The Economic Impact of the Nonprofit Sector
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- Create Date September 10, 2026
- Last Updated September 10, 2026
With approximately 335,000 employees, the nonprofit sector would rank as the fourth-largest employer in Los Angeles County — ahead of manufacturing, and behind only health care and social assistance, accommodation and food services, and retail trade.
It has never been counted that way. Nonprofit activity is distributed across health care, education, arts, and human services rather than constituting an industry classification of its own, so the sector rarely appears in regional economic analysis as a single entity.
A first-of-its-kind report from the Center for Nonprofit Management and the LAEDC Institute for Applied Economics measures it directly. Drawing on IRS Form 990 filings, Bureau of Labor Statistics data, and input-output modeling, the analysis examines all 27,916 active nonprofit organizations in the county and estimates the sector's contribution to employment, output, labor income, and public revenue.
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The sector accounts for approximately $185.6 billion in total economic output, roughly 12 percent of the county total, and $121.3 billion in value added — close to 13 percent of gross regional product
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Nonprofit activity supports an estimated 1.16 million jobs countywide through direct, supply-chain, and induced effects, and generates approximately $28 billion annually in federal, state, and local tax revenue
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Nonprofits represent 1.5 percent of employer establishments in the county but 8.5 percent of employment, reflecting the labor intensity of the work
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Ninety percent of these organizations operate on annual income below $1 million, describing a sector whose economic weight is distributed across a very large number of small organizations