Apache Software Foundation revenue: $2,220,257 in FY2025

Quick answer (all figures from the Apache Software Foundation's own filed Form 990 returns). ASF revenue was $2,220,257 in FY2025 (fiscal year ended 30 April 2025), $2,452,180 in FY2024, and $2,313,188 in FY2023. Expenses were $2,334,727, $2,162,676 and $2,042,336. FY2025 is therefore the first loss in the recent series, at -$114,470, against a board-approved budget that projected $3,000,000 of income and a $239,250 surplus. Net assets ended FY2025 at $4,206,363. ASF has no salary line at all: every one of the 17 officers and directors listed on the FY2025 return is reported at $0.

The three years, side by side

ASF's fiscal year ends on 30 April. Every figure below is read from the filed XML of the returns themselves, not from a summary.

Revenue rose 6.0% in FY2024 and fell 9.5% in FY2025.

One year, three different year labels

This is the single most common way ASF's numbers get misquoted, and it is worth stating before anything else. The year that ended on 30 April 2025 is called three different things by three different sources that are all looking at the same return:

I use ASF's own convention throughout, because that is the label attached to the budgets ASF publishes. When you see an ASF revenue figure quoted against a bare year, check which of these three conventions it is using before comparing it to anything.

The budget ASF approved, and the year it actually had

ASF publishes its board-approved budgets in the open, in its board minutes. The FY2025 budget was approved on 19 June 2024, and the minutes record that "The board approved the budget by unanimous vote."

Income came in 26.0% under budget. Spending came in 15.4% under budget, which absorbed a little over half the shortfall, and the remainder became the loss.

The budget's own line detail is worth reading against the outturn. ASF budgeted Total Sponsorship $2,600,000, Total Public Donations $150,000, Conference $250,000 and Interest Income $0. The return reports total contributions of $2,080,861 and investment income of $139,396. So the one line ASF budgeted at zero is the one line that materially overperformed, in a year when everything else fell short.

The following year's budget, approved 19 March 2025, was cut: Total Income $2,705,000 (down $295,000, or 9.8%) and Total Expense $2,567,227 (down $193,523, or 7.0%), for a projected net of $137,773. The minutes record that this one was not unanimous: "The board approved the budget by a majority vote 7-1-1 with nay vote by Greg Stein and abstention from Jim Jagielski." Both men appear on the FY2025 return's own officer list.

A trap in ASF's own budget lines

If you compare ASF's Infrastructure budget across those two years you will read a 93% cut: $1,900,000 in FY2025 against $127,900 in FY2026. That is not a cut. It is a reclassification, and the budget says so in its own footnote: "Salaries that have been included here in the past have been moved to a Staffing line that also includes the Tooling staffing." The FY2026 budget carries a new Staffing $1,609,547 line. Infrastructure plus Staffing is $1,737,447, or 67.7% of budgeted expense, against 68.8% for Infrastructure alone the year before.

This matters because ASF's own December 2025 annual report describes infrastructure as "roughly 70% of our +$2.5MM annual budget". That statement is consistent with the combined figure, and it is flatly inconsistent with the line labelled Infrastructure in the current budget. Both readings come from ASF. Diff the labels, not just the totals.

Where the money came from

The whole of the decline is on the contributions line, which fell $298,541, or 12.5%. Investment income went the other way, rising $66,618 (91.5%) in FY2025 alone and 3.98x across the three years, from $35,045 to $139,396. As a share of revenue it went 1.5%, 3.0%, 6.3%.

Program service revenue is zero on all three returns. It was $11,200 in FY2022, per the prior-year column of the FY2023 return, and it has been nil since. ASF sells nothing.

That last point deserves emphasis, because several market-research listings sold on the open web carry line items such as "Apache Software Foundation Web Server Revenue (US$ Million)". ASF's own returns report $0 of program service revenue in every year examined. Whatever those tables are measuring, it is not money ASF receives.

