“990 look up” is one of the most-searched phrases in fundraising — and one of the most wasted. A development director types it in, lands on ProPublica or Candid, scans the cover page for thirty seconds, and closes the tab. The IRS publishes a working dataset on every U.S. funder paying out grants, and almost nobody uses more than that first page. This guide treats the search as the start of a workflow, not the end of one, and shows the four sections of the form that actually do the prospect-research work for nonprofits in 2026.

Why a Generic 990 Look Up Wastes Your Time

The standard advice for finding a 990 is one sentence: “Go to ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer or Candid’s 990 Finder and search by name or EIN.” That advice is correct, and it is also why most fundraisers come away with nothing usable. The 990 was designed by the IRS as a compliance instrument, not a prospect-research tool, so the value is buried in the schedules — not on page one. A fundraiser who only reads the cover learns revenue, expenses, and the executive director’s salary, and essentially nothing about whether this funder will write them a check.

The reframe: a useful 990 search is a workflow with four pulls. You pull Part XV of the 990-PF to see what a private foundation actually funded last year. You pull Schedule I of the standard 990 to see what an operating nonprofit or community foundation regranted. You pull Part VII for board members and key staff to map relationships. And you pull Part VIII / Schedule B to understand who funded them — the upstream donors a peer organization disclosed. Do those four pulls in order and a quick lookup becomes a profile you can pitch from.

One reference point before going further: the IRS first published 990 returns in machine-readable XML format in 2016, and the dataset is updated roughly monthly through TEOS bulk downloads. That cadence is the speed limit on every downstream tool. Anyone selling you “real-time grant intelligence” built only on 990s is selling a 9–18 month rear-view mirror.

Start at the Source: IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search

The first stop for any serious 990 search is the IRS itself. Tax Exempt Organization Search (TEOS) is the official disclosure portal. It returns Form 990 series filings, Form 990-N e-Postcards, Publication 78 eligibility data, determination letters, and the Automatic Revocation of Exemption List in one place. Per the IRS, TEOS provides digital images of returns filed for tax year 2017 forward; older returns require a Form 4506-A request, which typically takes four to six weeks.

What TEOS does well: it confirms a funder is real, is currently in good standing, and is allowed to receive deductible charitable contributions (the Pub 78 check). What it does poorly: it does not let you search inside the filings. You cannot ask TEOS “show me every foundation that gave to youth literacy programs in Ohio in 2024.” For that, you need either the bulk XML extract or a third-party layer that has parsed it.

The compliance pre-check most fundraisers skip

Before spending two hours reading a 990, run three quick TEOS checks. First, confirm the organization is on the Pub 78 list. Second, confirm it is not on the Automatic Revocation of Exemption List — three consecutive years of non-filing triggers automatic loss of tax-exempt status, and a revoked funder cannot legally grant to a 501(c)(3) without complications. Third, note the date of the most recent filing; if the latest available 990 is more than two years old, the funder may be dormant. OpenGrants’ vetted funder directory runs these checks automatically, but doing them by hand on TEOS is free and takes about ninety seconds per candidate.

Mining 990-PF Part XV: Where Private Foundations Show Their Hand

For private foundations, the single most valuable section of any 990 look up is Part XV of Form 990-PF, “Supplementary Information.” This is where the foundation lists, by recipient, the grants it paid during the tax year. Part XV also includes the foundation’s stated grantmaking guidelines, geographic focus, application procedures, deadlines, and the name of the program contact. Read in order, those entries answer four questions in fifteen minutes: who do they fund, in what range, on what schedule, and through what door?

The practical move is to read the list of grants paid and look for three signals. The first is the size distribution — is the median grant $5,000, $50,000, or $500,000? Pitching a $250,000 program to a foundation whose largest 2024 grant was $40,000 is a waste of both parties’ time. The second is concentration — are 80% of the dollars going to a handful of repeat grantees? If so, the open-application slots are scarce and you are competing for the remaining 20%. The third is thematic adjacency — even if a foundation does not have your exact program area listed in its guidelines, recent paid grants reveal what it is actually willing to fund.

Sites like Grantmakers.io exist specifically to make 990-PF Part XV searchable. Grantmakers.io pulls from the same IRS machine-readable extract published since 2016, parses it into a database, and lets you search by grantee characteristics. Cause IQ went a step further in 2020 by mining Schedule I and the corresponding 990-PF grant fields into 12 new searchable dimensions including median grant amount, grant recipient NTEE codes, and grant geographic focus. These tools are downstream mirrors of the IRS feed — fast, but only as current as the underlying filings.

Mining Schedule I: The Forgotten Half of the Grants Trail

Schedule I is where the second half of the U.S. nonprofit grants economy gets reported, and it is the section most “990 look up” tutorials skip entirely. Operating nonprofits, community foundations, donor-advised fund sponsors, and regranting intermediaries file the standard Form 990 — but when they regrant money, they disclose it on Schedule I. The current form (Rev. December 2024) requires the organization to list every domestic recipient that received more than $5,000 in cash or non-cash assistance, broken out by recipient EIN, IRC section, amount, and purpose.

For fundraisers, Schedule I is where the next ring of funders lives. The biggest community foundations — the New York Community Trust, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, Chicago Community Trust, and hundreds more — do most of their grantmaking through donor-advised funds and report it out on Schedule I. So do United Way affiliates, federated funds, and program-specific intermediaries that pass federal dollars to subrecipients. None show up cleanly in a 990-PF Part XV search because they are not private foundations.

The 2026 workflow is straightforward: identify the community foundations and intermediaries in your geography, pull the most recent 990 for each on TEOS, and read Schedule I top to bottom. You will find dozens of peer organizations receiving DAF or community-foundation money you did not know was flowing. Cross-reference those peers against your prospect list using our grant database. Federal TaxFormFinder keeps a current copy of Schedule I and its instructions if your team needs the field-by-field reference.

