Internet Systems Consortium Revenue: The $27,409 Answer and the $7,747,915 One

Quick answer. Internet Systems Consortium's most recent Form 990 reports total revenue of $27,409 for the year ended 31 December 2024, against expenses of $40,370 and net assets of $132,218. The same return also discloses, on Schedule R, that its wholly owned subsidiary had total income of $7,747,915 in 2024. Both figures are correct. They are 282.7 times apart because they describe two different Delaware companies whose names differ by one word. ISC's own 2021 annual report put consolidated revenue at $7,116,000, against $346,096 on that year's 990.

If you searched for this number and got $27,409, you were given a real figure from a real regulatory filing, and it does not mean what it appears to mean.

Two companies, one word apart

ISC's About page explains the structure in a single sentence that almost nobody reads:

ISC, on its own About page: "In 2004, these ISC business operations were transferred to Internet Systems Consortium, Inc. (a not-for-profit company under Internal Revenue Code 501(c)(3) incorporated in Delaware). Many of ISC's ongoing activities are carried out by the company's wholly owned subsidiary, Internet Systems Corporation (also incorporated in Delaware)."

So there are two entities:

Same address. Names that differ by one word. Only one of them files a public return, and it is the one with almost no money in it.

What the non-profit actually is

The FY2024 return describes an organisation that does essentially nothing on its own account. These are all filed figures:

Zero employees. Zero volunteers. Zero salaries. Zero program service revenue. And in 2024, zero program service expenses, because every dollar of the $40,370 was classified as management and general.

Meanwhile ISC told its own readers, in the same period, that it "ended 2024 with 45 staff members, over half of whom are software engineers." Those 45 people are employed by the subsidiary, so they do not appear on the non-profit's return at all.

The board is four people, all recorded as independent, each at 4.00 hours per week. The return reports an unaudited organisation: the box for audited financial statements is answered no in both years examined.

Where the money actually moves

Schedule R Part V records transactions between the two entities. In both years the only transaction type reported is M, meaning services performed by the related organisation for the filing organisation. The flag for services performed for the related organisation is zero. The non-profit buys; it does not sell.

The Part IX line items reconcile to the Schedule R figure exactly in both years: $721,788 plus $36,000 is $757,788 in FY2023, and $36,000 is $36,000 in FY2024. Both years' Part IX also foot exactly to their printed totals.

What changed between the two years is the size. In FY2023 the non-profit passed $625,000 of program spending through to the subsidiary and ran a $719,559 deficit doing it, taking net assets from $864,738 to $145,179. In FY2024 it passed through nothing, spent $40,370 on accounting and management, and reported no program activity of its own whatsoever.

The number is on the 990, in the column nobody reads

Here is the part worth knowing if you ever need this figure again. The operating number is not absent from the public record. It is on the parent's own Form 990, on Schedule R Part IV, in the columns headed share of total income and share of end-of-year assets:

That $7,747,915 is corroborated independently. ISC's own review of the year says: "Financially and organizationally ISC is in good health, with no major concerns. Revenues in 2024 were strong, nearly $7.7M". The two sources agree to within about 0.6%.

And the disclosure is not reliably there. The FY2023 return files the same Schedule R, names the same subsidiary, and gives the same EIN and the same 100% ownership, yet leaves both financial columns blank. Share of total income: absent. Share of end-of-year assets: absent. So the identical question, asked of the previous year's filing, has no answer in it. The 2024 return is the first of the two to fill that column in.

Who is paid, and by whom

The compensation table is the sharpest illustration of what the structure does to the public record.

The return therefore reports, truthfully, that the number of individuals receiving more than $100,000 from the organisation is zero, and that total reportable compensation from the organisation is $0. Both are accurate. Both are also, read alone, the opposite of informative. Schedule O explains the arrangement in one line: "THE COMPENSATION FROM THE RELATED ENTITY WAS DETERMINED BY THE BOARD OF THE RELATED ENTITY."

The reserve test that does not work here

On two previous filings in this series the most useful number was not revenue at all but the reserve: net assets divided by annual expenses, expressed as days of cover. It separated Ruby Central's best-ever revenue year from its board's warning of "real financial jeopardy", and it showed the Django Software Foundation improving two years running.

