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The need for a national typology of the US non-profit sector has long been recognised. A typology which could better define and describe the variety and diversity of non-profit organisations by type or major function will serve numerous research and public policy uses. This article describes the essential elements of the National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities (NTEE), developed over almost a decade after extensive consultation with agencies in the non-profit sector and the United States government. The article reports an initial analysis of the classification of nearly one million non-profit organisations in the US, and comparisons are made with earlier estimates in Dimensions of the Independent Sector.Based on these findings, changes are proposed to this biennial statistical profile of the US non-profit sector. The importance of developing national typologies of non-profit organisations is discussed as a basis for comparative international research.For nearly two decades, researchers and policy-makers have acknowledged a need for a national typology of the US non-profit sector that would better define and describe the variety and diversity of non-profit organisations by type or major function. Such a system, similar to the Standard Industrial Code, was regarded as a major priority in order to provide a common set of definitions and language and so offer a scheme for conducting research to better understand this sector.In 1987, the non-profit sector in the United States had expenditures of over $280 billion and employed nearly eight million people. While the aggregate financial trends of the sector have been measured in editions of Dimensions of the Independent Sector since 1984, Hodgkinson andWeitzman (1989) could only provide aggregate measures of the sector across eleven subcategories of the Standard Industrial Code. Therefore, no analysis was available by major functions by whole categories of

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