LLVM Foundation revenue: $1,064,793 in 2024, and a 2026 budget that plans to lose $364,700

Quick answer (October 2026). The LLVM Foundation reported total revenue of $1,064,793 for its 2024 financial year, against $1,047,183 of expenses and a surplus of $17,610. Net assets at 31 December 2024 were $1,256,810. The last five filed years run $512,586 (2020), $356,397 (2021), $806,268 (2022), $966,022 (2023) and $1,064,793 (2024). 2024 is the first year in which conference ticket income (53.37% of revenue) exceeded donations (46.44%).

The Foundation has also published a 2026 approved budget that plans $1,323,000 of revenue against $1,687,700 of expenses: a deliberate loss of $364,700. Its board minutes say why, in the board's own words.

LLVM is the compiler infrastructure underneath Clang, Rust, Swift and a large fraction of the toolchains that build modern software. The legal entity that administers it is a small Californian charity with one employee, and almost everything it spends goes on running two conferences a year.

Every figure below comes from the filed Form 990 XML, from the Foundation's own published documents, or from a derivation that is shown.

The eleven filed years

The LLVM Foundation is a United States 501(c)(3) public charity, EIN 47-1136085, registered at Los Altos Hills, California. Its IRS category is Adult, Continuing Education. Eleven years of returns carry extracted financial data.

Across eleven years the Foundation has taken in $7,123,314. Net assets have grown 10.11 times since 2014.

2024 was the first year revenue passed a million dollars. It was also the thinnest year in a decade in margin terms: revenue rose 10.22% while expenses rose 19.66%, which took the surplus down 80.63%, from $90,898 to $17,610.

The 2024 return was signed on 8 November 2025 and received by the IRS on 14 November 2025. A search of the IRS index for receipt years 2026 and 2027 returns zero rows for this EIN, so the 2024 figures are the most recent filed statement of the Foundation's finances that exists. Each receipt year returns exactly one row, which also rules out an amended return.

2024 is the year the conference out-earned the donors

Form 990 Part VIII splits the 2024 income three ways:

The program service line is not a mystery. The return itemises it: $561,705 described as LLVM DEVELOPER MEETING, $6,500 described as GOOGLE SUMMER OF CODE, and $84 of all other program service revenue on line 2f, which together give the $568,289 total.

Tracked across all eleven years, the share of revenue coming from the developer meetings rather than from donations looks like this:

The 2020 and 2021 collapse is the pandemic: no in-person meetings, so no ticket income, and the Foundation ran on donations alone. The recovery since has not simply returned the mix to where it was. It has pushed past it. On the 2024 numbers the LLVM Foundation is primarily a conference organiser that also receives sponsorship, rather than a sponsored body that also runs a conference.

Where the money goes

Form 990 Part IX breaks 2024 spending into fifteen lines. They sum to $1,047,183, which is exactly the printed total.

The two developer meetings together are $805,768, or 76.95% of everything the Foundation spent in 2024.

The line called LLVM INFRASTRUCTURE is $29,426, or 2.81%. The Foundation spent 27.38 times more on its two conferences than on the infrastructure of the project it is named after. It also spent more on accounting fees than on that infrastructure: $42,847 against $29,426, a ratio of 1.46.

That comparison is worth framing honestly before anyone reaches for it as a criticism. LLVM's engineering is done by employees of the companies that use it, and a great deal of its build and test capacity is donated hardware and cloud credit that never passes through a charity's bank account. Running the two meetings really is most of what this legal entity does with money, and the Schedule O narrative in the 2023 return describes educational outreach as the Foundation's largest programme in exactly those terms. The point is not that the ratio is wrong. It is that nobody publishes it, and that the Foundation is now planning to change it, which is the subject of the next section but one.

For completeness: the 2023 return carried a DIVERSITY & INCLUSION expense line of $11,299 that does not appear at all in 2024, and 2024 added a SOFTWARE SUBSCRIPTION line of $9,835 that does not appear in 2023. The 2024 All other expenses line rose only $3,183, which is not enough to have absorbed the D&I line. Either the spending stopped or it was reclassified somewhere the return does not show. The 2026 budget, below, settles which.

