Non-Profit (990) Explorer
Caution: Form 990 pay is disclosed to satisfy IRC requirements, not to compare compensation. It is not a substitute for standardized industry compensation surveys.
Snapshot 990-2026-09-19-a2a77f85 · 235 organizations · 745 people · 1952 filings · FY2022–FY2025 · page built 2026-09-19 · next refresh expected December 2026
Caution
Form 990 pay is disclosed to satisfy IRC requirements, not to compare compensation. It is not a substitute for standardized industry compensation surveys.
What each figure is
Every figure comes from a Form 990 or 990-PF that anyone can pull, and every row on the site links to the return it came from.
| Figure | Form 990 line | Derivation | Applies to |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base salary | Schedule J, Part II, column (B)(i) | As reported | Schedule J filers only |
| Incentive / bonus | Schedule J, Part II, column (B)(ii) | As reported | Schedule J filers only |
| Other reportable | Schedule J, Part II, column (B)(iii) | As reported | Schedule J filers only |
| Deferred | Schedule J, Part II, column (C) | Retirement and other deferred compensation | Schedule J filers only |
| Nontaxable benefits | Schedule J, Part II, column (D) | As reported | Schedule J filers only |
| Total cash | Schedule J (B)(i) + (B)(ii) | Base plus incentive, per person | Schedule J filers only |
| Total compensation | Schedule J column (E) | Sum of (B)(i) through (D). Where no Schedule J was filed: Part VII (D)+(F). For a private foundation: 990-PF Part VII (c)+(d), which carries no expense-account column (e). | All filers — the available columns differ by form type |
| Adjusted total | Schedule J column (E) less column (F) | Removes compensation already reported as deferred on a prior return, so a deferral is not counted once when set aside and again when paid | All filers |
| Adjusted total, aged | — | Adjusted total × (1 + growth rate) ^ (YEARFRAC(the filing's own fiscal year end, the Age to Date on Inputs) + 1). The added year anchors ageing one year before the fiscal year end, because pay reported for a fiscal year is earned across that year | All filers |
| Incentive as % of base | Schedule J (B)(ii) ÷ (B)(i) | Taken per person, then summarised. Not the ratio of the two medians, which is a different and smaller number | Schedule J filers only |
| % of CIO | — | Pay against the top job in the same organization and year, whatever the peer filter. An internal ratio, so it is shown even for an organization excluded from the market — including your own | All filers |
Adjusted total is not survey equivalent
Industry compensation surveys normalize their definitions: every pay element, every time period, and every job in the investment office, matched to a common standard and covering the whole office. This figure does none of that. It is Schedule J column (E) less column (F): base salary, bonus and incentive, other reportable pay, deferred compensation and non-taxable benefits, less any deferred compensation already reported on an earlier return, on the period the form requires. The (F) subtraction is ours, not the form’s; without it a deferral is counted once when it is set aside and again when it is paid.
How the population is built
- One filing per organization. Every benchmark uses each organization’s latest return. A single fiscal year can be selected instead; nothing is ever pooled across years.
- As filed by default. Ageing is a control: when it is on, each figure is brought to the chosen date at the chosen annual rate, compounded, from one year before its own fiscal year end, because pay reported for a fiscal year is earned across that year. The sentence beside every table says so. The default date is 2026-06-30.
- Investment-office roles only. A person enters when the filed title names investment work, when a title the same filer gave that person in another year does, or when the filer is itself an investment office, measured as the share of the paid people it discloses who are investment staff.
- Out of population. Former officers, interim holders, a non-positive adjusted total, and titles stating a partial year (“through 6/30”, “outgoing”) are excluded from benchmarks.
- Thresholds. A median needs at least two records; a quartile or a distribution needs five. Cells below the threshold print an em dash. The number of firms behind each row is shown beside it and does not suppress anything.
Estimated quartiles
Off by default. When a reader turns on Estimate missing quartiles, a row that has a median but fewer than five records shows P25, P75 and P90 as the median times a ratio, in italics and marked 1. The median itself is never estimated, and a row with one record shows nothing. The ratios are measured on a reference set deep enough to measure: 106 endowments and foundations with assets of $2b or more, 314 records, each organization’s latest filing, as filed. They are taken by job family and pay element, because heads of office carry roughly twice the upside spread of the staff below them and base salary is far tighter than adjusted total; one ratio for every job was tested and rejected, as was a lognormal fitted to a thin row’s own mean and median. Estimates apply to adjusted total compensation and to base salary only. Typical error on three records is about 15% at P75, mostly from the median itself.
| Pay element | Job family | Reference records | P25 / median | P75 / median | P90 / median |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| adjusted total | Heads of office | 125 | 0.70 | 1.90 | 3.16 |
| adjusted total | Investment staff | 175 | 0.74 | 1.26 | 1.94 |
| base salary | Heads of office | 98 | 0.77 | 1.41 | 1.56 |
| base salary | Investment staff | 120 | 0.86 | 1.18 | 1.59 |
Families: Heads of office: CIO - Top Investment Executive, Deputy CIO, COO (Investment Office); Investment staff: Managing Director, Director & Investment Officer, Other investment staff, MD, Investment Operations; Other professionals: Other disclosed professionals.
