Researching a Funder with Form 990

Form 990-PF is the annual return every private foundation files. The return itemizes every grant paid — recipient, purpose, amount — plus the stated application procedure and the trustees. Read the grants table first, compute the median rather than the average, and check whether unsolicited requests are accepted.

Current figures — verified 2026-08-11

Item	Value	Source
Private foundations reporting they only fund preselected organizations	71% of 112,733 Form 990-PF filers, fiscal year end 2023	Candid, How often do foundations accept unsolicited requests for funds?
Foundations with assets above $100 million accepting unsolicited requests	38% of 1,744 such foundations	Candid, same analysis
Lag between a filing and its appearance in aggregated grants data	Six months to two years	Candid, Grants data fact sheet
Form 990 Schedule I itemization threshold	Recipients that received more than $5,000	IRS, Schedule I (Form 990)

These figures change. Verify against the linked source before relying on them. Report an outdated figure

Key takeaways

• Form 990-PF itemizes every grant a private foundation paid.
• Use the median grant size; one large grant destroys the average.
• A checkbox on the form states whether unsolicited requests are accepted.
• Officer compensation lines reveal whether any staff exist.
• Every 990-derived profile is at least a year old.

What is Form 990-PF and what does it tell a grantseeker?

Form 990-PF is the annual information return filed by private foundations, taxable private foundations, and section 4947(a)(1) nonexempt charitable trusts treated as private foundations (IRS, Instructions for Form 990-PF). The form is open to public inspection, and it is the only document in which most foundations disclose their complete grantmaking in a standard format.

Two forms cover the funder universe, and the difference decides how much you can learn. Private foundations — including most family and corporate foundations — file Form 990-PF and itemize every grant paid, with recipient, purpose, and amount. Public charities and community foundations file Form 990, which itemizes grants on Schedule I only for recipients receiving more than the reporting threshold; see the current figures above. Corporate giving programs run inside an operating company file nothing and are effectively invisible in tax data.

The research value of Form 990-PF is behavioral rather than aspirational. A foundation’s website states what it intends to fund; the return states what it funded, to whom, where, and for how much. When the two disagree, the return is the better predictor, because it is a legal disclosure rather than a communications document. That distinction is the whole method, and it underlies both how foundation grants work and the practice of finding and qualifying funding.

Electronic filing makes the data usable at scale. Organizations exempt under section 501(a) must file Form 990 and Form 990-PF electronically, subject to limited exceptions (IRS, Annual filing and forms), which is why filings are machine-readable rather than locked in scanned images.

Which parts of Form 990-PF matter for funder research?

Six parts of Form 990-PF carry nearly all of the research value, and the rest can be skipped on a first pass. The part numbering on the current form places the grants list in Part XIV, not Part XV, and many older guides still say otherwise — verify against the form before quoting a part number (IRS, Form 990-PF).

The table below lists the parts of Form 990-PF that a grantseeker reads, and what each one answers.

Part of Form 990-PF	Title	What it answers
Part I	Analysis of Revenue and Expenses	How much left the building as grants versus operating cost
Part VII	Information About Officers, Directors, Trustees, Foundation Managers, Highly Paid Employees, and Contractors	Who decides, and whether anyone is paid
Parts IX–XII	Minimum Investment Return, Distributable Amount, Qualifying Distributions, Undistributed Income	Required payout, actual payout, and carryforward position
Part XIV	Supplementary Information	The application procedure, grants paid, and grants approved for future payment
Part XIV, line 3b	Grants and Contributions Approved for Future Payment	How much of next year’s capacity is already committed

Part XIV is where a first read should start and often end. It contains the application instructions plus the itemized list of grants paid during the year, with recipient name and address, relationship to any foundation manager or substantial contributor, foundation status of the recipient, purpose, and amount (IRS, Form 990-PF).

For public charities and community foundations filing Form 990 instead, the equivalent reading is Schedule I for the grants list, Part VIII for revenue, and Part IX for functional expenses (IRS, Form 990). Community foundations add a wrinkle covered in community foundations and donor-advised funds: much of their grantmaking may flow from donor-advised funds the foundation does not direct.

How do you tell whether a foundation accepts unsolicited proposals?

Form 990-PF answers the question with a checkbox. Part XIV, line 2 instructs the filer: “Check here if the foundation only makes contributions to preselected charitable organizations and does not accept unsolicited requests for funds” (IRS, Form 990-PF). A checked box is the foundation telling the federal government, under penalty of perjury, that an unsolicited application will not be considered.

The box is checked far more often than grantseekers assume. Candid’s analysis of Form 990-PF filings found that a large majority of private foundations checked it, with larger foundations somewhat more open than the field; see the current figures above. The practical consequence is that most of the foundations a keyword search surfaces are structurally closed, and time spent drafting for them is time lost.

