The Center on Nonprofits, Philanthropy, and Social Enterprise in George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government is pleased to announce the release of the 2024 Nonprofit Employment Data Report from the George Mason University – Nonprofit Employment Data Project (GMU-NED).
This brief report provides a first look at new data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on nonprofit employment and wages between 2018 – 2022, focusing specifically on the 501(c)(3) portion of the nonprofit sector. Due to the unique nature of the underlying dataset, we are also able to compare nonprofit employment and wages to their counterparts in the for-profit sector during this crucial period.
The report is structured around five key findings to put the nonprofit paid workforce into context in terms of other major industries in the U.S. economy and in the fields in which it is most active, reveal how nonprofit employment was impacted by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and how they have recovered as of 2022, and assess aggregate nonprofit wages relative to for-profit sector counterparts and examine nonprofit and for-profit wage growth over the pandemic era. Among the findings:
- As of 2022, the nonprofit sector’s 12.8 million workers made it the third largest employer in the U.S. non-government economy.
- Between 2019 and 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic began, nonprofit employment declined by 580,000, or 4.5%, but nonprofits fared better than for-profits overall, which shed nearly 7% of their workers.
- However, nonprofits faced challenges in re-staffing in 2021 and 2022, lagging behind their for-profit counterparts. This left the nonprofit sector with a workforce 1.4% smaller than it enjoyed in 2019, while for-profit entities grew their workforce by 2.2%.
- As a result, nonprofits lost ground to for-profit counterparts in terms of market share. The nonprofit share of the total non-government workforce decreased from 10.2% in 2017 to 9.9% in 2022, reflecting losses in nearly all fields in which they are significantly active.
- Overall, nonprofit average annual wages per employee remained nearly equal to those paid by for-profits in 2022—and were much higher than for-profit wages in many of the key nonprofit fields.
As we approach the 5-year anniversary of the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, these new data from the BLS provide important insight into both the strengths of and challenges faced by the nonprofit sector both during and after the pandemic. The picture that emerges is of a sector that, though resilient, continues to confront obstacles in fully recovering from pandemic-era shocks. Overall, as detailed in the report, as of 2022, nonprofits had restored nearly 70% of the more than half-million workforce losses they suffered in 2020—but that left significant ground to cover to get back to the employment levels they enjoyed in 2019 in several key fields, and even further to go to catch up to where the sector’s workforce would have been without those losses.
Led by Center Director Dr. Alan Abramson, in collaboration with his Center faculty colleagues Dr. Stefan Toepler and Dr. Mirae Kim, the GMU-NED Project aims to continue and expand on the important prior work of Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Civil Society Studies. Produced by former Johns Hopkins Project Manager and current GMU-NED Research Consultant Chelsea Newhouse, in collaboration with GMU Nonprofit Center Director Dr. Alan Abramson, this new report also previews the Project’s plans for further explorations of the these new BLS data, including the imminent launch of the new George Mason University Nonprofit Works data explorer site that will allow users to explore and download the data they need to support their work. The Center on Nonprofits, Philanthropy, and Social Enterprise is grateful to the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation for its continuing support of this work.
To read the full report, please click here.
To learn more about the GMU-NED Project, click here.
For press inquiries, contact:
Aurora King, [email protected]
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