The seven rows
Each filed title is classified into a role, and each role into one of these rows. A record is one person in one organization's most recent filing, and there are 528 of them across 222 organizations. The count is people, not filings: an organization discloses several people in the one filing.
| Row | What falls in it | Records |
|---|---|---|
| CIO - Top Investment Executive | The head of the investment office: CIO, Co-CIO, or the chief executive of a separately incorporated investment company. One per organization per year; where both file, the chief executive holds it and the CIO is benchmarked as Deputy CIO. | 196 |
| Deputy CIO | Deputy CIO, and a CIO filed alongside the chief executive of an investment company. | 21 |
| Managing Director | Filed titles classified as: Managing Director, Senior Managing Director. | 112 |
| Director & Investment Officer | Filed titles classified as: Director of Investments, Investment Manager, Investment Officer, Senior Investment Officer. | 146 |
| Other investment staff | Filed titles classified as: Analyst, Associate, Portfolio Manager, Quantitative Analyst, Senior Analyst, Senior Portfolio Manager, Trader. | 12 |
| COO (Investment Office) | The head of investment operations, filed as chief operating officer or head of operations. Where an organization discloses no COO, its highest-paid operations managing director holds the job. | 25 |
| Other disclosed professionals | Everyone else the investment office disclosed: general counsel and compliance, finance, technology and human resources, investment-operations staff, and an investment title with an operations scope, such as Managing Director, Investment Operations, at an organization that also files a COO. | 16 |
Which organizations are in
An organization belongs in this dataset when it holds a pool of long-horizon capital that it invests, and staffs that pool with people whose job is investing it. Endowments, foundations, healthcare systems, pensions and the investment management companies they establish all qualify, and so do museums, libraries and research institutes that run endowments.
Two things disqualify an organization, and both are visible on its return:
- The assets are a balance sheet funded by liabilities rather than a portfolio funded by gifts or endowment. A corporate credit union’s assets are a loan book funded by member deposits. A community development lender’s are a loan portfolio funded by borrowings. Both file large asset figures; neither is an investment pool, and their senior staff manage credit and liquidity rather than investments. Benchmarking those roles against an endowment chief investment officer misdescribes both jobs.
- The organization discloses no investment staff. Where every person we can classify runs programmes or operations, there is no investment office to benchmark, whatever the balance sheet says.
It is not a sector test: museums, libraries, research institutes and conservation groups all run endowments and all stay. The Institute for Advanced Study at $1.3bn is in; a $5.9bn corporate credit union is not.
There is one size test, because the assets figure measures the investable pool rather than the balance sheet: an organization whose published pool is under $25m is not an investment office at that scale, whatever title one of its people carries. The threshold was set by counting what it removes — three organizations at $25m; a $100m floor would have removed a university whose $60m endowment is genuinely its investment office — and the organizations it catches are listed below with the rest.