ASF's sponsors are named publicly rather than in the return. The current platinum tier includes Google and Huawei, and the gold tier includes Cloudera. The return itself does not break contributions down by donor: Schedule B is filed, and the contributor detail is withheld from the public copy, so the split between those sponsors cannot be derived from the filing.

Where the money went

Component shares above are rounded to one decimal place and sum to 99.9%.

Split by function, that is program services $2,040,778 (87.4%), management and general $185,639 (8.0%) and fundraising $108,310 (4.6%).

Three lines moved sharply in FY2025. Conferences and meetings rose from $195,834 to $297,372 (+51.8%) and travel rose from $29,077 to $67,160 (+131.0%), consistent with a return to in-person events. Legal fees went the other way, from $57,616 to $833, a fall of 98.6%.

One line barely moves at all: fundraising was $108,325, then $108,315, then $108,310. Three consecutive years within $15 of each other.

Nobody at ASF is paid by ASF

The FY2025 return lists 17 officers, directors and key employees, including the President, the Treasurer, the Secretary and the VP Security. Every one of them is reported at $0 in the reportable-compensation, related-organisation and other-compensation columns alike. The same is true of all 17 on the FY2024 return and all 15 on the FY2023 return.

There is no salary line anywhere in the expense schedule either: no officer compensation, no other salaries and wages, no pension contributions, no payroll taxes. Total salaries and employee benefits on the summary page read $0 on all three returns, and that is internally consistent with the detailed expense schedule, which contains none of those lines.

What ASF has instead is the $1,259,329 management-fees line above: the Foundation buys its operations rather than employing them. It is worth knowing that this is the shape, because every "top paid employee" figure published about any non-profit is read off that same officer table. For ASF, that table is all zeros.

There is one loose end the return does not close. The compliance page reports 4 employees on the W-3 count for the calendar year, on all three returns, beside $0 of reported wages. The returns carry no explanatory note reconciling those two statements, and I am not going to guess at one.

The loss that was not a cash squeeze

A deficit and a cash drain are different things, and FY2025 separates them cleanly.

In FY2025 ASF reported a loss of $114,470 while its cash and savings rose $435,357. In FY2024 it reported a surplus of $289,504 while cash fell $67,235. In both years the sign of the cash movement tracks the deferred-revenue movement, not the bottom line.

Deferred revenue is money already received for a period that has not yet happened, and on ASF's balance sheet it is essentially the whole of the liability side: $1,073,890 of $1,116,537 (96.2%) at the end of FY2023, $826,642 of $834,486 (99.1%) in FY2024, and $1,232,912 of $1,253,972 (98.3%) in FY2025. It also appeared from nothing. At the start of FY2023 ASF's total liabilities were $3,310 and the deferred-revenue element is simply absent from that column.

Three years of prior-period adjustments

Each of the three returns carries an entry on the line the form labels "Prior period adjustments":

The roll-forward reconciles exactly in all three years once the adjustment is included.

The FY2023 one is the striking one: at $565,328 it is 2.09 times the reported surplus, and it flips the year's outcome. FY2023 is reported as a $270,852 surplus, and ASF's net assets fell $294,476 over that same year. Anyone who reads only the headline bottom line for FY2023 gets the direction of that year wrong.

To be explicit about what this is not: the form asks for an explanation on Schedule O for line 9, "other changes in net assets", and it does not ask for one on line 8, prior period adjustments. ASF's returns comply. This is a disclosure the form does not request, not a disclosure ASF has withheld.

A quarter of the spending leaves the United States

Schedule F reports ASF's activity outside the US, in three regions, described in every year with the single word "INFRASTRUCTURE".

Foreign spending rose 58.7% in FY2025, in the year revenue fell. Europe alone more than doubled, up $194,797 (124.6%).

The reserve

Net assets divided by annual expenses gives a rough measure of how long ASF could run on reserves: 712 days at the end of FY2023, 733 days at the end of FY2024, and 658 days at the end of FY2025. Roughly 1.8 years of cover, down from 2.0.

Split by restriction, the FY2025 decline is almost entirely unrestricted: funds without donor restriction fell $134,301 to $3,579,078, while donor-restricted funds fell $282 to $627,285. The restricted pool has barely moved in three years.

