FreeBSD Foundation Revenue 2024: $1,739,644, a Record $862,364 Deficit, and Two Bottom Lines That Both Check Out

Quick answer (September 2026). The FreeBSD Foundation reported revenue of $1,739,644 and expenses of $2,602,008 for calendar year 2024, a deficit of $862,364, on its Form 990 for the tax year ending December 31, 2024. That follows deficits of $582,885 in 2023 and $275,883 in 2022, for a three-year cumulative shortfall of $1,721,132. Net assets ended 2024 at $4,026,908, all of it unrestricted, down 23.7% from $5,280,629 two years earlier. The Foundation's own profit and loss report for 2025, published in June 2026 and a full year ahead of the IRS, shows income of $2,342,063.45, expenses of $2,576,585.93 and a net loss of $70,234.64.

Three things about those numbers are not on any other page, and the third is the one that changes how you read the first two.

The Form 990 series nobody has extracted yet

The FreeBSD Foundation is a Colorado 501(c)(3), EIN 84-1545163, formed in 2000, with six employees, five volunteers and a six-member board of which five are independent. It runs on a calendar fiscal year, so there is none of the year-labelling confusion that plagues foundations with a non-calendar year end.

Revenue grew 29.3% in 2024. Expenses grew 34.9%. The deficit grew 47.9%, after growing 111.3% the year before.

Across the fourteen years of Form 990 figures now available for this organisation, 2011 through 2024, the 2024 deficit is the largest it has ever reported. Only four of those fourteen years were loss-making at all: 2015, then 2022, 2023 and 2024 consecutively.

The 2024 return is the part that does not appear in the usual places. ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer API still lists the Foundation's extracted financial data ending at 2023; the 2024 filing sits in the "without data" bucket with a revenue of zero. Only the latest_object_id field gives it away. The figures above for 2024 come from the filed XML itself, object id 202533219349304773, pulled from the IRS bulk archive 2025_TEOS_XML_11B.

Two bottom lines, and both are correct

Here is the finding that no aggregator carries, because it requires holding two documents side by side.

The Foundation publishes its own profit and loss statements on its financials page. Its 2024 statement reports a net loss of $853,594.30. Its Form 990 for the same twelve months reports $862,364. The 2023 pair is further apart still: the Foundation published $400,126.09 and the return says $582,885, a gap of $182,758.91, or 31.4% of the IRS figure.

Neither document is wrong. They are measuring different lines.

The 990's headline loss is Part I line 19, revenue less expenses, and it excludes unrealised investment gains. The Foundation's own statement includes them. Part XI of the return closes the gap explicitly, and it foots to the dollar in both years:

• 2023: $5,280,629 opening, less the $582,885 loss, plus $182,758 of unrealised gains, gives $4,880,502.
• 2024: $4,880,502 opening, less the $862,364 loss, plus $8,770 of unrealised gains, gives $4,026,908.

So the number the Foundation publishes as "Net Income" is the 990's change in net assets, not the 990's bottom line. Two of two years reconcile exactly. If you quote a FreeBSD Foundation loss figure, say which basis you are on, because in 2023 the two differ by almost a third.

The revenue side reconciles just as cleanly and reveals a reclassification. The Foundation's 2024 statement books $1,524,259.17 of contributions. The 990 reports contributions of $1,453,539 and a separate "other revenue" line described only as MISCELLANEOUS at $70,720. Those two sum to $1,524,259. The remaining difference between the two documents' total income, $215,384.83, is exactly the investment income of $215,385 that the operating statement does not carry. The composition moved; the total did not.

Expenses agree almost perfectly. The 2024 statement totals $2,602,007.64 against the return's $2,602,008. The 2023 pair differs by $750.33 on a $1.93 million base, or 0.04%, and the only line differing by a comparable amount is bank and investment fees, $29,745.78 on the statement against $28,995 on the return.

The budget, and how far the year missed it

The Foundation also publishes its board-approved budgets. This is where the 2024 story actually sits, and running it is one fetch.

