More than 130 Long Island nonprofit employees made over $1 million. Search the database.

More than 130 people earned at least $1 million annually from Long Island nonprofit organizations, with all of them — save for three university presidents — working in healthcare, a Newsday analysis of tax filings found.

Everyone from college basketball coaches to country club staff and labor union bosses to charity leaders fill the next tier of people receiving six-figure salaries and compensation packages.

Newsday is examining nonprofit pay through a first-ever compilation of thousands of individual federal tax documents, each representing the most recent Form 990 report submitted to the IRS through the end of 2025. Details are being presented to readers in a database that allows searching, sorting and review by categories, including employee name, title and organization, as well as their pay and their nonprofit's revenue.

Taken together, the Long Island nonprofit industry reported more than $44 billion in revenue, according to the Newsday analysis — nearly double what it was a decade prior, outpacing inflation.

"Just because the word nonprofit is in your articles of incorporation, that doesn’t mean people aren’t motivated by money," said Bill Hammond, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank in New York City.

Two doctors at St. Francis Hospital in Roslyn topped the list of nonprofit workers with the highest salaries: Dr. Joseph Levine, chief of electrophysiology, and Dr. Richard Shlofmitz, chairman of cardiology. Both earned more than $6 million in 2024.

Former Northwell Health president and CEO Michael Dowling was next, earning $5.9 million during his last full year leading the sprawling nonprofit system, which across its related organizations reported more than $20 billion in revenue and employed more than 100,000 people.

The two St. Francis doctors and Dowling are among 131 people who received more than $1 million from a nonprofit organization during the reporting period, the data shows.

Newsday's database includes 7,900 nonprofits with headquarters in Nassau or Suffolk counties that employed more than 278,000 people. These nonprofits reported paying their highest earners and key employees a total of $1 billion during the most recently available tax period.

How Newsday examined the data

Just as the federal definition of a nonprofit — organizations excused from paying certain taxes — varies widely, so do reporting requirements. Certain government and religious organizations do not need to file with the IRS, and most nonprofits with $50,000 or less in revenue report differently.

Those included in Newsday's database reported compensation for current and former nonprofit officers, directors and trustees; the five highest-paid current employees; and other key current and former employees.

"Compensation" as listed in the database typically includes salaries, fees, bonuses and severance payments. Deferred compensation and contributions to employee and health benefit plans are among the types of compensation included in the "Other" column.

The pay under "related" organizations reflects compensation for employees from subsidiaries or parent or sibling organizations of a primary nonprofit.

For example, Dowling, the former Northwell executive, is listed over 100 times in the database because he was also the CEO of Northwell's many related nonprofits, such as Long Island Jewish Medical Center and South Shore University Hospital. In those instances, Dowling's "related" compensation lists the same $5.9 million he received directly from Northwell and does not reflect additional pay.

Newsday is also naming the city that each nonprofit provided to the IRS as its home base. Employees for Lenox Hill and Staten Island University hospitals in New York City are also in the database because Northwell runs them and is based in Westbury.

'A very lucrative field'

The nonprofits that reported the most revenue, by far, are healthcare organizations. The Island's big hospitals — including Northwell's Long Island Jewish Medical Center and Catholic Health's St. Francis — report revenue in excess of $1 billion annually.

"Healthcare is a very lucrative field even when you look beyond the nonprofit world," Hammond, a healthcare policy analyst, said, noting how the industry now generates revenue figures on par with the for-profit business sector.

As Long Island's hospital systems have grown and acquired more property, they have removed billions of dollars in full market value from Long Island's tax rolls, Newsday recently found. In 2025, hospital systems accounted for nearly $5 billion in full market value removed from the tax rolls, double the amount a decade earlier. 

Long Island’s private universities, including Hofstra, Long Island University, Adelphi and New York Institute of Technology, also have relatively high revenues — in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

In a 2025 report, state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli found nonprofits provide "integral services to vulnerable populations." DiNapoli’s office also found that while hospitals and education systems can generate revenue from patients and students, many other nonprofits are reliant upon government funding and struggle when taxpayer dollars are delayed.

Efforts to limit executive pay

State and local officials have previously sought to limit executive pay for nonprofits that receive taxpayer subsidies.

In 2012, then-Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed an order to cap executive pay at nonprofits at $200,000 unless certain conditions were met. The order was later weakened through litigation, and Gov. Kathy Hochul let it lapse in 2022.

More recently, Suffolk County lawmakers unsuccessfully sought to end contracts with nonprofits if their executives made more than the governor, or roughly $250,000.

The IRS already tries to limit nonprofit executive compensation, including making organizations use an independent system to determine how much its highest earners compare with peers at similar institutions.

Northwell and Catholic Health both state on tax forms that they consult with independent experts to set executive base pay, in part, based off typical wages at peer institutions. On Long Island, some doctors and healthcare executives earn more than $1 million.

"It's an extraordinary exception," Fran Barrett told Newsday about the top hospital compensation. "The average nonprofit leader is underpaid."

Barrett, who founded a nonprofit advocacy group in 1979, served under Cuomo as a nonprofit coordinator.

Much more common in the sector, she said, are staffs of fewer than 10 people engaging in tireless fundraising and grant applications to be able to achieve their nonprofit's mission.

"You don't do this work for the money," Barrett said of the large majority of nonprofits. "You do this work because you believe in the cause."

Newsday's Josefa Velásquez contributed to this story.