This graphic offers a high-level breakdown of nonprofit organizations currently registered with the IRS. Of those registered, approximately 76.7% report their revenue to the IRS. The rest are exempt; the exemptions apply primarily to religious institutions, small nonprofits generating less than $25k per year, and those included in a group return.

The scatter plot shows the relative balance between all nonprofit organizations and those that report revenue by filing a Form 990 (or a 990-EZ, 990-PF, or 990-N). Because churches are exempt – I’ll hold my tongue on this issue – religion-related nonprofits have a large negative residual when considering a linear regression. In terms of revenue, health care nonprofits perform by far the best, with an average of 34.7 million dollars, which is far beyond the upper limit of the scale I set; I’m curious to see what the median is because I’m guessing there are some very large outliers, but I don’t have the data to calculate it.

Geographically, the states with the lowest percentage of nonprofits reporting revenue to the IRS are all in the southeast. I didn’t cross-tabulate the NTEE code data with the state data, but it would be safe to assume that a larger percentage of these states’ nonprofits are religion focused. The states with the highest percentage filing Form 990 are in the northeast. I’ve labeled each state with its average revenue per nonprofit. The clear outlier here is Oregon, with an average of $8.1M; DC has an average of $6.9M, and the rest of the states are all below $4M.

Data source: http://nccsweb.urban.org/tablewiz/bmf.php