The nonprofit isn't in IRS Publication 78. Is my donation still deductible?
Free, no login. Checks IRS recognition, deductibility, revocation history and filing recency.
The group-exemption trap
A national body — a church denomination, a fraternal order, a scouting council — can hold a single IRS group ruling covering hundreds or thousands of local subordinates. Those subordinates are legitimately tax-deductible, but many never appear individually in Publication 78.
In the current IRS data, 238,026 organizations fall into exactly this category: recognised 501(c)(3) entities absent from Pub 78 but carrying a group exemption number. A checker that simply reports "not in Pub 78 → not deductible" gets all of them wrong. This is the single most common correctness bug in nonprofit verification tools.
Churches
Churches are automatically considered tax-exempt and are not required to apply for recognition. Many are therefore absent from both Publication 78 and the Business Master File while being entirely legitimate and deductible.
When absence IS worth worrying about
The genuine caution case is an organization listed in the Business Master File as a 501(c)(3), not in Publication 78, and with no group exemption. That combination is uncommon — only about 4,600 organizations in the current data — and it is worth confirming directly with the IRS before relying on deductibility.
Timing
Both files are republished roughly monthly. A newly recognised organization can be legitimately absent simply because the next release has not happened yet. Every result on this site shows the release date of the data it used.