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Data · Legal-aid nonprofits

Legal-aid nonprofits by county

How many legal-aid, public-interest-law and civil-rights nonprofits have an address in each county, from the IRS list of tax-exempt organizations. Counts by type and revenue band, with a rate per 100,000 residents, refreshed each month.

Checked October 29, 2026 · CC BY 4.0 · Not legal advice

What is in this dataset?

How many legal-aid, public-interest-law and civil-rights nonprofits have an address in each county, state and the nation, from the IRS Exempt Organizations Business Master File. Counts by type (legal services, public interest law, civil rights) and by annual revenue band, with a rate per 100,000 residents. Counts only: no names.

Use it to see where free and low-cost legal help is organized, which counties have none on the list, and how a market's nonprofit legal sector compares by size. An organization counts where its IRS mailing address is, which is often a headquarters that serves a wider area.

Records
3,196
Look up by
52
state
Primary-source records
3,196

The letters are explained in what P, S, D and U mean.

Where does the data come from?

Every organization on the IRS Exempt Organizations Business Master File state extracts whose NTEE code is I80 (legal services), I83 (public interest law) or R20-R26 (civil rights, immigrants', minority, disability, women's, seniors' and LGBTQ rights) is counted once, in the county holding most of its ZIP code's land (Census 2020 ZCTA-to-county file; Connecticut by planning region). A PO-box ZIP is placed by its city where at least 3 and 60% of all exempt organizations with that city and a ZCTA ZIP sit in one county. Revenue bands use the file's REVENUE_AMT.

Period covered
October 13, 2026
Places
The whole US, states and counties
How often we refresh it
Every month
Records read
October 29, 2026

Official sources

The sources the records cite most

What does a record look like?

The full records add the dates, the quoted source text and every field in the CSV and JSON files below.

What each of the 13 main columns means
jurisdiction
Two-letter state code, or US
level
us, state or county
county
County FIPS code (county rows)
orgs
Organizations counted
legal_services
NTEE I80
public_interest_law
NTEE I83
civil_rights
NTEE R20-R26
revenue_under_50k
Annual revenue under $50,000 (or none reported)
revenue_50k_1m
$50,000 to under $1 million
revenue_1m_10m
$1 million to under $10 million
revenue_10m_plus
$10 million or more
per_100k
Organizations per 100,000 residents (2025 population)
asOf
IRS file date

How do I use it in my own tools?

legalaidorgs_lookup
For one two-letter state code: the state total and every county's count of legal-aid, public-interest-law and civil-rights nonprofits, by type and revenue band.
legalaidorgs_compare
Legal-aid nonprofit counts and rates per 100,000 residents for up to 10 states side by side.
legalaidorgs_search
County or state rows whose text matches the words given, such as a county name ("Cook County").

How to cite this dataset

You can reuse, adapt and republish this data, including commercially, under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (CC BY 4.0). The only condition is that you credit Probative and link to the source.

Version
1.0.0, released October 29, 2026
Every version
10.5281/zenodo.23782866 (always points to the newest)
License
CC BY 4.0

Download the data

Free, no email or login. The files are hosted on this site and Zenodo, a public research archive.

Suggested citation

Probative. (2026). Legal-aid, public-interest-law and civil-rights nonprofits by county, from the IRS exempt-organization list (Version 1.0.0) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23782867

Credit line for a chart, table or article

Source: Probative, Legal-aid, public-interest-law and civil-rights nonprofits by county, from the IRS exempt-organization list, version 1.0.0, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23782867, licensed CC BY 4.0.

Add to a reference manager (Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote)

Not legal advice. Counts of organizations on the IRS exempt-organization list by mailing address, not a directory and not a measure of services delivered.

What changed recently?

  • 2026-10-29 · 5,930 organizations in the 50 states and DC, IRS Business Master File as of October 13, 2026. (source)

The full log is in changes.json.

What are the limits?

  • An organization counts once, where its IRS mailing address is. A statewide program with one office counts in that office's county, though it may serve the whole state.
  • The list covers organizations the IRS recognizes as exempt. Programs run inside a court, a bar or a university, which file no return of their own, are not on it.
  • NTEE codes are assigned from each organization's filings and can lag a change of mission. A county with 0 has no listed organization at an address there; help may still reach it from a neighbor.
  • Revenue is the amount on the organization's latest return in the file; small groups that file no return show in the lowest band.
  • Records older than 45 days since their last check are marked stale in the files until we re-check them. Every confirmed error we fix is listed in the data corrections log.

Found a wrong value? Report an error with the record id and the source that shows the right value.

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