ProPublica says executive compensation is $0. The return says she is the only paid officer.

ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer page for the Foundation publishes a field called Executive Compensation. For 2022, 2023 and 2024 it reads $0.

The Foundation has a paid president. Part VII of the 2024 return lists Tanya Lattner, President, at 24.00 hours per week and $62,569 of reportable compensation. Eleven other people are listed, all at 1.00 hour per week and all at $0. Total reportable compensation from the organisation is $62,569, so she is the only person on the list who is paid anything.

Schedule O of the 2023 return says so in plain words. Under the heading for Part VI line 15A it reads: "COMPENSATION PROCESS FOR TOP OFFICIAL LLVM'S PRESIDENT IS THE ONLY PAID OFFICER. HER COMPENSATION HAS BEEN REVIEWED BY THE BOARD AND COMPARED TO MARKET DATA."

So why does the summary say zero? Because of which line the money sits on. Form 990 Part IX line 5 is headed "Compensation of current officers, directors, trustees, and key employees" and line 7 is headed "Other salaries and wages", both verified against the IRS form. In the 2023 and 2024 filed XML there is no line 5 element at all. The president's pay sits entirely on line 7.

ProPublica builds its Executive Compensation field from line 5. Line 5 is empty, so the field reads $0.

The year it moved is visible in ProPublica's own extraction of the two lines across the eleven years:

The amount barely moves. In 2021 the president was paid $62,360 and the summary said $62,360. In 2022 she was paid $62,360 and the summary said $0. Nothing about the job changed; the line changed.

This is the same class of defect, by a different mechanism, as the one on the Rust Foundation's returns, where the executive director also surfaced at $0 in widely read summaries. Anyone comparing open source foundation executive pay from aggregator fields rather than from Part VII is comparing a reporting artefact.

For scale: $62,569 across 24.00 hours a week for 52 weeks is $50.14 an hour. The Foundation's own Schedule O says her compensation "HAS BEEN DETERMINED TO BE NOMINAL CONSIDERING THE AMOUNT OF TIME THAT IS DEVOTED" and that much of her time is, in the return's own quotation marks, donated.

Part I line 5 of the 2024 return reports 1 individual employed. Part I line 6, headed "Total number of volunteers (estimate if necessary)", reports 0. A project with thousands of contributors reports no volunteers, because the question asks about the charity rather than the codebase. It is still an odd number to find on the face of the return.

The 2026 approved budget plans a $364,700 loss

The Foundation publishes a documents page carrying its bylaws, its articles of incorporation, its conflict of interest policy, twelve sets of board meeting minutes, and one financial report: a 2026 approved budget.

It is three pages. Here it is, with the arithmetic checked rather than assumed.

Revenue and expenses each foot to their printed totals, and $1,323,000.00 minus $1,687,700.00 is exactly the printed loss of $364,700.00.

Set against the 2024 outturn, the budget raises revenue 24.25% and expenses 61.17%. The planned loss is 29.02% of the entire $1,256,810 reserve.

Four things in that budget are worth pulling out.

The two developer meetings account for four fifths of the planned loss. Program I splits into US LLVM Developers at $657,800.00, Euro LLVM Developers at $395,500.00, Meetups at $27,500.00 and Asia LLVM Developers at $0.00. Against budgeted ticket income of $540,000.00 and $220,000.00, the US meeting is planned to run $117,800 short and the European meeting $175,500 short, a combined $293,300. That is 80.42% of the total budgeted loss of $364,700.

There is an Asia line, budgeted at zero on both sides. The budget carries Ticket sales, Asia LLVM Developers and Total Asia LLVM Developers, both at $0.00. A third regional meeting exists in the chart of accounts and is funded for nothing in 2026.

Infrastructure nearly doubles. The LLVM Infrastructure line is budgeted at $55,000.00 against $29,426 actually spent in 2024, an increase of 86.91%. The 2.81% figure above is the thing the Foundation is visibly trying to move.