When the box is not checked, the same Part XIV requires the foundation to disclose four things: the name, address, and telephone number or email address of the person to whom applications should be addressed; the form in which applications should be submitted and the information and materials they should include; any submission deadlines; and any restrictions or limitations on awards, such as by geographical areas, charitable fields, kinds of institutions, or other factors (IRS, Form 990-PF).

Read that disclosure block against the foundation’s website. The return is a legal filing and the website is marketing, so where they conflict the return usually reflects operating policy — though the return is older, and a named contact may have moved on. A checked box does not always mean no path exists; it does mean an unsolicited full proposal is the wrong first move, and that a letter of inquiry or a referral is the sensible entry.

How do you compute a foundation’s realistic grant size?

Compute the median of the grants table, not the average, and then compute the middle half of the distribution. One outsized grant to a founder’s alma mater will pull the mean far above anything a new grantee could realistically receive, and asking at the mean signals that you did not read the return.

Consider a Form 990-PF grants table with twelve grants: $500,000, $75,000, $50,000, $50,000, $40,000, $35,000, $30,000, $25,000, $25,000, $20,000, $15,000, and $10,000. Total grants paid are $875,000. The arithmetic mean is $72,917. The median — the midpoint between the sixth and seventh values — is $32,500. The mean is more than twice the median, entirely because of one grant.

Now compute the middle half. The 25th percentile of that distribution sits near $21,000 and the 75th percentile at $50,000, so the realistic ask band is roughly $21,000 to $50,000. Removing the single $500,000 grant drops the mean to $34,091, which is close to the median — confirming the outlier diagnosis rather than assuming it.

Three refinements sharpen the band further. First, restrict the comparison set to recipients of roughly your organizational size, because a foundation that writes $500,000 checks to hospitals and $25,000 checks to community groups has two distributions, not one. Second, code the purpose column: counting general operating support against named-project grants tells you what to ask for, which matters as much as how much. Third, check Part XIV line 3b, grants approved for future payment; large forward commitments mean next year’s capacity is already spoken for.

How do you read a foundation’s grant distribution for geography and repeat grantees?

The grants table in Form 990-PF carries recipient addresses, which makes geographic concentration directly computable. Tabulate the recipient states and cities and sum dollars by place. A foundation describing itself as national while sending most of its dollars to three counties is describing an aspiration, and an applicant outside those counties is competing against that gravity.

Repeat-grantee analysis requires three consecutive returns rather than one. Pull the grants tables from three years, build the recipient lists, and compare. The share of the most recent year’s recipients that did not appear in either prior year is the new-grantee rate, and it is the most predictive single number in foundation research because it measures behavior rather than stated policy. A foundation whose recipient list barely changes is a closed system regardless of what its guidelines say.

Two columns in the same table add context that dollar figures miss. The relationship column discloses any relationship between an individual recipient and a foundation manager or substantial contributor; a table with many entries there describes a family checkbook rather than an open competition. The foundation-status column shows whether recipients are public charities or private foundations, which tells you whether your legal structure is one the funder is accustomed to funding.

The purpose column is the cheapest source of language. Reading thirty purpose lines gives you the funder’s own vocabulary for the work they fund, which is more useful in a letter of inquiry than any phrasing you would generate independently. Turning that reading into a ranked, dated list of targets is what building a grant pipeline does with the output.

How do you tell a staffed foundation from an unstaffed one?

Part VII of Form 990-PF lists officers, directors, trustees, foundation managers, highly paid employees, and contractors, with compensation (IRS, Form 990-PF). If every compensation figure is zero, the foundation has no paid staff, the trustees are the staff, and there is no program officer to call. That single observation changes the entire outreach strategy.

Unstaffed foundations behave differently in four ways worth planning around. Decisions cluster around infrequent board meetings rather than rolling review. Written materials do more work because no one will call to clarify. Relationships run through trustees, which makes board-level introductions decisive. And response times are long, because the work is being done by volunteers between other obligations.

Staffed foundations are the opposite case, and Part VII shows their shape. Compensated positions, especially program-titled ones, mean there is someone whose job includes talking to applicants before a proposal exists. That conversation is the highest-value pre-submission input available, and it costs one email.

Part VII also answers the relationship question. Cross-referencing trustee names against your own board, major donors, and senior staff produces a warm-path map derived entirely from public records. The same names can be searched across other organizations’ filings to find shared affiliations, which is what a full-text filing search is for.

Where do you get Form 990 data for free?

Three free sources cover almost all Form 990 research, and none requires a subscription. Each answers a different question, and using them in sequence is faster than using any one exhaustively.

• ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer — free access to filed returns for millions of tax-exempt organizations, with organization search, people search, and full-text search across filings (ProPublica, Nonprofit Explorer). Full-text search is the tool that finds a foundation by what it funded rather than by its name.
• IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search — the authoritative record, covering Publication 78 eligibility data, the automatic revocation list, determination letters, Form 990-N filings, and copies of returns (IRS, Tax Exempt Organization Search). Use it to confirm status, not to browse.
• IRS bulk data downloads — the same data as downloadable data sets, including Publication 78 data, the auto-revocation list, and Form 990-series files, updated monthly (IRS, Tax Exempt Organization Search bulk data downloads). This is the route to systematic analysis across many funders at once.

