Unicode Consortium revenue: $860,373 in 2025, and the investment gain that out-earned the organisation

Quick answer. For the year ended December 31, 2025, the Unicode Consortium (legal name Unicode, Inc., EIN 77-0269756) reported total revenue of $860,373, total expenses of $880,463, and a net operating result of minus $20,090. In 2024 it reported $904,067, $901,275 and plus $2,792. In 2023 it reported $923,831, $813,640 and plus $110,191. Net assets finished 2025 at $1,795,945, the highest figure in the fifteen fiscal years the IRS has digitised for this organisation, even though the year was a loss. Roughly 68.9% of 2025 revenue was membership dues, a figure that appears on no single line of the return. All figures below come from the filed Form 990 XML.

The number almost nobody has

The Unicode Consortium defines how essentially every computer on earth stores text. Its 2025 return records that the Unicode Standard now covers 159,801 encoded characters across thousands of scripts, and that its CLDR and ICU projects are, in the organisation's own words, embedded in "EVERY MAJOR OPERATING SYSTEM AND BROWSER".

Search for what it costs to run and you get almost nothing. A page-one search for its revenue returns a social-media post, a jobs listing, a press release about emoji, a forum thread about Apple's quarterly profit, and a profile of a differently-named company called Unicode Systems. Not one result answers the question.

That is not an accident of ranking. It is what the organisation has chosen. Its Form 990 answers Part VI, Section C, line 19, which asks an organisation to describe how it makes its governing documents and financial statements available to the public, with the same sentence in 2023, 2024 and 2025:

Schedule O, verbatim: "GOVERNING DOCUMENTS AND POLICY STATEMENTS ARE POSTED ON THE ORGANIZATION'S PUBLIC-FACING WEBSITE. OUR FINANCIAL STATEMENTS ARE POSTED ON OUR INTERNAL WEBSITE FOR ACCESS BY OFFICERS, BOARD MEMBERS AND MEMBERS UPON REQUEST."

The Unicode bylaws say the same thing from the other direction. Article 8, Section 2 requires the board to prepare, within 120 days of year end, an annual report containing "a balance sheet as of the end of such fiscal year and an income statement and statement of changes in financial position for such fiscal year". It then limits the audience: the corporation "shall notify each member yearly of the member's right to receive the annual report prepared pursuant to this section and send the report to those members who request it."

The same bylaw clause anticipates that there may be no auditor. The report must be accompanied by any report of independent accountants, "or, if there is no such report, the certificate of an authorized officer of this corporation that such statements were prepared without audit". That is the branch in force. Form 990 Part XII, line 2b asks whether the financial statements were audited by an independent accountant. Unicode answered no in 2023, in 2024 and in 2025.

So there is no public annual report, and no audit. The Form 990 is the only public financial record of the Unicode Consortium that exists, which is why this piece is built entirely from it.

Where the money actually comes from

Here is the part that matters most, and the reason a casual reading of this organisation's finances goes wrong.

Unicode reports membership dues in two different places on the same page of the same form. Part VIII, line 1b captures "membership dues, assessments, or similar amounts" as a contribution. Part VIII, line 2 captures program service revenue, and the first row Unicode lists there is also labelled MEMBERSHIP DUES. Both are dues. Neither line shows the total.

This split is a normal and defensible accounting treatment: the portion of a subscription that buys something identifiable is program service revenue, and the portion that exceeds that value is a contribution. Nothing here is irregular. But the consequence for anyone reading summary data is real. Every automated profile of this organisation reports its 2025 contributions as $430,981, or 50.1% of revenue, which invites the conclusion that Unicode is roughly half donation-funded. It is not. Add the two dues lines and membership dues are 68.9% of everything the consortium took in, and "all other contributions" is $190,141, or 22.1%.

Note also how the split moved. Between 2023 and 2024 the contributions half fell 33.8% while the program-services half rose 23.2%. Total dues fell 8.3%. A reader watching only the contributions line would have recorded a collapse that did not happen.

The rest of 2025 revenue is investment income of $42,747, a conference event contributing $34,177 of program service revenue (up from $15,246 in 2023, a 2.24x increase across two years), and $123 of other revenue.

