Redrawing the Map

These demographic and policy shifts provide the backdrop against which this report characterizes the landscape of organizations and services currently meeting veterans’ needs. The study builds a new dataset from the ground up rather than relying on the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) classification of military- and veteran-serving organizations (via the National Taxonomy of Exempt Organizations [NTEE] code). The NTEE classification code is assigned by the IRS at the time an organization files for tax-exempt status and may not reflect the filing organization’s intent. An organization’s mission or program focus can also evolve over time without a change to the NTEE code reflecting the shift in services. Moreover, the NTEE code may capture the specific substantive area of the services provided—such as human services or medical care—while missing the specific subpopulation they target. The traditional code does not capture organizations whose veteran- and military-serving work falls under other major IRS categories, such as health care or social services.

Beginning with the IRS’s full registry of nonprofit organizations, this study narrows analysis to 501(c)(3) organizations filing an IRS Form 990 or 990-EZ, identifying organizations with relevant missions, and narrows the scope even further to organizations with at least one full-time employee. This approach yields 849 stand-alone organizations whose primary mission is dedicated to serving veterans, service members, and their families, alongside 150 organizations in which military-and veteran-specific support, programming, or a nested organization is embedded within a broader institutional mission.

Among the 849 stand-alone organizations, the plurality of organizations in the sector are small, young, and unevenly concentrated. Of these, 65 percent of organizations operate with fewer than 10 employees, 80 percent were founded in 2002 or later, and just five of 18 mission categories account for 64 percent of all organizations. Revenue growth has been broad-based, with median annual growth of 15 percent over the last four years of recorded tax data—though a minority of organizations (many concentrated on emergency relief) saw meaningful decline. Government funding remains concentrated in housing and homelessness services, tied to identifiable federal programs like Housing and Urban Development-VA Supportive Housing (HUD-VASH) and Supportive Services for Veteran Families. Geographic concentration of military- and veteran-serving organizations reflects both veteran population size and proximity to federal policymaking in Washington, D.C.

The 150 embedded services, programs, and organizations tell a different story: Rather than existing to serve veterans, they serve veterans as one population within a broader mission. Most often, these embedded services include housing, family services, food assistance, disability services, and legal aid. These programs and organizations cluster around general nonprofit infrastructure in states such as Texas, New York, and Illinois.

The findings lead to distinct responsibilities for key players in each part of the military- and veteran-serving ecosystem.

The executive branch should consider how veteran concentration rates per county should factor into resourcing decisions—not just the absolute number of veterans in an area—to ensure that rural and geographically isolated areas have equal access to veteran services and resources. Federal grant compliance frameworks should be tiered by organizational size and resourcing to reduce the disproportionate burden on smaller grantees.

Projected Absolute Veterans⁹ and Projected Veteran Concentration Rates¹⁰

Congress should exercise robust oversight of the VA staffing reductions and the expansion of community care, convening regular hearings to assess whether alternative service delivery mechanisms are maintaining or elevating the quality and continuity of care that veterans have earned.

The philanthropic community should examine its current portfolio of grantees and identify whether it is reaching organizations best positioned to support underserved veterans. Capacity-building grants for overhead, staffing, and operational infrastructure should be considered as programmatic investments. Investments in shared technological infrastructure could meaningfully reduce the burden on small organizations currently operating without adequate tools or sufficient staffing levels. Funders should also consider the value of investing in specific positions focused on the military and veteran community within existing organizations and institutions, including universities, hospital systems, state and local government offices, or large organizations with aligned missions such as housing, employment, and mental health.

Introduction

The U.S. veteran population reached 17.3 million in 2026.¹¹ Serving that population are both the federal government (primarily through the Department of Veterans Affairs [VA]) and a robust community of military- and veteran-serving organizations. As of April 2026, the VA requested a $488.2 billion budget for fiscal year (FY) 2027, representing a 7.7 percent increase from the FY 2026 budget.¹² The largest categories in the budget are primarily divided between mandatory spending on veterans’ benefits, including disability compensation, pensions, and educational benefits (69.2 percent), and discretionary spending on medical care delivered through VA hospitals and clinics, information technology, electronic health record modernization, and construction, with mandatory benefits programs (30.8 percent).¹³ The growth in the federal budget dedicated to serving veterans reflects legislated eligibility expansion through the PACT Act, the MISSION Act, and the Forever GI Bill (explored in more detail later).¹⁴

Over the last decade, the strategic and national landscapes have undergone significant change. The pace of military deployments has also changed over the past decade. U.S. troops in Afghanistan, numbering more than 100,000 service members in mid-2011, were formally withdrawn on August 30, 2021.¹⁵ The difficult withdrawal raised questions about the justification of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and was reflected in lower rates of trust in the military.¹⁶ In the days immediately following the withdrawal, the VA and veteran-serving nonprofits reported significant increases in service members seeking mental health counseling.¹⁷

