Nonprofit Jobs Rebound but Remain 1 Million Short of Pre-Pandemic Levels

First, the good news: U.S. nonprofits have added roughly 666,500 jobs to their payrolls since May. The bad news: Nonprofit employment remains about 976,620 jobs short of where it stood in February, before the coronavirus erupted into a global pandemic.

According to the analysis from the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies, most of the job losses were in health-care and social-service nonprofits. Health-care nonprofits are estimated to have shed a net of 310,766 jobs since February, 31.8 percent of the 976,616 nonprofit jobs lost over all. Social-service nonprofits are employing 211,755 fewer people than in February, or 21` percent of the nonprofit jobs lost.

The estimates, which tally job losses and gains through August, show that some types of nonprofits have benefited more than others from a partial economic recovery. The researchers estimate health-care nonprofits have recovered 43 percent of the 547,530 estimated jobs they had shed as of May 2020. Arts, entertainment, and recreation nonprofits, the hardest-hit charities, recovered only 34.5 percent of the 205,964 jobs lost as of May 2020.

Arts, entertainment and recreation nonprofits are employing nearly 38 percent fewer people than in February 2020. Social-servicenonprofits, also among the hardest hit, employ roughly 12 percent fewer people than in February.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn’t break out employment figures by nonprofit or for-profit status so the numbers in the report are estimates. To arrive at their figures, researchers analyzed job losses by industry and assumed nonprofit job losses were proportional to the share of nonprofit jobs in each industry.