The loss that raised the balance sheet

Unicode's 2025 operating result was minus $20,090, its first loss since 2021 and the third largest of the five loss years in the digitised record. Its net assets went up by $70,090, from $1,725,855 to $1,795,945, to the highest level they have ever reached.

Both are true, and the return reconciles them on Part XI. Line 5 of that part, "Net unrealized gains (losses) on investments", records $90,254. Line 8, "Prior period adjustments", records minus $74.

Net assets, beginning of year          1,725,855
Revenue less expenses                    -20,090
Net unrealized gains on investments      +90,254
Prior period adjustments                     -74
                                       ---------
Net assets, end of year                1,795,945

That foots to the dollar. It is worth stating plainly what it means: in 2025 the Unicode Consortium's investment portfolio produced more value than the Unicode Consortium did. The pattern is not new. Across 2023, 2024 and 2025 the return reports unrealised investment gains of $87,279, $42,891 and $90,254, a three-year total of $220,424. Over the same three years the cumulative operating result was $92,893. The portfolio out-earned the operations by a factor of 2.37.

This is why the 2025 loss should not be read as distress, and equally why the record net assets should not be read as a strong year. Neither figure describes the other. A summary table that prints a net income of minus $20,090 beside net assets of $1,795,945 is reporting both correctly and explaining neither.

What it spends, and on whom

Total 2025 expenses of $880,463 break down as follows on Part IX, which foots exactly:

The single largest line is one person. Schedule J gives the components of the chief executive's 2025 package: base compensation $228,000, bonus and incentive $36,456, deferred compensation $7,934, and nontaxable benefits $24,355, totalling $296,745. That is 33.7% of everything the organisation spent in 2025. Schedule O explains the bonus as "DISCRETIONARY INCENTIVE AMOUNTS THAT WERE APPROVED BY THE BOARD BASED UPON PERFORMANCE", and the return records that comparability data was used and that the package was approved by the officers and the full board.

Thirteen officers and directors are listed on Part VII for 2025. Eleven of them received nothing. That is easy to doubt and easy to verify: Part IX line 5, the officer compensation line, is $296,745, which is exactly the chief executive's package to the dollar. There is no room in that line for anyone else. Most of the eleven are recorded at 0.20 hours a week; the board chair and chief technology officer through June 30, 2025 is recorded at 20 hours a week, for nothing.

That arrangement is older than it looks. Digitised returns show officer compensation of $0 for nine consecutive years, 2012 through 2020, resuming at $92,043 in 2021 and climbing each year since. Two things should be said carefully about that. First, this was never an organisation without staff: other salaries and wages ran between $175,492 and $196,959 throughout those nine years. What it lacked was a paid officer. Second, the arrival of a paid chief executive in 2021 is a real structural change rather than a change in how the same facts were disclosed, and the Part IX line 5 reconciliation above holds in each year checked.

Employees rose from 3 in 2023 to 7 in 2024 and 7 in 2025. Reported volunteers rose from 95 to 98.

The contractors nobody has named

The form itemises that spending only under a condition, printed on the line itself: "(If line 11g amount exceeds 10% of line 25, column (A), amount, list line 11g expenses on Schedule O.)" Unicode crosses it every year, so the breakdown is disclosed. Unicode's breakdown is:

Contracted technical work rose 21.1% across two years while other consulting fell 69.5%. The technical line is charged entirely to programme services, with nothing allocated to management or fundraising, in all three years.

Part VII, Section B asks for the five highest compensated independent contractors paid more than $100,000. Unicode names one in two of the three years. In 2023 that was Wenlin Institute SPC of Eureka, California, paid $103,213 for "CLDR SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT". In 2024 there was none. In 2025 it was CodeHive TX LLC of Dripping Springs, Texas, paid $102,552 for "SOFTWARE ENGINEERING". The 2025 return separately describes ICU4X, its Rust rewrite of the internationalisation libraries for constrained devices, as a live programme with a 2.1 release.