Run the same formula here and it returns nonsense:

That is not a seventeen-fold improvement in resilience. Net assets fell. The denominator collapsed, because the parent stopped routing program spending through itself. A reserve ratio measures an operating entity, and this is a holding company. I am declining to publish a days-of-cover figure for ISC, and the reason it cannot be computed is itself the finding: the entity that files the return is not the entity that runs the software.

For the same reason, the long revenue series visible on aggregator sites is a series about the parent, not about ISC's business. ProPublica's extracted figures show it falling from $6,519,012 in 2012 to $27,409 in 2024. The operating business did not fall 238-fold. The reporting boundary moved.

What ISC publishes about itself

ISC's last published consolidated financial statement covers 2021. That report's table is headed, in ISC's own words, "2021 CONSOLIDATED FINANCIAL INFORMATION", consolidated being the word that resolves the whole discrepancy, and it shows:

That table audits well. All six annual identities hold exactly: revenue minus expense equals net income in each of the three columns, and actual minus budget equals delta on each of the three rows. Seven of its nine quarterly rows sum exactly to their printed annual totals. The two that do not are both expense rows, each off by exactly 1. Since the figures are printed in thousands and each quarter is rounded independently, that is a rounding artefact of at most $1,000, not an error. The printed annual totals remain mutually consistent.

Since 2021 the picture thins out. Of the five entries published in ISC's Annual Reports category covering 2022 to 2025, exactly one contains a revenue figure: the 2024 review quoted above, and it is a single rounded sentence rather than a statement. The others are development and accomplishment reports. ISC's 990 says its returns are posted to GuideStar; it does not host them on isc.org.

None of this is an accusation. A 501(c)(3) parent with a taxable operating subsidiary is a perfectly ordinary arrangement, ISC discloses the structure on its own About page, files the Schedule R, and states a group revenue figure publicly. The point is narrower: the number a search engine hands you is the parent's, and the parent is not the business.

What the existing answers get right and wrong

I checked each of them rather than assuming.

ProPublica's page is accurate and radically incomplete. Every FY2024 figure it renders matches the filed return exactly: revenue $27,409, expenses $40,370, net income -$12,961, net assets $132,218, contributions $26,182 at 95.5%, program services $0, investment income $1,227 at 4.5%. Seven of seven. It is not wrong about anything. It also contains zero mentions of Internet Systems Corporation and does not surface Schedule R, so it answers a narrower question than the one most people are asking.

ProPublica's API is a year behind its own page. The organisation record carries a 2024 tax period and names the 2024 filing's object ID, while the list of filings with extracted data stops at 2023. That split now shows up on the fourth consecutive non-profit examined in this series, so treat it as the expected state rather than a surprise. Its extraction quality, where it does have data, is exact: all four FY2023 headline figures match the filed XML.

Wikipedia is silent, not stale. Its article carries no revenue figure and no dollar amount at all, and does not mention the subsidiary. Silence is a reasonable thing for an encyclopedia to do here.

The commercial aggregators are wrong in the other direction. LeadIQ's page, as shown in Google's results, estimates revenue "in the range of $10M$25M". That range does not contain $7,747,915 either, so it is also incorrect, but it is the right order of magnitude, which the exactly-correct regulatory figure is not. That is an uncomfortable result and worth stating plainly: on this entity, the careful answer misleads by 283x and the sloppy answer misses by a factor of about 1.3 to 3.2.

How to check this yourself

Every figure above comes from documents anyone can pull:

1. The filed XML. The IRS publishes e-filed returns at apps.irs.gov/pub/epostcard/990/xml/{year}/. Grep the year index for EIN 200141248, take the object ID, download the matching archive and extract the member whose name contains that ID. ISC's FY2024 return is object 202532659349300863 in the 2025 index; FY2023 is 202442629349300624 in the 2024 index.
2. Read Schedule R, not just Part I. Part IV is where controlled entities and their income sit. Part V is where the transactions between them sit, and the single-letter transaction code tells you the direction.
3. Check whether the columns are populated. On this filer they are present in FY2024 and blank in FY2023, so the answer you get depends on which year you happen to open.

ISC operates F-Root, one of the root name servers of the DNS, and root-servers.org lists ISC among the root server operators. It maintains BIND 9, which a large share of the internet's DNS resolution still runs on, along with Kea DHCP and Stork. Its About page notes it has hosted other open-source projects in its datacentre, including the Internet Archive. It is a real organisation with 45 staff and roughly $7.7 million of annual income, and its public financial identity is a shell with no employees and $27,409.

Both numbers are true. Only one of them is an answer.