Reading Part VII and Schedule B: Map the People and the Money Behind Them

Two further pulls turn the filing from a financial summary into a relationship map. Part VII lists current officers, directors, trustees, and key employees, with compensation. That is the public record of who is on the board — the highest-converting source of warm introductions in nonprofit fundraising. Cross-reference Part VII against your own board, donor list, and LinkedIn network before writing a cold letter of inquiry.

Schedule B is harder to use but worth knowing about. Most filers are required to disclose substantial contributors on Schedule B (recipients of more than $5,000 or 2% of total contributions). The catch: for public charities, the IRS redacts donor names and addresses from the public copy, so you typically see the amount and date but not the donor. Even with redactions, Schedule B confirms whether a peer organization actually raises the contributions it claims, and shows the dollar ladder of their top gifts. If the largest gift is $25,000, the org is not a $1 million-gift shop, regardless of what the strategic plan says.

Teams that want this packaged can lean on OpenGrants’ grant writing services, which roll Part VII, Schedule I, and Part XV into a one-page funder brief before each application. For in-house teams, the free playbook is identical — TEOS first, then the four targeted pulls.

The 2026 Toolset: What’s Free, What’s Worth Paying For

Most 990 lookup tools you will encounter are layers on top of the same IRS feed. Knowing what each layer adds — and what it does not — saves a lot of money. The IRS bulk 990 XML downloads are free, complete, and the underlying source for every other tool on the market; the trade-off is they are raw XML zips organized by month. TEOS is the free web UI for one-at-a-time lookups. ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer, per Candid’s own documentation, holds summaries and PDFs for roughly 3 million tax-exempt organizations and 9.6 million filings going back to 2001 — free and faster to search than TEOS.

Paid layers — Candid Premium, Cause IQ, 990iQ, Foundation Directory — earn their fees when you need cross-filing search, prospect lists, or grants-made enrichment at scale. Candid alone reports more than 1.9 million organization profiles and unlimited 990 downloads at the Premium tier. The GivingTuesday Data Commons publishes a free research-ready 990 data mart segmented by form type and form part, which is the best free option for analysts who want pre-cut datasets rather than raw XML.

One important 2026 reality: every paid layer is bottlenecked by the IRS publication cadence. The IRS releases 990 data on a roughly monthly schedule, and downstream tools republish within a week or so. The lag from a grant being paid to it appearing in a searchable 990 is typically 9 to 18 months. For fundraisers, the implication is that 990 data is excellent for understanding funder pattern, and useless for understanding funder availability this quarter. Pair every 990 search with a press-release scan and a direct check of the funder’s website. The nonprofit funding section of the OpenGrants blog publishes regular roundups of new programs that have not yet shown up in 990 filings.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How current are the 990s I can look up in 2026?

A: The IRS posts 990 series filings on a rolling, roughly monthly cadence to the TEOS bulk download page, and the underlying TEOS web search reflects new filings as they post. In practice the most recent available 990 for a typical nonprofit is for a tax year that ended 9 to 18 months ago, because organizations have a filing deadline of the 15th day of the 5th month after fiscal year-end (with two automatic six-month extensions). For private foundations, the same calendar applies to the 990-PF.

Q: What’s the difference between Form 990, 990-EZ, 990-PF, and 990-N?

A: Public charities with gross receipts of $200,000 or more, or total assets of $500,000 or more, file the full Form 990. Smaller charities under those thresholds can file the shorter Form 990-EZ. Very small nonprofits with gross receipts normally $50,000 or less file the Form 990-N e-Postcard, which carries minimal data. Private foundations file Form 990-PF regardless of size, which is the form that contains the grants-paid detail in Part XV.

Q: Are 990s the same as audited financial statements?

A: No. A 990 is a tax filing prepared for the IRS using IRS definitions; audited financials are prepared by an independent CPA firm using Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. They will not match line for line — different recognition rules, different netting conventions, different program-versus-overhead classifications. For prospect research, the 990 is usually more useful because it is standardized across organizations.

Q: How do I read a 990-PF Part XV grants list efficiently?

A: Sort by amount. The median grant size tells you what to ask for; the top decile tells you the ceiling. Then scan recipients for thematic adjacency to your work — recipients in adjacent fields are leading indicators a foundation might fund you, even if you are outside its stated focus area. Finally, check whether the same recipients appear year after year. Those slots are likely committed and not available to new applicants.

Q: Is it worth paying for Candid, Cause IQ, or a similar tool?

A: It depends on volume. If you are running one or two prospect cycles a year and have time, the free stack (TEOS plus ProPublica plus Grantmakers.io plus GivingTuesday’s data marts) does the job. If you are building prospect lists across hundreds of funders, the paid layers pay for themselves in saved analyst hours within a quarter. The decision is workflow, not data — every tool ultimately reads the same IRS feed.

Bottom Line and Next Steps

A useful 990 look up in 2026 is not a search — it is a sequence. Run the three TEOS compliance checks first. Then, depending on the entity type, pull Part XV (990-PF) or Schedule I (990) for the grants pattern, Part VII for the board map, and Schedule B for upstream funders of peer organizations. Each pull takes minutes; together they replace the generic “they fund education in the Midwest” stub with a concrete profile you can pitch from. Treat the paid third-party tools as accelerators on a workflow you understand, not as a substitute for one.

If your team is short on hours, the highest-leverage shortcut is to scope your funder pipeline against a curated list before reading any 990s at all. OpenGrants maintains a vetted funder directory and a searchable grant database that surface funders most likely to fund organizations of your size, mission, and geography — so the targeted pulls are spent on real candidates, not on the open universe of 1.9 million tax-exempt entities.