18 organizations are excluded on these tests:
| Organization | Why it is not an investment office |
|---|---|
| Vizo Financial Corporate Credit Union | A corporate credit union. Its assets are a loan and investment book funded by member deposits, not an investment pool. |
| Corporate America Credit Union | A corporate credit union, as above. |
| Credit Union Of Texas | A retail credit union. Deposit-funded balance sheet. |
| Volunteer Corporate Credit Union | A corporate credit union, as above. |
| Opportunity Finance Network | A CDFI network. Assets are lending capital, not an endowment. |
| Capital Impact Partners | A community development lender. Assets are a loan portfolio. |
| Reinvestment Fund Inc | A community development financial institution. Its senior staff are described on the return as community lending, risk and compliance. |
| Raza Development Fund | A community development lender. |
| Coastal Enterprises | A community development lender. |
| Community Builders Inc | An affordable-housing developer and lender. |
| Affordable Housing Access | An affordable-housing operator. The balance sheet is property. |
| Coalition For Green Capital | A green bank. Assets are deployable lending capital awarded under a federal programme, not an invested endowment. |
| Womens World Banking | A microfinance network. |
| Ecmc Group Inc | A student-loan guarantor and servicer. The balance sheet is a loan portfolio funded by its guarantee business. |
| U C San Diego Foundation | Its Part VII parses with one title on every person ('Investment Operations Manager', the Chancellor included), so no row from it can be classified; its assets are managed by UC Investments, not by foundation staff. Out until the parse is fixed and the roles re-read (2026-09-04). |
| Media Development Investment Fund Inc | Investable pool of $10m is below the $25m floor. A person with an investment title is not an investment office at this size. |
| Tennessee Technology Development Corporation | Investable pool of $0m is below the $25m floor. A person with an investment title is not an investment office at this size. |
| Vpm Media Corporation | Investable pool of $10m is below the $25m floor. A person with an investment title is not an investment office at this size. |
A further 13 organizations are out of the benchmark set because their latest filing lists no investment executive we could classify; their earlier rows stay on the People tab. "Most recent" means the organization's most recent filing, not the most recent row that classified, and nothing more than two fiscal years behind the page's latest year enters a benchmark.
| Organization | Last benchmark year | Latest filing | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Inc | FY2022 | FY2025 | latest filing lists no investment executive we could classify |
| Conference On Jewish Material Claims Against Germany | FY2023 | FY2024 | latest filing lists no investment executive we could classify |
| Corporation Of Haverford College | FY2022 | FY2025 | latest filing lists no investment executive we could classify |
| Richard King Mellon Foundation Dtd 01 01 47 | FY2023 | FY2024 | latest filing lists no investment executive we could classify |
| University Of Notre Dame Du Lac | FY2024 | FY2025 | its investment executives in the latest filing are outside the benchmark population: former officer; the title states a partial year |
| Betterlife | FY2023 | FY2024 | latest filing lists no investment executive we could classify |
| Iowa State University Foundation | FY2022 | FY2025 | latest filing lists no investment executive we could classify |
| Johns Hopkins University | FY2024 | FY2025 | its investment executives in the latest filing are outside the benchmark population: adjusted total is zero or negative; former officer; interim |
| Brown Foundation Inc | FY2023 | FY2025 | latest filing lists no investment executive we could classify |
| Texas Scottish Rite Hospital For Children | FY2024 | FY2025 | its investment executives in the latest filing are outside the benchmark population: the title states a partial year |
| Community Foundation Of North Texas | FY2023 | FY2024 | latest filing lists no investment executive we could classify |
| President Board Of Trustees Santa Clara College | FY2024 | FY2025 | its investment executives in the latest filing are outside the benchmark population: the title states a partial year |
| California Institute Of Technology | FY2024 | FY2025 | its investment executives in the latest filing are outside the benchmark population: former officer; the title states a partial year |
Where the assets figure comes from
Assets are assembled from several sources that do not all measure the same thing. The basis is stated per organization in the Organizations table, and this is what each label means.
| Basis | Organizations | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| NACUBO | 99 | Endowment market value as the organization reports it to the NACUBO-Commonfund study. A portfolio figure. |
| 990 Investments | 81 | The investment lines off the return's own balance sheet, end of year: Form 990 Part X lines 2, 11 and 12 (savings and temporary cash investments, publicly traded securities, other securities), or Form 990-PF Part II lines 2 and 10a through 13 at fair market value. Program-related investments are excluded as mission lending. A portfolio figure, narrower than total assets, and as filed: a negative cash line reduces it. |
| P&I | 40 | Assets under management as reported to Pensions & Investments. A portfolio figure. |
| Manual, per organization | 12 | Read by hand from a named public source, because the organization files separately from the pool it manages. The source is on the row in the Organizations table. |
| 990 Investments (understates) | 2 | The filer's own investment lines, as above, where the organization is a parent whose system pool sits at an affiliate that files no separate return, or reports it outside those lines. Published rather than replaced, and flagged. |
| 990 Assets (balance sheet) | 1 | Total assets off the return, end of year. Not a portfolio: for a hospital system or an operating charity it includes property, plant and receivables. Used only where no portfolio figure is available. |
Where an organization also reports to NACUBO (171 do), its Part X investment lines run a median 8% above the NACUBO endowment figure (10th percentile 0.84, 90th 1.38, 82 of 171 between 1.00 and 1.15). One hump, not two: Part X captures board-designated and other invested funds that NACUBO’s narrower endowment definition excludes. Hartigan’s dip test finds no evidence of a second mode (p = 0.99).