In the same time frame, the veteran population decreased from nearly 21.0 million veterans in 2015 to 17.3 million veterans in 2026, largely the result of older, conscription-era veterans passing away.¹⁸ The veteran population is not only smaller, but its makeup also represents shifting demographic trends, as 26 percent of veterans in 2026 served in the post-9/11 period (compared to 13 percent in 2015), and women comprise 12 percent of the veteran population (compared to 9 percent in 2015).¹⁹ The population’s changing composition may present new needs for both the VA and the nonprofit organizations that serve it.

The past decade has been defined by structural and institutional changes affecting the military and veteran community. In 2019, the United States also created a sixth military branch, the United States Space Force—the first new military service created since the advent of the United States Air Force in 1947.²⁰ Between FYs 2021 and 2023, the military services faced the most challenging recruiting environment in the 50-year history of the all-volunteer force, with the Army, Navy, and Air Force failing to meet their recruitment goals in FY 2023.²¹ The VA reduced its workforce by 30,000 staff in FY 2025, aiming to cut bureaucracy while maintaining or improving veteran services.²² The changing composition of the veteran population and the evolving strategic and institutional backdrop present an opportunity to reexamine the landscape of organizations actively meeting the needs of service members, veterans, and their families.

This growing federal financial investment in the veteran community exists alongside a complementary support system: the parallel nonprofit ecosystem serving service members, veterans, and their families. These nonprofit services operate in ways that federal programs alone cannot. The network of nonprofit organizations serving the community can reach populations that the VA does not (including family members or veterans not eligible for federal benefits) and has the potential to respond more nimbly to emerging needs within the veteran and military family community.

In 2015, the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) published Charting the Sea of Goodwill.²³ The study conducted a comprehensive landscape analysis of the funding flows to the “sea of goodwill,” or the community of military- and veteran-serving organizations. More recent studies exploring the nonprofit sector serving this community include RAND’s The Role, Effectiveness, and Sustainability of Nonprofit Organizations that Provide Employment Support for Veterans (2024), the Milken Institute’s Thriving Beyond Service: Strategic Philanthropy for the Military-to-Civilian Transition (2025), and the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy’s Military & Veterans Community Index 2025.²⁴

Each of these studies takes a different approach to defining the community of military- and veteran-serving organizations. The 2015 CNAS and 2024 RAND studies relied on a conventional approach of focusing on organizations classified by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) as military- or veteran-serving through the National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities’ (NTEE) code W30, an approach that had also been used by the Urban Institute and the D’Aniello Institute for Veterans and Military Families and cited by reporting from the George W. Bush Institute.²⁵ Common references to approximately 42,000–45,000 veteran-serving organizations trace back to the list of organizations coded under NTEE’s W30.²⁶ This methodology has an advantage in that it produces a closed, consistently referenced list over time. However, an understanding of the veteran- and military-serving landscape based solely on this set of organizations has limitations. The classification code is assigned by the IRS and may not reflect the filing organization’s intent. An organization’s mission or program focus can also evolve over time without a change to the NTEE code to reflect a shift in services. Moreover, the NTEE code may capture the specific substantive area of the services provided—such as human services or medical care—while missing the specific subpopulation they target.

Recognizing these limitations, the Milken Institute and the Lilly School of Philanthropy each developed their own screening criteria to build datasets of military- and veteran-serving nonprofit organizations tailored to their respective research study questions. This study offers another set of screening criteria to identify the core list of organizations serving the military and veteran community. Rather than relying on IRS classifications to define the field, this study builds a new dataset from the ground up, drawing directly from IRS tax filings to identify organizations whose missions, programs, staffing, and activities serve veterans, service members, and their families independent of how the IRS classified them at the time of filing. This study further includes both organizations whose primary mission is dedicated to the military and veteran community and organizations that embed military- and veteran-specific programming within a broader institutional mission, including programs and organizations overlooked in more recent studies.

The dataset developed for this study is also narrower than prior approaches in specific ways. It excludes 501(c)(4) organizations that are permitted to engage in advocacy and lobbying activities, as well as 501(c)(19) and 501(c)(23) organizations— membership-based veteran and military organizations, such as posts of the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the U.S. (VFW) and the American Legion, that operate under a distinct tax designation. While these organizations play an important role in the broader veteran ecosystem, that role is distinct from, and broader than, the day-to-day direct-service focus of this study.

