Tax-Exempt Organizations Registered With the IRS

More than a million charities and private foundations were registered with the Internal Revenue Service as

of September 30, 2006, according to figures released by the tax agency.

The number of groups classified under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code rose in 2006 by 18,212, or 1.7 percent, from 2005, the revenue service reported.

In 2006, a total of 1,064,191 charitable organizations — including 105,219 private foundations — were registered with the federal government, compared with 1,045,979 registered in 2005.

The number of nonprofit groups and foundations has increased by nearly 63 percent over the past decade. In 1996 the IRS counted a total of 654,186 of them.

The pace of growth of charitable organizations has slowed down recently, however. The number of groups increased by 3.5 percent from 2004 to 2005, 4.8 percent from 2003 to 2004, and 6 percent from 2002 to 2003.

The IRS has acknowledged that an unknown number of the organizations classified under Section 501(c)(3) are still on the government’s books, even though they have shut down.

From 2005 to 2006, the number of private foundations grew by 1.4 percent, an increase of 1,478, the revenue service said.

The IRS’s statistics show that the total number of tax-exempt organizations classified under all parts of Section 501(c) of the Internal Revenue Code rose by 15,456, or 1 percent, from 2005 to 2006.

These statistics were published in the IRS’s Data Book 2006, which is available online.

The chart below shows the number of organizations registered under each subcategory of Section 501(c) in 2005 and 2006, as well as the number of applications approved and denied in 2005 by IRS field offices.