Access bulk IRS Form 990 data for programmatic/dataset use (not per-organization lookups)
domain: irs.gov · 6 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
For official downloads, use the IRS's own Form 990 series downloads page (irs.gov/charities-non-profits/form-990-series-downloads), organized by year
For programmatic bulk access to e-filed XML returns, pull directly from the public S3 bucket at s3.amazonaws.com/irs-form-990 — no authentication is required over HTTPS
Use the bucket's index files to enumerate which EIN/filings are available for a given year before downloading individual XML documents
Do not rely on the original 'IRS 990 Filings' listing on the AWS Registry of Open Data — that specific listing stopped being maintained/updated after 2021
If you need pre-converted spreadsheet extracts rather than raw XML, check the separately maintained 'IRS 990 Filings (Spreadsheets)' Registry of Open Data listing instead
Cross-reference with ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer API for single-organization lookups rather than downloading the full bulk dataset for one-off queries
Known gotchas
The AWS Registry of Open Data's original 'IRS 990 Filings' dataset page is stale — the IRS stopped updating it after December 2021, even though the page may still be indexed by search engines
The live source of truth is the S3 bucket (s3.amazonaws.com/irs-form-990) and irs.gov downloads page, not the old Registry listing — verify freshness before treating either as current
Raw XML bulk data requires you to build your own EIN/year index and parser; there's no query API here, only file downloads (contrast with ProPublica's API for targeted lookups)
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