Against the 2024 approved budget, contributions of $1,453,539 came in 30.8% under the $2,100,000 donations line, a shortfall of $646,461. Expenses came in only 6.8% under budget. Miss your revenue by nearly a third and trim your spending by less than a fifteenth, and the arithmetic does the rest: the actual deficit of $862,364 was 24.8% deeper than the $691,183.50 the board had approved, an overrun of $171,180.50.

2023 went the other way. Contributions landed 9.4% under budget, expenses 11.8% under, and the deficit came in 25.7% smaller than planned.

One caution on reading these budgets side by side. The 2024 document has a "Contracted Services" block holding accounting and legal fees; the 2025 document has no such block, and those lines appear inside "Office Expenses" instead. Contracted services did not vanish. It was relabelled.

The deficit is deliberate, and they say so

It would be easy to write the three widening deficits as a foundation in trouble. Before doing that, it is worth reading what the Foundation itself says, on its own 2025 budget summary page:

The Foundation, verbatim: "While the total expenses for 2025 are greater than the projected revenue, this is a deliberate decision by the Board. Years ago, the board agreed to utilize the reserve fund specifically so we could invest in areas that accelerate the growth of the Project. By drawing on these reserves, we can address important needs today rather than postponing work that will strengthen FreeBSD's future."

The same page adds that "the 2025 budget should be seen as a guideline rather than a fixed plan." The budget document itself carries the line "Approved June 10, 2025".

That is a stated policy, not a drift. It does not make the 2024 overrun disappear, because a reserve drawdown 24.8% deeper than the board approved is still deeper than the board approved. But it reframes the series: this is a planned spend-down, and the only real question is the runway.

The runway

Net assets at the end of 2024 were $4,026,908, against total liabilities of just $32,949. Every dollar of it is unrestricted: the balance sheet reports $0 of donor-restricted net assets, so there is no locked-up portion to strip out, and there is no deferred revenue.

At the 2024 expense rate that reserve covers 565 days, about 1.55 years of total operations. At the 2024 deficit rate, and holding that deficit flat, it covers 4.67 years. The deficit has not been flat, though: it roughly doubled in 2023 and grew by almost half again in 2024.

Where the extra money went

Expenses rose $673,852 in 2024. Essentially all of it is one line.

Schedule O breaks out Part IX line 11g, the "other fees for services" bucket. In 2023 that breakout's largest component is labelled PROFESSIONAL STAFF at $463,847. In 2024 the same position is labelled CONTRACTORS at $1,136,620, a rise of $672,773, or 145.0%. That single line accounts for 99.8% of the entire increase in expenses.

Meanwhile Part I line 15, salaries and employee benefits, went from $955,390 to $954,235. That is a fall of $1,155, or 0.12%. The payroll was flat; the contracting was not.

Schedule F says where. Total expenditure outside the United States went from $267,486 to $931,185, a 3.48x increase and a $663,699 rise, which is 98.5% of the total expense increase. Foreign expenditure was 35.8% of all 2024 spending. A Europe programme-services line of $725,535 appears that did not exist in 2023, when the only European row was contributions received with no expenditure against it, and the Foundation's reported overseas office count goes from zero to one. The return states no relationship between the Schedule F regional figures and the Part IX functional figures, and I am not asserting one; they are two cuts of a year in which the money moved abroad.

Consistent with that, the Foundation reported no contractors paid more than $100,000 in 2023 and three in 2024, each described as SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT, at $138,939, $109,990 and $108,333.

The pay cut that never happened

Read Part VII alone and the Executive Director took a 41.8% pay cut: $300,704 in 2023, $175,000 in 2024.

That is wrong, and Schedule J says so in the Foundation's own words. The 2023 figure is base compensation of $166,348 plus a bonus of $134,356. The explanation attached to it reads:

Schedule J, Part III, verbatim: "IN THE REPORTED TAX YEAR, A ONE-TIME PAYMENT WAS MADE TO ADJUST THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR'S COMPENSATION. THIS PAYMENT INCLUDED FIVE YEARS OF RETROACTIVE BONUSES AND SALARY ADJUSTMENTS APPROVED BY THE BOARD, BRINGING THE SALARY IN LINE WITH FAIR MARKET RATES AFTER A PROLONGED PERIOD OF UNDER-COMPENSATION."

