API access
Everything on this site is served from an API, and the API is the better way to use it. If you want more than a few organizations, get a key — it is free, it takes a minute, and it is faster than reading these pages.
What you get
- A changed-since sync feed
- Keyset-paginated and ordered so you can stop and resume exactly where you left off. Every record says whether it was created, superseded by an amendment, or withdrawn, so a mirror stays correct without re-walking everything.
- Amendments, linked rather than duplicated
- When an organization amends a return, the earlier filing is marked superseded and points at the one that replaced it. Nothing is deleted, and nothing is counted twice.
- Group exemptions, linked
- A chapter covered by a national organization's group exemption carries the id of that organization, so a local chapter leads to its parent and a parent to its chapters.
- Lookup and search
- Organizations by id, by EIN, or by fuzzy name; officers by name. The same reads these pages are built on.
- The source documents
- The original IRS e-file XML for a filing, mirrored and served whole, so any figure here can be checked against the return it came from.
Rate limits
Both windows apply to every request, and every response carries what is left of each in its
RateLimit
headers, so a client can pace itself without guessing.
- 120 requests per minute
- 5,000 requests per hour
These are the defaults. If you are doing something the defaults do not fit, say so when you ask — the limits are per consumer and can be raised.
Getting a key
Free, immediate, and there is no account. Give an address you can receive mail at, confirm it, and the key is shown on the next page — once, because only a hash is stored. Lose it and you can issue another as often as you like.
If you need more than the default limits above, say so on the form and it becomes a short conversation rather than a fresh one. Anything the form cannot handle still reaches a person at [email protected].
There is a daily cap on how many confirmation emails go out, so on a busy day automatic issuance can pause. It is a limit on the mail rather than on who may have a key: if you hit it, email the address above and one will be issued by hand, same day and still free.
A key identifies a caller so the rate limits have something to count against, and so we know who to tell if a sync starts failing. It is not a licence — the data is public domain either way — and you can revoke yours at any time.
What you may do with it
Keep a copy. Store it, build on it, republish it, train on it, and sell what you make with it — the licence permits all of that, and the sync feed exists so your copy stays current rather than going stale the day you took it.
The underlying IRS filings are public domain. This database is published under the Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0, which asks two things in return: credit the source, and if you share a database built from this one, share it under the same licence.
You cannot own public records. The charge is for access and infrastructure, never for the facts.