About DoubleNine Analytics.

DoubleNine Analytics helps nonprofit boards and executives answer a simple question: is our compensation reasonable? We process over one million IRS Form 990 filings to provide transparent, data-driven benchmarks — no expensive consultants required.

Every figure on this site is reproducible. Every filing is public. Every number has a source.

All compensation data comes from electronically filed IRS Form 990 returns. Form 990 Part VII requires tax-exempt organizations to report compensation for their officers, directors, trustees, key employees, and highest-compensated employees.

Electronic filings are publicly available through the IRS and are sourced from the GivingTuesday Data Commons, which maintains a public archive of Form 990 XML filings. Electronic filing covers approximately 60–65% of all Form 990 filers. Organizations with gross receipts above $200,000 or total assets above $500,000 are required to file the full Form 990; smaller organizations file Form 990-EZ, which is also included in our dataset where Part VII compensation data is present.

The DoubleNine database currently includes 1,797,083 compensation records across 161,754 mission-driven nonprofits, covering tax years 2019–2025. Our full dataset spans 678,675 total organizations across all 50 states, Washington D.C., and U.S. territories.

Coverage is limited by what organizations file electronically. Paper filers and non-profit categories outside 501(c)(3) may appear in the raw dataset but are excluded from default benchmarks.

IRS Form 990 contains free-text title fields, which means the same role can appear hundreds of different ways. Position titles are standardized into canonical categories using a multi-method classification system informed by academic research from the Nonprofit Open Data Collective.

When generating a compensation benchmark, DoubleNine identifies peer organizations using a distance-ranking algorithm across three dimensions:

When your exact filters return fewer than 15 peers, DoubleNine automatically supplements with the closest comparable organizations by distance rank. Each peer in your report is labeled as either a direct peer (exact filter match) or a closest comparable (nearest neighbor), so you always know the basis for each comparison.

This tool supports the comparability review process described in IRS Form 990 Part VI, Line 15 and Treasury Regulation § 53.4958-6(a).

The rebuttable presumption of reasonableness requires compensation decisions to be approved by an independent body using appropriate comparability data.IRS § 53.4958-6(a) — Intermediate-sanctions regulation

DoubleNine Analytics provides one source of such comparability data but should be used alongside other compensation studies and professional guidance.

Not every organization that files a Form 990 is a typical nonprofit. The IRS dataset includes law firms, accounting partnerships, insurance companies, hospital systems, universities, and private foundations — all of which have fundamentally different compensation dynamics than a mission-driven charity.

DoubleNine classifies every organization into one of eight categories using a combination of name analysis, NTEE codes, and revenue patterns. By default, benchmarks show only operating nonprofits — the organizations your board is actually comparing against. You can toggle this filter off on the benchmark tool to see the full dataset.

Every benchmark is an approximation. These are the things we want you to know when you use our numbers.