Strip the catch-up out and base pay went from $166,348 to $175,000, a rise of 5.2%.

The aggregate moves the other way again. Total reportable compensation in Part VII rose from $460,704 to $536,699, up 16.5%, while the actual payroll line was flat. The reason is disclosure, not pay: the count of individuals over $100,000 went from two to four, so more of the same payroll became visible. Anyone reading a single year of Part VII in isolation will get the direction of travel wrong in both directions.

2025, a year the IRS has not seen

The Foundation's 2025 profit and loss report was published in June 2026. No 2025 Form 990 has been filed; the IRS index for 2026 returns no row for this EIN.

Income of $2,342,063.45 against expenses of $2,576,585.93 gives an operating loss of $234,522.48, and a net loss after investment income of $70,234.64. Set beside 2024's $853,594.30, the published loss fell 91.8%.

Expenses barely moved, down 1.0%. The swing is all on the income side, and one line carries most of it: "4600 Miscellaneous Income" of $644,319.59, against $0.00 on that line in 2024. Contributions themselves rose from $1,524,259.17 to $1,697,743.86, up 11.4%. Without the miscellaneous line the 2025 operating loss would have been $878,842.07 rather than $234,522.48.

What that line is, the report does not say, and I am not going to guess. It is worth watching: the 2024 return took a $70,720 equivalent out of contributions and parked it in "other revenue", and the 2025 figure is 9.1 times larger.

Against the 2025 budget, income landed 11.5% over the $2,100,000 line and expenses 17.7% under the $3,131,904 line.

Concentration, and the lines the form asks about

Schedule A shows the donor base broadening sharply. Public support was 36.790% in the 2022 window, 46.260% in 2023 and 56.240% in 2024. The 33 1/3% public support test is passed comfortably in every year. The driver is concentration falling: gifts from donors exceeding the 2% threshold were 51.2% of all gifts in the 2023 five-year window and 38.3% in the 2024 window.

Three Part VI and Part XII answers are worth recording, because they are the Foundation's own answers to the form's own questions, and they are the same in both years.

To "Were the organization's financial statements compiled or reviewed by an independent accountant?" the answer is No. To "Were the organization's financial statements audited by an independent accountant?" the answer is also No. And to line 15a, which asks whether the process for setting the Executive Director's compensation included "a review and approval by independent persons, comparability data, and contemporaneous substantiation of the deliberation and decision", the answer is No.

Context matters on all three. None of them is a legal failure: a 501(c)(3) of this size with no federal funding is not required to have audited statements, and line 15a asks about a specific three-part safe-harbour procedure rather than about whether anyone approved anything. Schedule J separately records that a board or compensation committee was used, and Schedule O states that the Executive Director and the independent Treasurer review the Form 990 in detail before filing. What is true is that for an organisation with $4.06 million of assets spending $2.6 million a year, no independent accountant has audited, compiled or reviewed the statements those figures come from.

What everyone else says

The Foundation's own financials page is complete, current and better than any third-party source, and it did not appear on page one of either search I ran for these figures. Its 2025 numbers are a year ahead of the IRS.

ProPublica's public web page for EIN 84-1545163 does carry the 2024 figures accurately, including the full officer table, even though its API does not. The fair verdict there is accurate and radically incomplete: it has the headline, and none of the budget comparison, the two-bases reconciliation, the Schedule J explanation or the Schedule F geography.

Wikipedia's FreeBSD article mentions a $1 million donation from Jan Koum in November 2014 and carries no current revenue figure at all. That is silent rather than stale, and grading it as wrong would be unfair.

No data aggregator appeared on page one for this query, so none is graded here.

Method

Every 990 figure above comes from the filed XML: object id 202433209349314123 for 2023 and 202533219349304773 for 2024, both retrieved from the IRS Form 990 bulk downloads. The 2024 archive stores its members with DEFLATE64 compression, which the Python standard library cannot read; both extractions were verified against the archive's recorded CRC32 and uncompressed length before any figure was read. Form line labels were checked against the IRS Form 990 itself rather than from memory. Self-published figures come from the Foundation's own PDFs, linked above. The 2022 column is taken from the 2023 return's own prior-year figures and from ProPublica's extracted data; the older split is not established here.