The balance sheet

Total assets at the end of 2025 were $1,798,480 against liabilities of $2,535, all of it accounts payable and accrued expenses. The asset side is four lines and foots exactly:

• Publicly traded securities, $1,097,854, which is 61.0% of assets
• Accounts receivable, $312,305
• Savings and temporary cash investments, $263,468
• Non-interest-bearing cash, $124,853

Cash and savings together rose from $286,444 to $388,321 over the year. Receivables are worth noticing: $312,305 is 36.3% of a year's revenue, consistent with an organisation that invoices annual dues and waits.

Against $880,463 of annual expenses, net assets of $1,795,945 are about 745 days of cover, a little over two years. One caveat belongs with that figure. Form 990 asks for net assets split between amounts with and without donor restrictions only if the filer follows FASB ASC 958. Unicode checks the box for organisations that do not, so the return prints no restricted and unrestricted split at all and the 745 days should be read as an undifferentiated total. The return also shows no deferred revenue line in any of the three years, so unlike many subscription-funded bodies there is no billed-in-advance liability to net off first.

Schedule A: a narrowing donor base

Schedule A tests whether a charity is publicly supported. Unicode's 2025 Part II reports five-year gifts and contributions of $2,319,733 and total support of $2,526,906. Line 5 then subtracts, in the form's words, "the portion of total contributions by each person ... that exceeds 2% of the amount shown on line 11". For Unicode that subtraction is $946,158, or 40.8% of all contributions over five years.

The resulting public support percentage is 54.36% for 2025, against 58.97% for 2024 and 58.35% as filed for 2023. The direction is downward. The test itself is passed comfortably: the return checks the 33 1/3% support test box, and 54.36% is well clear of that threshold. This is a concentration signal, not a compliance problem.

The identity of those donors is not knowable from public filings. Schedule B, which lists them, is redacted in every public copy, and the filed XML shows the contributor name, address and amount fields as RESTRICTED.

What the existing answers get right and wrong

ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer is the best public source and its numbers are correct. Its organisation page carries complete extracted data for 2025 and 2024. The fair verdict is accurate and radically incomplete: it publishes revenue, expenses, net income and net assets, and it does not reconcile the loss against the rising net assets, does not add the two dues lines, and does not surface Schedule O.

One caution for anyone reading it programmatically. Its JSON API and its web page disagree about what exists. At the time of writing, the API's list of filings with extracted data stops at fiscal 2023, while the web page for the same organisation carries full extracted figures for 2024 and 2025. The API's top-level summary fields do carry the 2025 figures. If you query the API and trust its filing list, you will conclude two years are unpublished when they are on the page.

Wikipedia is the other place people look. Its Unicode Consortium article is a fair case of a current narrative attached to a stale box. The prose and the key-people list are current, naming the present chief executive and chief technology officer correctly. The infobox revenue figure is $467,576, sourced to the 2018 return. The 2025 figure is 84.0% higher, so the infobox understates current revenue by 45.7%.

Two commercial aggregators appeared in the results. Neither is graded here on its numbers, because both refuse an ordinary request and neither is a profile of this organisation: one is a page about a similarly named company, and the other is a category index for computer-science nonprofits rather than an entry for Unicode. Where their figures were visible only as a search snippet, they are not treated as sources.

One number deliberately not computed

It is tempting to divide 2025 spending by the 159,801 characters the standard now encodes, or by the 4,803 characters added in 2025, and publish a cost per character. That figure is not computed here because the denominator is incoherent. The encoded repertoire is the cumulative output of more than three decades, and character encoding is only one of four programmes the return describes; CLDR, ICU and ICU4X absorb much of the spending and encode nothing. Any such ratio would be arithmetic without meaning.

How to check every figure here

Everything above is in documents anyone can pull.

1. Look the organisation up by EIN 77-0269756 on ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer to get the filing index and the object identifier for each year.
2. Download the filed XML from the IRS directly. The Form 990 series downloads page publishes a yearly index CSV and the archives it points to. Note that the index year is the year the return was received, not the tax year: the 2025 return sits in the 2026 index.
3. Read the numbers against the blank Form 990 so that every line label is the IRS's rather than a summary site's.

The organisation's own about page is the right place to understand what the money buys. It is not the place to find out how much there is.