One caution on that ratio. ASF holds $1,232,912 of deferred revenue, which is money it has taken but not yet earned. Net of that, the cushion is smaller than the headline days-of-cover figure suggests.

Public support

ASF is a 509(a)(2) publicly supported organisation. Its public support percentage was 98.95% for FY2023, 98.78% for FY2024 and 97.70% for FY2025. The threshold it must clear is 33.33%, and the return marks the test as passed in all three years. The slow drift downward is the mirror image of the rising investment income, which counts against the ratio rather than for it.

A schedule that disappeared, and a number that repeats

The FY2023 and FY2024 returns both file Schedule D, reporting other assets of $73,943: "CONTRIBUTED SERVICES" at $72,917 and "PREPAID" at $1,026. The two figures are identical in both years. The FY2025 return files no Schedule D at all, and its residual other assets are $11,751.

Before reading that as an omission: the form triggers Schedule D Part IX only when other assets reach 5% or more of total assets. ASF's $73,943 was 1.45% and 1.43% in those two years, and FY2025's $11,751 is 0.215%. The schedule was never required. Its absence in FY2025 is correct, and its presence in the two prior years was ASF filing more than it had to.

There is a coincidence here that I will report and not explain. The FY2025 expense schedule carries a line described as "SERVICE CONTRACTS" at $72,917, which is exactly the amount at which the contributed-services asset had been carried for the two preceding years. The returns state no relationship between the two, "SERVICE CONTRACTS" is a recurring line that was $139,075 and $132,742 in the prior years, and I am not going to assert a link the filings do not make. Both numbers are above; a reader checking the returns will meet them, and should know they are exactly equal.

What the other published answers say

Two of those deserve a fuller note.

ASF's own annual report is silent, not wrong. The ASF 2025 Year in Review, published 18 December 2025, is a substantial document, and it contains zero occurrences of the word "revenue", no statement of activities, and exactly two dollar amounts: a reference to infrastructure being "roughly 70% of our +$2.5MM annual budget", and the statement that "The Tooling Initiative added $500K to the ASF's annual budget in FY2025, and was made possible by seed funding by Alpha-Omega." Both are budget statements. Neither is an outturn.

ProPublica's web page and its API disagree with each other. The web page carries FY2025 and FY2024 in full, including the officer table showing $0 against every name. The API's extracted-financial-data array stops at FY2023 and files the two most recent years under filings without data, even though its own metadata points at a filing received in 2026. If you are reading ASF's finances through a tool built on that API, you are two years behind, and the web page you would land on if you clicked through is not.

Worth stating plainly: ProPublica's page is accurate and it is the best public answer to this question. What it does not do, because it is a data viewer rather than an analysis, is compare the outturn to ASF's published budget, or surface the prior-period adjustments, the deferred-revenue mechanism, the restricted split, or the foreign-spend share.

What I could not establish

The 4-employee W-3 count beside $0 of wages is unreconciled, and the returns contain no note that resolves it. The identity and size of individual sponsors cannot be derived from the filings, because Schedule B's contributor detail is withheld from the public copy as the law permits. The cause of the FY2023 prior-period adjustment is not stated and is not required to be. ASF's returns are unaudited, which the filings state directly, so there is no second set of accounts to reconcile against, and the Schedule D reconciliation between return and audited statements does not exist for this organisation.

How to check this yourself

Every figure above comes from three filed returns and two ASF pages. The returns are public. Search ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer for EIN 47-0825376, and the filed XML for each year is downloadable from the IRS bulk 990 data. ASF's board-approved budgets are published in its board minutes, and the annual report is on its news site. The IRS form itself is the place to confirm what any given line is asking for.

For comparison, and noting that these are not like-for-like periods: the Python Software Foundation reported $4,086,997 and the Free Software Foundation $1,362,457. ASF's $2,220,257 sits between them.

Primary sources: ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, EIN 47-0825376; ASF board-approved budgets; ASF 2025 Year in Review; ASF sponsors; IRS Form 990.