about 6% and Small organizations about 3%. The following year brought a sharp rebound: Small organizations’ expenses rose 15%, the largest single-year swing among the size groups. The report cautions that changing composition within size bins contributed to the rebound, so it should not be read as a like-for-like change for a fixed set of organizations. GivingTuesday, Mapping the Giving Ecosystem, Sections 3.1 and 3.8
These figures describe reported expenses within a defined filing population. They do not represent every nonprofit in the United States, and nominal growth does not indicate whether spending power rose after inflation. The annual reassignment of organizations to revenue bins also means that size-group comparisons across years can reflect membership changes as well as changes in individual organizations’ spending.
Expense ratios, reserves, and financial resilience
Expense-to-revenue ratios provide a different view: they show how closely reported spending tracks reported revenue, rather than the dollar amount spent. Before COVID-19, the median ratio was about 99% for Small organizations and 96–97% in larger revenue bins. In 2021, the median fell to 89–94% in all groups except Small as organizations cut spending faster than revenue declined. Small organizations’ median ratio dipped to about 94% after relief funding temporarily expanded revenue. By 2022–2023, the median ratios across all bins had returned to 95–99%. GivingTuesday, Mapping the Giving Ecosystem, Section 3.9
A ratio near 100% is not a direct measure of financial health: it compares expenses and revenue over a reporting period, while reserves represent accumulated resources. In 2023, the median organization in the report’s Form 990 population had roughly 11 months of unrestricted net assets relative to annual expenses, and about 5% reported negative net assets. The largest organizations in the reserve analysis—those with $50 million or more in expenses—had median unrestricted reserves covering under six months and median liquid reserves covering under two months. Their 7.2% rate of negative net assets was the highest among size groups. These are medians and group shares, not a guarantee that a typical organization in every subsector has the same cushion. GivingTuesday, Mapping the Giving Ecosystem, Section 3.9
Program spending and mission delivery expenses
Program expenses are often used to describe the share of spending directed to an organization’s program activities. The GivingTuesday analysis shows a substantial size gradient in 2012: organizations in the Major revenue bin allocated 83.3% of expenses to programs, compared with 62.7% for Medium-Small organizations and 26.5% for Small organizations. The Small bin is defined as under $100,000 in annual revenue. For Medium through Major organizations, program-expense ratios varied by only 1–2 percentage points before 2020; the Small group’s share rose from about 27% in 2019 to 35% in 2020. GivingTuesday, Mapping the Giving Ecosystem, Section 3.10
The report also tracks grants paid, a category that can be important for grantmaking and pass-through organizations. From Medium-Small through Large groups, grants paid were broadly stable at 5–8% of expenses. Small organizations showed a different pattern: their aggregate grants-paid share was 14–16%, while the median Small organization’s ratio was zero. The report attributes the higher aggregate share to a small subset of community foundations and pass-through intermediaries, illustrating how a few organizations can affect an aggregate even when the median is zero. Among Major organizations, grants paid rose from 2.1% of expenses in 2012 to 4.6% in 2023. GivingTuesday, Mapping the Giving Ecosystem, Section 3.14
Program and grant categories should not be treated as interchangeable measures of mission impact. They describe expense classifications, and the available figures do not establish the outcomes produced by those expenditures.
Staffing, salaries, and professional fees
Reported salary expenses differ markedly by organization size in the GivingTuesday analysis. The report says 78% of Small organizations reported zero salary expenses, compared with 42.6% of Medium-Small, 20.9% of Medium, and 6.8% of Major organizations. These percentages are given across the report’s 2012–2023 analysis without a single tax year specified. A zero in the salary-expense category does not by itself establish that an organization had no workers; the statistic concerns reported salary expenses. GivingTuesday, Mapping the Giving Ecosystem, Section 3.11
Among Large and Very Large organizations, salaries consistently represented 35–37% of expenses over 2012–2023. The distribution among Major organizations was more varied: 18.8% were in the 1–10% salary-expense band, while 24.8% were in the 31–40% band. These bands show that a size category can contain organizations with quite different expense structures. GivingTuesday, Mapping the Giving Ecosystem, Section 3.11
Professional fees—including consultants, legal services, and accounting—also take a larger reported share in the Small bin. Across the report’s analysis, Small organizations allocated 6–8% of expenses to these fees, compared with 3–4% for Medium-Small organizations and less than 1% for Large, Very Large, and Major organizations. Small organizations’ professional-fee share reached 8.0% in 2021 and remained 7.8% in 2023. The figures describe expense shares, not the dollar amount each organization paid. GivingTuesday, Mapping the Giving Ecosystem, Section 3.13
Nonprofit journalism operating expenses: a sector-specific view
Nonprofit news outlets offer a focused example of how mission and operating models shape expense allocations. Across Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) member organizations, 62% of operating expenses in 2025 went to editorial operations, including reporting and editing. The membership-wide share allocated to revenue generation rose from 10% in 2019 to 16% in 2025, the highest level on record in the report. These are figures for INN members, not estimates for all U.S. nonprofits. Institute for Nonprofit News, “Revenue & Expenses”
Median expenses per INN member organization were $449,000 in 2025, up from $434,000 in 2024. The report also describes a high-investment group of outlets that devoted at least 25% of expenses or budget to revenue generation; 46% of that group were more than 15 years old. The age figure provides context for that subgroup and is not itself an expense measure. Institute for Nonprofit News, “Revenue & Expenses”
FY 2023 expenses in the NCSES nonprofit research survey
A separate federal survey provides a large-scale expense snapshot for its own defined population. Table 1 of the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES) FY 2023 nonprofit research survey reports total expenses in thousands of dollars. Across all organizations covered, total expenses were $1,819,255,255 thousand, or about $1.819 trillion. Healthcare organizations accounted for $1,574,738,331 thousand; science and technology organizations, $28,052,865 thousand; and other nonprofit organizations, $216,464,059 thousand. NCSES, Table 1. Total expenses of nonprofit organizations, by type of nonprofit organization and R&D activity: FY 2023
The table further separates organizations by whether they reported R&D activity. Healthcare organizations with R&D activity reported $873,669,021 thousand in expenses, compared with $701,069,310 thousand for those without R&D activity. For science and technology organizations, the corresponding amounts were $21,488,955 thousand and $6,563,910 thousand. Other nonprofit organizations reported $51,513,164 thousand with R&D activity and $164,950,895 thousand without it. Amounts in this table are in thousands, so the figures should be read with that unit in mind. NCSES, Table 1, FY 2023
This survey is not a census of all nonprofits. It is the Nonprofit Research Activities module of the 2024 Annual Business Survey, and it excludes nonprofit universities and colleges and federally funded research and development centers administered by nonprofits. Industry categories are based on the 2017 North American Industry Classification System code accounting for the majority of payroll. Its totals should therefore be interpreted within this survey scope, separately from the Form 990 analysis and INN membership figures.