Paid databases such as Candid add normalization, subject coding, and cross-funder search speed on top of the same public filings. Their value is time, not access. What they cannot fix is recency: Candid states that “annual return data from government sources—such as Form 990 or 990-PF—can take six months to two years to reach Candid from the date they were filed” (Candid, Grants data fact sheet). Locating funders in the first place is covered in how to search for grants.

What goes wrong in Form 990 funder research?

Form 990 research fails in predictable ways, and most failures come from treating a tax return as current intelligence. Six recur:

• Using the mean instead of the median. A single large grant inflates the average and produces an ask the foundation has never made to an organization like yours.
• Quoting a stale part number. The grants list is not where older guides say it is; confirm against the current form before citing a part.
• Skipping the unsolicited-requests checkbox. Most private foundations report that they only fund preselected organizations, and the box is the fastest disqualifier available.
• Reading one year. New-grantee rate, renewal behavior, and forward commitments are only visible across three consecutive returns.
• Trusting the stated geography. Recipient addresses in the grants table are evidence; the guidelines page is a statement of intent.
• Forgetting the lag. Every profile built from filings is at least a year old, and staff, strategy, and priorities all turn over inside that window.

The compounding error is building a proposal whose only evidence of fit is a tax return from two years ago. Filings tell you whether a funder is worth approaching and what to ask for. They do not tell you what the funder decided last quarter, and only the funder’s own current materials — or a conversation — can.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between Form 990 and Form 990-PF?

Private foundations file Form 990-PF and itemize every grant paid in Part XIV. Public charities and community foundations file Form 990 and itemize grants on Schedule I only above a reporting threshold. Corporate giving programs operated inside a company file neither and leave no public grant record.

Where is the grants list on Form 990-PF?

The itemized grants list is in Part XIV, Supplementary Information, along with the foundation’s stated application procedure and grants approved for future payment. Older guides frequently place it in Part XV, which reflects a superseded version of the form. Confirm against the current form.

How do I know if a foundation will consider my application?

Part XIV of Form 990-PF carries a checkbox stating that the foundation only makes contributions to preselected charitable organizations and does not accept unsolicited requests for funds. If the box is checked, an unsolicited proposal will not be reviewed, and the realistic path is a referral or an introduction.

How current is Form 990 data?

Returns cover a completed fiscal year and are filed months after it ends, then take additional time to reach aggregators — six months to two years, by Candid’s account. Treat any 990-derived funder profile as a dated photograph and check it against the funder’s own current materials.

Does a foundation have to spend a fixed amount each year?

Private foundations calculate a minimum investment return, a distributable amount, and qualifying distributions on Form 990-PF, in Parts IX through XI, with the undistributed income position in Part XII. Comparing distributable amount against qualifying distributions shows whether a foundation is paying out at, above, or below its requirement.

Related topics

• Finding and Qualifying Funding — the hub for search strategy, funder research, and pipeline construction
• Free Grant and Funder Data Sources
• The Go/No-Go Decision
• Grant Timing and the Funding Calendar

Sources

1. Internal Revenue Service. Form 990-PF, Return of Private Foundation (2025 revision). https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f990pf.pdf (accessed 2026-08-11)
2. Internal Revenue Service. Instructions for Form 990-PF. https://www.irs.gov/instructions/i990pf (accessed 2026-08-11)
3. Internal Revenue Service. Form 990, Return of Organization Exempt From Income Tax. https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f990.pdf (accessed 2026-08-11)
4. Internal Revenue Service. Schedule I (Form 990), Grants and Other Assistance to Organizations, Governments, and Individuals in the United States (Rev. 12-2024). https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f990si.pdf (accessed 2026-08-11)
5. Internal Revenue Service. Annual filing and forms. https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/annual-filing-and-forms (accessed 2026-08-11)
6. Internal Revenue Service. Tax Exempt Organization Search. https://apps.irs.gov/app/eos/ (accessed 2026-08-11)
7. Internal Revenue Service. Tax Exempt Organization Search bulk data downloads. https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/tax-exempt-organization-search-bulk-data-downloads (accessed 2026-08-11)
8. ProPublica. Nonprofit Explorer. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/ (accessed 2026-08-11)
9. Candid. How often do foundations accept unsolicited requests for funds? https://candid.org/blogs/do-foundations-accept-unsolicited-requests-for-funds-from-nonprofits/ (accessed 2026-08-11)
10. Candid. Grants data fact sheet. https://candid.org/about/our-data/grants-data-fact-sheet/ (accessed 2026-08-11)