Of the 16 hospital systems in the dataset, 1 reports to NACUBO or P&I: Rush University Medical Center (NACUBO), so the comparison above cannot be made for the rest of them.
Years in role
Years in role, years at the organization and total experience are not on any filing. They are taken from public reporting by a language model, each year with a verbatim sentence from a named source, and are published only where that sentence contains the person’s surname. Years in role are published for 154 of 745 people; the rest are missing because they could not be verified, not because they are newly appointed. 22 values that claimed a role began after the first year the filings already show the person in it were dropped. The list of people to look up came from a private contact list held by Michael Oak Advisors; it contributes no compensation figure, and no compensation figure on this site comes from a survey or any private source.
What the data cannot tell you
There is no target or maximum
The return records amounts PAID, not opportunity. No line reports a target or maximum award, so incentive against target cannot be derived at any price. A bonus earned in one year and paid in the next appears in the year it was paid.
The pay year is not the fiscal year
Compensation is reported for the calendar year ending with or within the organization's tax year, even where its fiscal year is not the calendar year. A June year-end filer's compensation figures are still calendar-year amounts, and they are a year older than the fiscal year printed on the return. Not all of it is W-2 pay: column (B) is reportable compensation, column (C) is retirement and other deferred compensation, and column (D) is nontaxable benefits.
The (F) adjustment is not available on every filer
The adjusted total removes column (F), deferred compensation already reported on an earlier return. Form 990-PF has no column (F), so no private foundation record can carry that adjustment, while 990-PF column (c) expressly includes current-year payments of amounts reported as deferred in a prior year. Foundation records are therefore less adjusted than Schedule J records, not differently adjusted.
The year label is the tax period's END year
A row's year is the calendar year in which the organization's tax period ended, on every record without exception. For a June year-end filer, FY2025 means the period that closed 30 June 2025 and carries calendar 2024 compensation. The label is not the IRS form year and not the filing date.
Schedule J rows are broader than Part VII rows
Where a filer files Schedule J, amounts excluded from Part VII under the two $10,000 exceptions are added back, so the same person's compensation can total higher on Schedule J than on Part VII. Records from the two sources sit in the same benchmarks, and no formula choice removes that difference.
The current year is never present
The most recent return available is the fiscal year that closed.
The form itself truncates the title on 990-PF
The IRS e-file schema limits the title field on Form 990-PF Part VII to twenty characters, and the return arrives already cut: the Packard Foundation's filing carries the literal string 'INVESTMENTS ASSOCIAT'. It is not a parsing fault: the raw XML carries the cut. A truncated title cannot be classified with confidence, and nothing recovers what the form did not carry. The share of 990-PF records affected is computed on the methodology page. On the 990-PF highest-paid path, 98 of 267 titles are exactly twenty characters, across 24 filers.
Subtracting (F) understates anyone new to a filing
The adjusted total removes column (F), deferred compensation reported in an earlier year, so that a payout is not counted twice. Where the person does not appear in the prior year's return for that organization, the deferral was never in any published figure and removing it takes away pay that was earned. The cause is the disclosure threshold: a filer names its five highest paid over $100,000, so anyone crossing into disclosure while carrying a vesting award is understated by construction. The records affected are counted on the methodology page. On 100 of the 352 published records carrying an (F) amount, the person is absent from the prior year’s return; those deferrals total $52.6m, and 4 of the 100 records sit in the benchmark population.
Components carry a smaller sample than totals
Only Schedule J breaks the total apart, and it is filed only above the reporting threshold. A Part VII-only filer has a total and no components. Every row states which basis it is on.
Not everyone is disclosed
Officers, directors, trustees, key employees and the five highest-paid employees over $100,000 — not the whole team. Aggregate staff cost is therefore not comparable between organizations and is not shown.
Related-organization pay may be reported twice
Part VII column (E) carries compensation from related organizations, which a parent and a subsidiary may each report. Where a person is visible only through a related organization, that figure is used once and never added to a filer's own.
AUM is assembled, not reported
No Form 990 states assets under management. The figure is taken from the best available source per organization — NACUBO, a published AUM figure, the return's own investment lines (Form 990 Part X lines 2, 11 and 12; Form 990-PF Part II lines 2 and 10a–13 at fair market value), or the balance sheet as a last resort — and the basis is published for every organization on Peer Orgs. A balance-sheet figure is a whole institution, not a managed pool, and is flagged as such. Where an organization reports to NACUBO as well, its Part X investment lines run modestly above the NACUBO endowment figure, in one hump rather than two: Part X captures board-designated and other invested funds that NACUBO's narrower endowment definition excludes. The current ratio is computed at each build and shown on the methodology page.
