GiveRadar Research

Original studies of the infrastructure behind charity transparency: government registers, open data, and what the public is actually allowed to see. Every claim carries an official source, every dataset is published under CC-BY-4.0 with a DOI, and every edition goes through an independent audit before release.

Published work

Publications

4 publications
Research noteOctober 2026
Charity overhead in official registers: what the filings show

US charities filing a full Form 990 report a median 86.1% of expenses as program expenses, and 58.8% report zero fundraising costs (FY2023, 252,844 charities). Only the US Form 990 and Canada's T3010 hold a program, administration and fundraising split at scale.
Illustration: three people reviewing a US map, a pie chart marking 2% and one tall stack of money next to many small blocks
Research noteOctober 2026
US charity revenue by size, FY2024: three quarters of charities share 2% of the money

FY2024 IRS filings from 357,916 US 501(c)(3) public charities. 75.7% report revenue under USD 1 million and together hold 2.1% of all reported revenue; the 0.9% with USD 100 million or more hold 73.7%, and hospitals as coded by the IRS alone hold 39.0%.
Illustration: three people reviewing charity finance charts, with a bar chart of 2021 to 2024 and stacks of coins
Research noteOctober 2026
Charity finances 2021 to 2024: more deficits, concentrated income

Official filings from six registers in five countries, following the same 396,252 charities from FY2021 to FY2024. The share spending more than their income rose in all six registers, and the largest 1% of charities report between 57% and 75% of all reported income.
Illustration: three people comparing charity registers on a world map, with a 2026 country ranking
IndexEdition 1 · August 2026
Global Charity Register Transparency Index 2026

How open are the world's official charity registers? 76 countries scored on seven dimensions, from register existence to machine readability and financial disclosure. Six countries reach 100 out of 100, wealth does not predict openness, and several registers that refuse foreign connections turn out to be richer than Germany's.
About this research

Charity and nonprofit statistics you can trace to a source

GiveRadar Research publishes charity and nonprofit statistics in which every figure names its source, so you can check it instead of taking it on trust. The current publications draw on official registers: annual returns filed in the United States, England and Wales, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland, and the register infrastructure of 76 countries.

That makes the work usable for charity research, sector reports and journalism that needs numbers with a source. The finances note follows the same 396,252 charities from FY2021 to FY2024 and finds that the share spending more than their income rose in all six registers. The transparency index scores how open each country's charity register is, from whether it exists to whether its data can be downloaded.

What we measure

Charity finances and register transparency, not giving totals

So far, two questions run through the research. How are charities doing financially, read straight from their filings as deficit shares and income concentration? And how much can the public actually see, measured as the transparency of the register that holds those filings? It is nonprofit financial analysis and register analysis, not a survey of how much people give in a year, and it never ranks individual charities.

Using the data

Free to reuse, with a DOI and open methods

Each publication releases its data under CC BY 4.0, with the method written out and the source of every number named. The transparency index carries a DOI (10.5281/zenodo.21804904) and the finances tables download as CSV, so you can cite them in a paper or rerun them for your own country. Spotted an error, or want to work on the next edition? Write to info@giveradar.com.

The data behind the research

Explore the registers for yourself

Search 7.9M+ nonprofits across 100+ countries, sourced from the registers this research measures.