A charity does not close because its overhead was too high. I checked 328,186 tax returns.

This is a submission for Weekend Challenge: Generosity Edition I have given money to charities for years and I have never once known whether the one I gave to was about to close. The number everybody puts in front of you is overhead, the share of spending that does not go to programmes. Every rating site leads with it. I assumed it meant something. So this weekend I downloaded the IRS Statistics of Income extracts of Form 990 and Form 990-EZ, which is 3,697,515 filings covering 700,873 organisations across fiscal 2017 to 2024, then asked a narrower question. Not whether a charity is efficient. Whether it is going to still be there. I took the 328,186 organisations that filed a long-form Form 990 for fiscal 2018 or 2019, then checked which of them appear on any filing for fiscal 2022 or later. 8.88% do not. Then I scored two candidate signals inside each of ten spending deciles, so that nothing I found could turn out to be a story about big charities outliving small ones. Feeding America spends $4.93 billion a year and holds 1.04 months of it in cash. The Greater Chicago Food Depository spends $261 million and holds half a month. Second Harvest Food Bank of Central Florida holds nine days. None of that is on any rating site, because the number nobody computes for you is the one that decides whether the lights stay on. What I Built Keepalive computes months of runway for 579,178 US nonprofits, straight off their own filings. Runway is cash plus savings divided by one month of spending. It is the number a finance director lives by and the number a donor never sees. Across 1,573,687 long-form filings the median is 5.5 months . 33.5% hold under three months. 15.1% hold under one. The site does four things with that. Where does my gift buy the most time. Say what you can give, pick a cause and a state. It ranks real organisations by days of runway your money adds, which is 365 * yearly gift / annual spending . $25 a month is 12 hours of runway at a $260 million food bank