About the Dataset
This analysis includes data from 11,012 arts and culture organizations across the United States who reported activity during fiscal years 2018 to 2025. These organizations come from across regions, disciplines, sectors, and budget sizes, providing broad coverage of the nonprofit arts and cultural sector.
The results focus on aggregate trends during this period, with data from 2019 acting as baseline. For some results, 2018 data is shown to help readers contextualize whether trends were appearing before the period leading to the COVID-19 disruption.
Sample Construction
In this analysis, we use a broad, unbalanced sampling approach to improve the representativeness of the trend findings. Any organization with complete 12-month fiscal year data for a given year within the 2018 to 2025 study period is included. This approach allows us to access the largest sample possible in our analysis and reduces potential selection bias, since organizations who have completed the Cultural Data Profile over consecutive years may share other characteristics such as long-term relationships with funders participating in CDP data collection. However, the composition of the sample may vary from year to year, meaning that observed trends can reflect both changes in organizations’ financial outcomes and changes in the organizations included in the analysis.
Below is a table of organization counts by fiscal year.
Organization Counts by Fiscal Year
| 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025* | |
| Count of Organizations | 6,424 | 6,004 | 5,398 | 5,506 | 5,171 | 4,663 | 4,480 | 1,783 |
Inflation Adjustment
We apply inflation adjustments to financial measures so that changes over time reflect changes in real rather than nominal values. The rate of adjustment is 26.4% for comparison between 2019 and 2025 and 2.9% from 2024 to 2025. The adjustment is reflected in all reported values and figures. For indexed charts, we use FY2019 as the baseline for change so that we may compare trajectories among groups with different starting values.
Inflation Adjustment
| Year | Aug-Aug% | Cumulative |
| 2020 | 1.3% | 1.3% |
| 2021 | 5.3% | 6.7% |
| 2022 | 8.3% | 15.5% |
| 2023 | 3.7% | 19.8% |
| 2024 | 2.5% | 22.8% |
| 2025* | 2.9% | 26.4% |
Note: Inflation adjustments are based on the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U), All Items, U.S. City Average (not seasonally adjusted). https://www.bls.gov/regions/mid-atlantic/data/consumerpriceindexhistorical_us_table.htm
Annual inflation is measured August-to-August, with cumulative adjustments compounded relative to the 2019 base year. Unless otherwise noted, financial values are expressed in constant 2019 dollars.
Summary Statistics
For this report, we primarily report the means (average levels) of financial activity for the organizations included. Means retain information about the scale of organizations' financial activity and, when based on the same organizations and definitions, can be directly compared or combined into corresponding totals.
Because arts organizations vary substantially in scale, overall means can be influenced by a small number of large organizations. We therefore present results by budget size alongside overall results. Additionally, some extreme values are removed prior to analysis (more detail provided below). These different views should be interpreted together rather than expected to produce identical trend patterns.
Each statistic and calculation uses only observations with the data required for that measure.
How We Determined Budget Size
We would expect that small organizations face different pressures or challenges than medium-sized organizations, which in turn perform differently than large organizations.
Budget categories are assigned annually based on total expenses. Rather than assigning each organization a fixed budget category throughout the trend period, we assign organizations to budget categories independently for each fiscal year. This allows organizations to move between small, medium, and large categories as their expense budgets change.
Using annual budget classifications gives us a representation of each year’s reporting landscape rather than anchoring organizations to a budget category that may no longer reflect their current scale, particularly during periods where there were contractions in spending like the pandemic. However, it also means that trends within a budget category reflect both changes in organizations’ financial performance and changes in which organizations fall into that category.
Below is a breakdown of the organizations included in each fiscal year by budget size.
Organizations by Budget Size
| Budget Size | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025* |
| Under $250K | 2,896 | 2,609 | 2,537 | 2,686 | 2,269 | 2,031 | 1,967 | 789 |
| $250K–$1M | 1,847 | 1,767 | 1,497 | 1,539 | 1,522 | 1,372 | 1,307 | 525 |
| Over $1M | 1,681 | 1,628 | 1,364 | 1,281 | 1,380 | 1,260 | 1,206 | 469 |
Average Budget (Total Expenses) – Inflation Adjusted
| Budget Size | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025* |
| Under $250K | $97,000 | $97,000 | $87,000 | $84,000 | $83,000 | $82,000 | $81,000 | $74,000 |
| $250K–$1M | $534,000 | $529,000 | $515,000 | $487,000 | $454,000 | $446,000 | $439,000 | $418,000 |
| Over $1M | $5,272,000 | $5,184,000 | $5,161,000 | $4,683,000 | $4,456,000 | $4,515,000 | $4,415,000 | $4,545,000 |
Median Budget (Total Expenses) – Not Inflation Adjusted
| Budget Size | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025* |
| Under $250K | $81,000 | $81,000 | $72,000 | $73,000 | $81,000 | $85,000 | $87,000 | $78,000 |
| $250K–$1M | $482,000 | $479,000 | $475,000 | $463,000 | $480,000 | $492,000 | $508,000 | $485,000 |
| Over $1M | $2,466,000 | $2,468,000 | $2,566,000 | $2,497,000 | $2,507,000 | $2,674,000 | $2,573,000 | $2,610,000 |
Calculations
For each fiscal year, calculated metrics are derived at the organization level using inflation-adjusted figures and then averaged in aggregate. Definitions for the calculations used in this report include:
- Government support is the total sum of support at the local, city, state, and federal levels.
- Working capital is the difference between an organization’s current assets and its current liabilities. Working capital can be negative, which indicates that current liabilities exceed current assets. Months of working capital is calculated by dividing total working capital by total expenses and multiplying by twelve.
- Payments to artists is a breakout of personnel expenses and may not be fully captured in total expenses reported by organizations. It reflects the amount paid to artists and performers and may include payments to both employees and independent contractors. Other (non-artist) personnel expenses is calculated at the aggregate level by subtracting artists payments from total personnel expenses to provide an estimate of how spending was allocated.
- Organizations in deficit are those whose total expenses exceeded their total revenue in a given fiscal year.
Reducing Sensitivity to Extreme Observations (Trimmed Means)
Because averages are affected by values at the high and low ends of the range of responses, we exclude the top 1 percentile of organizations in terms of budget size before calculating summary statistics. For this year’s analysis, this threshold corresponds to annual budgets greater than $41.3 million. the report, we may refer to “trimmed” mean values, indicating this exclusion.
While some large values may reflect activities from organizations who are important cultural anchors in their respective regions, trimming helps limit sensitivity to extreme observations or changes in reporting by these large organizations over time. The process does not imply that the excluded organizations or reported values are invalid.
Other corrections that are applied to the data include adjusting observations flagged by data quality checks for possible reporting or data entry errors.
Limitations & Considerations
The broad unbalanced approach is not without its limitations, as the organizational composition for each fiscal year shifts as organizations enter and leave the dataset. Thus, the sample size is not constant across years, and reporting coverage differs each year. Annual changes in reported statistics can reflect both within-organization change and changes in sample composition.
As CDP submissions come in on a rolling basis, the most recent fiscal year is less complete than earlier years and its sample composition can continue to change. Our analysis of data extracted at different points in the submission cycle suggests that the direction of observed trends is generally more stable than their magnitude. As a result, estimates for the most recent reporting year are best interpreted as emerging.