Nonprofit Employment Has Finally Recovered From Jobs Lost to Covid

Nonprofits across the country have added enough jobs over recent months to more than make up for those lost since the onset of the Covid crisis nearly three years ago, according to new estimates from the George Mason University Nonprofit Employment Data Project.

After losing at least 1.6 million jobs, or 13.2 percent of its work force in 2020, nonprofits now employ 107,000 more people than they did pre-pandemic in 2017, the most recent year for which comprehensive data exists. The study found that the nation’s nonprofits likely first recovered from pandemic job losses in October 2022 and have added jobs since December.

While the study suggests nonprofit employment is back on track, it cautioned that the recovery has not affected all types of nonprofits equally. Arts groups still employ 29,000 fewer workers than they did in 2017, and religious, grant-making, civic, and career-related organizations as a group employ roughly 102,000 fewer workers, a loss of 12.6 percent of its pre-pandemic work force.

Health care, education, and social-service nonprofits showed the strongest job growth from 2017 to December 2022. While health-care nonprofits added 84,123 jobs over all, organizations that employ nurses, which have been affected by widespread staffing shortages, suffered a 9 percent job loss.

For the past year, the country’s labor market has been exceptionally strong over all. In December 2020, the U.S. unemployment rate was 3.5 percent, matching its lowest rate since 1969.

The tight job market may be a problem for nonprofits, which typically have a hard time keeping up with the pay scale at corporations.

“The economic recovery led nonprofit institutions to a significantly better place than where they stood at the end of 2021 in terms of overall employment,” says the report. “However, it is important to note that these estimates are based on the assumption that nonprofits were able to keep pace with the overall private economy — an assumption that may or may not bear out given other research showing that nonprofits have faced unique challenges in attracting workers in a highly competitive employment market.”

The report is a continuation of a series of reports released monthly by the Nonprofit Economic Data Project at Johns Hopkins University. To arrive at its estimates, researchers assumed that nonprofit job losses were proportional to the share of nonprofit jobs in each industry.