Diversity and inclusion is back. The line that vanished from the 2024 return is budgeted at $35,000.00 for 2026, 3.10 times the $11,299 spent in 2023.

Two small blemishes, reported as measurements rather than as complaints. Travel Grants, Domestic is printed as 38,500 where every other figure in the document carries two decimal places. And the State Income Tax Expense and Total Tax Expense rows are printed with no amount at all.

The G and A subtotal does not foot, by exactly $46,000

Under General and Administrative Expenses the budget prints two components and a subtotal:

$366,500.00 plus $27,400.00 is $393,900.00. The printed subtotal is $439,900.00. The gap is $46,000.00.

I re-extracted that block from the raw PDF text to make sure I had not dropped a row. There is no third component line in the published file.

Two readings are available and the document does not settle between them. Either a General and Administrative component worth exactly $46,000 exists in the underlying workbook and is collapsed out of the published PDF, or the subtotal is wrong. The round figure favours the first. What can be said definitely is that the grand total of $1,687,700.00 and the headline loss of $364,700.00 are both computed using $439,900.00, so the bottom line is unaffected either way, and a reader adding up the two visible components will be $46,000 short of the number the budget actually uses.

Two details support the suppressed line reading. The published file's own PDF metadata title is "2026 Budget Workpapers" rather than the title the web page gives it, and page three carries the line "For Management Purposes Only" above a credit to an outside bookkeeping firm, Beyond Balanced Books Inc. This is an internal working document that has been published, not a document drafted for publication.

The board said why, in its own minutes

The minutes of the board meeting of 7 November 2025 record the 2026 budget being approved. The relevant passage, in full:

Finance Committee, 2026 Budget. "The finance committee members distributed a memo ahead of time with two budget options, along with a spreadsheet and slides". A board member presented those slides, the minutes record, highlighting an increase in "event costs over time, and that sponsorship levels have remained flat." Then: "Our public financial records show that we are spending down the savings we accumulated during the 2020-2023 years that we did not hold in-person events." And finally: "Motion: approve budget option 2", with the result "Vote: passed unanimously, 2026 budget approved".

That one sentence about spending down savings is the whole story, and the eleven-year table above is the evidence for it. Between 2019 and 2022, with program service revenue at 4.16% and 5.92% in the two pandemic years, net assets rose from $709,894 to $1,148,305. The Foundation banked $438,411 while it could not hold events. It is now deliberately spending that down.

It is worth saying plainly that this is a board that understands its own numbers, has named the mechanism, has chosen between two drafted options, and has published both the minute and the resulting budget. That is better financial governance than most organisations of this size manage, and it is the reason this article can be written at all.

Note also that the published budget is option 2. Option 1 is not published.

What the $366,500 payroll line is for

Payroll is budgeted at $366,500.00. In 2024 the Foundation's entire salaries, benefits and payroll taxes cost $69,484. The budget is 5.27 times that, an increase of $297,016.

Three consecutive sets of minutes explain it. On 5 December 2025, under "Revisiting hiring for the infra position", the minutes record that the president would revise a job description. On 9 January 2026: "The board is refining a job description for a DevOps Infrastructure Engineer", and "For employment law simplicity, we are starting our search for candidates in the USA". On 6 February 2026, under Infrastructure Job Description, the board agreed to share the posting with the project's infrastructure area team leads.

The posting is live on the Foundation's careers page. It is titled DevOps Engineer, LLVM CI/Build Infrastructure Specialist, at "Position Level: IC-3 to IC-4", "Location: Remote (must be based in and authorized to work in the United States)", which matches the January minute exactly. And it publishes a number: "The starting salary range for this role is $90,000-$140,000 USD annually."

That lets the payroll line be tested rather than guessed at. In 2024 the Foundation's employer costs on top of salary ran at 11.05% ($1,337 of benefits and $5,578 of payroll taxes on $62,569 of wages). Applying that same rate, one engineer at the top of the published range costs about $155,473 fully loaded, and the president's existing cost is $69,484. Together that is about $224,957, leaving roughly $141,543 of the budgeted payroll unaccounted for. At the bottom of the range the unexplained remainder is about $197,069.