What resulted is a list of 849 organizations under 501(c)(3) specifically focused on meeting the needs of veterans and military families, along with 150 embedded organizations or specific lines of effort operating within other organizations that have a broader overall mission.

Geographic Distribution of Military- and Veteran-Serving Organizations²⁷

Most existing studies do not account for the fact that many nonprofit organizations serving military and veteran populations operate with no full-time staff. While meaningful service to the veteran and military community is undertaken daily by volunteer-led, volunteer-staffed organizations, the threshold of whether an organization has at least one full-time employee serves as a proxy for capacity to deliver on an organization’s mission. Though volunteer-led, volunteer-staffed organizations are not included in this analysis, an additional goal for philanthropy should be to identify prospective military- and veteran-serving organizations currently meeting the needs of their target community in a fully voluntary capacity. The dataset developed for this study further requires that each organization report at least one full-time employee, a threshold used as a credible proxy for institutional capacity. The ability to sustain operations, maintain institutional knowledge, and deliver services with a measure of consistency requires a degree of workforce capacity distinct from that of organizations run entirely by volunteers.

To meaningfully contribute to the evolving discourse, this study characterizes the current landscape of organizations serving these populations. This study further examines how mission, organizational capacity, and reliance on government funding shape organizations’ ability to meet community needs.

To trace philanthropic investment in military- and veteran-serving organizations, the study draws on IRS Form 990 and 990-N filings derived from complementary datasets: the IRS Exempt Organizations Business Master File Extract and explorable forms 990 and 990-EZ through ProPublica, Candid (formerly GuideStar), and CauseIQ. Referencing across these independent datasets and platforms allowed the research team to validate findings, investigate discrepancies, and exercise informed judgment about which organizations to include or exclude from the analysis.

This study sought to provide additional context to IRS data through semi-structured qualitative interviews with nonprofit leaders in the field. Interviews were conducted across two distinct categories: leaders of large national-level organizations and leaders of locally focused organizations. The dual track was designed to identify the distinct similarities, differences, strengths, challenges, and opportunities facing each, while also recognizing the characteristics and practices that leaders of more established organizations attribute to their sustained impact. Interviews also captured the experience and perceptions of both stand-alone organizations and those nested within larger institutions, including within university campuses or services provided in partnership with state and local government offices.

It bears noting that this study does not claim to evaluate the programmatic effectiveness or mission impact of the organizations examined; the analytic focus is the flow of resources and funding to the field rather than outcomes produced by the organizations being funded. That said, many of the organizations participating in qualitative interviews currently receive support from prominent philanthropic funders recognized for rigorous grant-making standards and robust outcome-tracking requirements. This suggests that, while organizational effectiveness falls outside the scope of this study, the interviewed sample is in large part held accountable to external funders for their results, lending a degree of confidence in the quality and intentionality of the organizations whose perspectives inform this report.

To ensure the study’s findings reflect the full community of military- and veteran-serving organizations, a targeted number of interviews were also conducted with organizations that have not yet secured significant philanthropic investment. This deliberate inclusion serves two purposes: first, to illuminate the distinct challenges facing yet-to-be resourced organizations; and second, to draw meaningful connections between the attributes and practices of well-resourced organizations and those still seeking sustainable funding—therefore, ultimately informing recommendations for both emerging organizations navigating the path toward organizational maturity and philanthropic funders as they consider their portfolio of investment. Leaders of emerging organizations were identified through their participation in nonprofit leadership training networks.

The report is structured to provide both breadth and depth across several interrelated dimensions of the military- and veteran-serving landscape. It opens with a county-level overview of the veteran population, examining both absolute and veteran concentration rate data to situate the analysis geographically. This is followed by a county-level assessment of federal resource flows through the VA (as measured by the Geographic Distribution of Expenditures [GDX] dataset), offering a granular picture of where federal investment currently flows.²⁸

The report then turns to the organizations actively serving service members, veterans, and their families. It first examines the 849 stand-alone organizations whose primary mission is dedicated to serving the community, walking through their distribution across mission areas, organizational size and staffing patterns, the age of the organizations (and what it reveals about the sector’s post-9/11 growth), four-year revenue trends, reliance on government funding, grant-making activity, and geographic distribution. It then provides insights into the 150 identified embedded programs, services, and organizations through which veteran-specific programming operates within a broader institutional mission. Because revenue and staffing cannot be cleanly attributed to veteran-specific activities and cases for this cohort, the focus is on how their missions, organizational ages, reliance on government funding, and geographic footprints compare to stand-alone veteran-serving organizations. Together, these sections offer a full picture of the network of services available to the military and veteran community.

The report closes with observations and recommendations for distinct areas of practice: the federal government, philanthropic community, and military- and veteran-serving organizations.