The investment lines are the filer's, not the chief investment officer's
Form 990 Part X does not say who manages what it lists. For a health system, 'other securities' can commingle the investment office's pool with a self-insurance trust and trustee-held bond reserves that a treasury or risk function runs, and a defined-benefit pension trust that a separate fiduciary committee runs. None of these is itemized on the return, so none is netted out; a hospital's figure may credit its CIO with assets another committee governs. It can be tested against an external source only where a health system also reports to NACUBO or P&I; the methodology page names which do. Defined-contribution plan assets are never included, because they are participant-directed and do not appear on the filer's balance sheet.
Program-related investments are excluded for one filer type only
Form 990 gives program-related investments their own line (Part X line 13), which is excluded as mission lending. Form 990-PF does not: they sit inside 'investments — other' (Part II line 13) with everything else, and the itemized schedule names them only when the filer chooses to; few do, and the largest PRI programmes name none. So a private foundation's figure may retain program-related dollars that a public charity's does not. The asymmetry is the form's.
Individual exclusions and overrides
Where a filing is accurate but the person is not an investment-office comparator, the record is removed by name and the reason recorded; there are 1. Where the filing cannot distinguish the job, a named record is benchmarked in a different row; there are 6. A rule that matches nobody stops the build.
| Organization | Year | Who | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| U C San Diego Foundation | 2025 | Khosla | The Foundation did write that title, so this is not a parse error. But the entire $1,254,439 is compensation from a related organization, and the individual is filed as Chancellor & President in the three preceding years. Not an investment-office job. MO decision, 2026-09-02. |
| Organization | Matched on | Benchmarked as | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Yale University | director, investments | Managing Director | Yale renamed this exact grade 'Managing Director, Investments' from FY2023. Same job, same pay band, two titles. |
| Yale University | sr director of private equity | Managing Director | Senior asset-class head at Yale IO, $3.85m. The Director benchmark medians $550,358. |
| Massachusetts Institute Of Technology | global investment professional | Managing Director | MITIMCo's senior investment grade. Four of them, $2.54m to $2.62m, directly below the president. |
| Duke University | investment manager | Managing Director | DUMAC's senior investment grade, $1.75m to $2.07m. Not to be confused with its 'DIR. OF INVESTMENTS' at $409,260, which is genuinely Director grade and is why this matches on title. |
| Princeton University | Birmingham | COO (Investment Office) | PRINCO files all six of its senior team as 'managing director of PRINCO'. Jennifer Birmingham is the chief operating officer; the return does not say so and no title rule can infer it without also moving the five who are genuinely investment MDs. MO knowledge, 2026-09-02. |
| The Board Of Trustees Of The Leland Stanford Junior University | Jay Kang | Deputy CIO | Stanford files him as 'SR. MD, SMC', the same title it gives another managing director. His title was Senior Managing Director, sitting above Stanford Management Company's other managing directors; the return does not show the hierarchy. MO knowledge, 2026-09-04. |
The IRS instructions behind these definitions
Every definition on this page traces to the IRS instructions for the form it came from. The links go to the documents rather than to page numbers, because the IRS repaginates them each year and a cited page stops being true.
- Instructions for Form 990 — Part VII, the compensation-type tables, and the rule that compensation is reported for the calendar year ending with or within the organization's tax year
- Instructions for Schedule J (Form 990) — columns (B)(i), (B)(ii), (B)(iii), (C), (D), (E) and (F)
- Instructions for Form 990-PF — Part VII columns (c), (d) and (e)
The timing rule is also printed on the face of Form 990 itself, at Part VII Section A line 1a, which does not move.
The CSV download
Export CSV writes the records behind the current peer set. The last two columns say where each row came from:
- source_form —
990or990-PF, the return the row was read from. On a 990-PF row the Schedule J component columns are empty, and thenontaxablecolumn, where filled, holds 990-PF Part VII column (d): deferred compensation, future severance, retirement plans and welfare-benefit contributions, not Schedule J column (D). - data_snapshot_id — the snapshot the file was cut from, the same on every row and the same identifier printed at the top of this page. A downloaded figure matches the page only while the two identifiers match.
Corrections
This site publishes the names, titles and compensation of individuals because their employers reported them on a Form 990 or 990-PF, a public document. If a figure here does not match the filing, the filing has been amended, or a person is in the wrong row, write to mike@michaeloak.com with the organization, the person, the year and what is incorrect. Corrections appear in the next snapshot, whose identifier changes, so anyone quoting the old figure can tell it moved. An accurate figure that matches a public filing is not removed on request.