So the 2026 payroll budget is larger than the president plus one engineer at the top of the advertised range. It may cover a second hire, a part-year contractor, a raise, or simple headroom. The published documents do not say, and I am not going to guess.

The reserve, and why there is no audit

Net assets at the end of 2024 were $1,256,810 against $1,047,183 of annual expenses: 1.20 years, or 438 days of cover.

Two qualifications that usually matter and here both point the same way. The whole of it is unrestricted. The 2024 Part X balance sheet carries a net assets without donor restrictions line and no donor-restricted line at all, so there is no restricted tranche to deduct. And although the Foundation is an accrual-basis filer, neither the 2023 nor the 2024 return carries a deferred revenue line, so the usual step of subtracting advance conference receipts before quoting a reserve does not apply here.

On the 2026 budget, the planned $364,700 loss would take that reserve to roughly $892,000 and the cover to well under a year.

The returns answer No to Part XII line 2b, "Were the organization's financial statements audited by an independent accountant?", and also No to line 2a, "Were the organization's financial statements compiled or reviewed by an independent accountant?". No audit, no review, no compilation, on an organisation turning over a million dollars and paying $42,847 a year in accounting fees.

Before anyone reads that as a governance failure, read the Foundation's own bylaws. Article VIII, under Required Financial Audits: "This corporation shall obtain a financial audit for any tax year in which it receives or accrues gross revenue of $2 million or more, excluding grant or contract income from any governmental entity for which the governmental entity requires an accounting."

At $1,064,793 of revenue the trigger has not been reached, and the absence of an audit is exactly what the Foundation's own constitution provides for. The same article adds that "any audited financial statements obtained by this corporation shall be made available for inspection by the Attorney General and the general public within nine months after the close of the fiscal year to which the statements relate", a duty that never arises because no audit is obtained. The bylaws also contemplate the unaudited case directly, requiring in its place a certificate of an authorised officer "that such statements were prepared without an audit from the books and records of this corporation."

What is worth noting is the trajectory. The 2026 budget projects $1,323,000 of revenue, which is 66.15% of the $2 million threshold at which the Foundation's own bylaws will oblige it to buy an audit. On the growth in the eleven-year table, that is a question for the next few years rather than the next decade.

The cash flow the Form 990 does not require

A Form 990 contains no cash flow statement. Part X gives both year ends, so one can be derived, and it either foots or it does not.

It foots to the dollar. Two things make that worth showing. The derivation only closes if the $3,000 of depreciation relates to an asset already carried inside other assets at the start of the year rather than bought during it; Schedule D confirms a fixed asset with a cost of $3,000, accumulated depreciation of $3,000 and a closing book value of nil. Treating it as bought in-year leaves a residual of exactly $3,000, so the arithmetic selects the correct reading on its own.

The change in net assets is $17,607 while the surplus is $17,610. The $3 is Part XI line 9, other changes in net assets, and Schedule O explains it in one word: "ROUNDING -3."

The dominant item is the $180,706 swing in prepaid expenses. At the end of 2023 the Foundation had $188,040 paid in advance, against $2,207 a year earlier and $7,334 a year later. That is the conference cycle showing up on the balance sheet: venue deposits for the next year's meetings, paid before the year end and consumed in the following year.

Schedule A: the public support test they actually use

Most small charities in this position rely on the test at section 170(b)(1)(A)(vi), where fee income does not count toward public support. The LLVM Foundation does not. Its Schedule A checks the box for a 509(a)(2) organisation, the gross receipts test, under which receipts from admissions to an exempt activity do count.

That is the right test for a body funded by conference tickets, and the Foundation passes it comfortably: public support is 99.85% of total support and the box for the 33 and a third per cent test is checked. Amounts received from disqualified persons and excess amounts from substantial contributors are both $0, so there is no donor concentration adjustment at all.

The five-year table behind that percentage is the interesting part:

Within those five years the admissions component went from $21,844 in 2020 to $568,205 in 2024.

One small reconciliation worth showing, because it is the kind of thing that looks like an error and is not. Schedule A puts 2024 gross receipts from admissions at $568,205, while Part VIII line 2g puts total program service revenue at $568,289. The $84 difference is exactly the line 2f all other program service revenue noted earlier: Schedule A counts the two named activities and excludes the unitemised remainder. The two schedules agree.

Vienna, and thirty travel grants

Schedule F of the 2024 return reports activity outside the United States in one region, VIENNA, AUSTRIA, described as "HOSTED THE 2024 EUROPEAN LLVM DEVELOPERS' MEETING." Region expenditure is $337,376, matching the Euro LLVM Dev Meetings line in Part IX exactly. The Foundation reports no offices and no employees outside the United States.

It also made travel grants to 20 individuals outside the United States totalling $41,675, disbursed by wire, and to 10 individuals inside it totalling $15,776. Thirty recipients, $57,451, which is the whole of the grants figure in Part I. The averages are $2,083.75 for a foreign recipient and $1,577.60 for a domestic one.

There is a disclosure difference between the two years worth noting carefully. Form 990 Part IV line 14b asks whether the organisation had "aggregate revenues or expenses of more than $10,000 from grantmaking, fundraising, business, investment, and program service activities outside the United States", and a Yes requires Schedule F Part I. The 2023 return spent $196,062 on the European meeting, which Schedule O places in Glasgow, Scotland, and paid $42,070 of foreign grants, yet its Schedule F carries no Part I region table. The 2024 return does.

The fair reading is that the 2024 return is the better one and the Foundation improved its own disclosure. Nothing was concealed in 2023 either: that return's Schedule O describes the Glasgow meeting, its attendance and its programme in detail. The form was incompletely filled in; the facts were published.

One disclosure that went the other way

The 2023 return answers Yes to Part VI line 2, which asks "Did any officer, director, trustee, or key employee have a family relationship or a business relationship with any other officer, director, trustee, or key employee?" Schedule O then explains it in five words plus two names: "TANYA LATTNER CHRIS LATTNER PRESIDENT DIRECTOR MARRIED".

That is a model disclosure. It is specific, it is unprompted in any practical sense, and it is exactly what the Foundation's own conflict of interest policy requires: the policy's annual disclosure form carries a Family Relationships table that asks signatories to "Include spouse, ancestors, brothers and sisters, children, grandchildren, great grandchildren" and the spouses and domestic partners of several of those.

The 2024 return answers No to the same question, and carries no Part VI line 2 entry in Schedule O. Both people are still listed in Part VII of the 2024 return, in the same roles.

Nothing here establishes any wrongdoing, and it is important to be precise about how little this is. The relationship is public, the prior year's return discloses it in the Foundation's own words, the same outside firm prepared both returns, the compensation was board-reviewed and benchmarked according to Schedule O, and the bylaws cap interested directors at "not more than 49% of the directors of this corporation" against an actual 2 of 9, which is 22.22%. The conflict of interest policy requires the board to "authorize and oversee an annual review of the administration of this conflict of interest policy."

The narrow and only point is this: the 2024 return answers No to a question the 2023 return answered Yes to, with the same two people in the same roles, and a reader who pulls only the most recent return will not learn about the relationship.

What the sponsor roster would cost at list price

The Foundation's sponsors page carries 17 sponsor logos across four tiers: 4 at Diamond, 5 at Platinum, 7 at Gold and 1 Corporate Supporter. Its sponsorship prospectus, approved by the board on 8 December 2023, prices them: Diamond at $100,000 and above, Platinum at $50,000, Gold at $25,000, corporate Supporter at $2,500 and individual Supporter at $250.

At the floor of each tier that roster is worth $827,500 a year. Reported contributions in 2024 were $494,518, and the 2026 budget projects $550,000 of corporate sponsorships. The roster at list price is 1.67 times the former and 1.50 times the latter.

That gap should not be read as a contradiction, and there are at least four ordinary explanations. The roster is today's and the revenue is 2024's. List prices are not invoices, and multi-year or in-kind arrangements are negotiated. The Diamond tier is priced at $100,000 and above, so using the floor understates rather than overstates. And a substantial part of what large companies give an open source foundation arrives as donated build hardware, cloud credit, staff time and venue support, none of which touches a revenue line.

The honest conclusion is the more useful one anyway: the Form 990 materially understates what the LLVM project actually runs on.

Taking the logos in document order under each tier heading, Diamond carries AMD, Apple, Google and Qualcomm, and Platinum carries Arm, Fastly, Huawei, Meta and NVIDIA. In the Gold tier the image filenames give AWS, BayLibre, Fujitsu, MathWorks and Sony, plus one named only access. The seventh Gold logo and the single Corporate Supporter logo are stored under purely numeric filenames, so I cannot identify those two from the page markup and will not guess.

From the minutes, things that appear nowhere else

The twelve published sets of minutes run from 7 February 2025 to 6 February 2026. A few things in them are not published anywhere else.

EuroLLVM 2026 ticket prices, set at the December 2025 meeting: $1,050 corporate, $800 nonprofit, academic or independent, and $260 student, with late registration adding $100 to $200 depending on ticket type and speaker tickets in selected categories discounted by 50%. The target event size is 300. Budgeted European ticket income of $220,000 across 300 attendees implies an average of $733.33, which is consistent with that mix.

A maintainers fund was considered and declined. From the February 2026 minutes: "Rust has a maintainers fund. We discussed the possibilities, but for the moment, this is not in our operating budget, and we have higher priority expenses." That is a direct, checkable statement about the budget above.

Student travel grants are being rationed. The same meeting recorded 32 applicants and agreed a policy that the Foundation should sponsor any given student at most three times, "to spread our dollars around and reach new students" in substance.

An annual report was promised. The January 2026 minutes record a target release of late January or early February 2026, "pending financial completion." As of this writing the Foundation's documents page carries no annual report.

And the minutes are candid about themselves. The February 2026 meeting opened by not approving the previous minutes: "Notes not prepared, so the board deferred approval until the next meeting in March."

Two small errors in those documents, noted because they are checkable. The December 2025 minutes close by confirming the next board meeting date as Jan 9, 2025, a year earlier than the meeting that then took place. And the January minutes are published under a 2026-01-08 label while the document itself is dated Jan 9, 2026.

What everyone else says

There is almost nothing to correct, because there is almost nothing published.

A Google search for the Foundation's revenue returns a page of results about tax authorities and the dictionary definition of the word revenue. No aggregator profile, no data vendor, no financial summary appears at all. The same search run against another open source charity returns that body's own 990 PDF, its annual report and a ProPublica page in the first three results, so the instrument works and the emptiness is real.

Wikipedia has no article for the LLVM Foundation; the URL returns a 404. The LLVM article mentions the Foundation and correctly names Tanya Lattner as its president since 2014, and contains zero occurrences of revenue, budget, or any dollar amount. That is silence rather than error, and it should be graded as such.

ProPublica is accurate on everything it extracts and is the best public source by a distance. Its only defect is the Executive Compensation field discussed above, which is a faithful reading of an empty Part IX line 5. Its API also lags its own web page: the API's structured filings stop at 2023 while the web page carries 2024 in full, so anyone querying the API alone would report the Foundation's most recent year as 2023.

A Google AI Overview appeared on the search but was not retrieved, so it is not graded here.

Method

Figures come from four places. The 2023 and 2024 Form 990 data is from the filed XML, pulled from the IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search bulk archives at object IDs 202433209349315823 and 202503189349307440, with the ZIP central directory count asserted against the enumerated member count and each member's CRC and length asserted after decompression. The 2014 to 2022 figures are ProPublica's extraction of the filed returns. The budget, minutes, bylaws, conflict of interest policy and sponsorship prospectus are the Foundation's own published PDFs. Form line labels are quoted from the IRS Form 990 itself rather than from memory.

Every percentage and ratio above is computed from those figures and can be reproduced from the tables. Both years of Part IX and Part VIII foot exactly to their printed totals, and the derived cash flow foots to zero.