For researchers & builders

License the dataset

Coverage figures below verified June 11, 2026. The enrichment pipeline runs nightly; counts only grow.

Churches List maintains the most heavily enriched open-format database of American Christian congregations we know of: 334,554 places of worship, cross-referenced nightly against public registries. The same data that powers this directory is available as flat-file exports and as an API — for academic research, journalism, and commercial products.

What is in the data

  • Core directory — 334,554 churches. Name, street address, city, state, ZIP, denomination (mapped to a controlled taxonomy), phone, website where known.
  • Geocodes — 330,375 records (98.7%). Latitude/longitude with quality grade, geocoded against OpenStreetMap Nominatim.
  • IRS nonprofit linkage — 329,971 exempt-organization matches. EIN-level joins to the IRS Exempt Organizations file, including 96,941 records with Form 990 financial filings.
  • Census context — 324,143 records. ACS demographic profiles for the surrounding area, plus county-level religious-adherence rates from the U.S. Religion Census for 80,678 records.
  • Historic registers — 9,512 National Register of Historic Places listings matched to congregations, with register dates.
  • Historical-newspaper mentions — 12,620 records from the Library of Congress Chronicling America archive, 1789–1963.
  • Web history — 20,883 first-snapshot dates from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine for church websites.
  • Surroundings — 31,631 nearby-POI profiles (what stands within ~500 m of the building, from OpenStreetMap).

What is deliberately not in it

No personal data. We do not license member lists, donor information, clergy contact details, or the correspondence we receive from churches. Exports contain organizational records only — the same information a visitor sees on a public church page, plus the public-registry joins.

Formats

  • CSV / Parquet export — full dataset or filtered slices (by state, denomination, or enrichment layer), with a data dictionary and source-license notes per field.
  • API — JSON over HTTPS, keyed access, for products that need fresh reads rather than a snapshot.
  • Custom cuts — if you need a specific join (for example, NRHP churches with 990 filings in one metro), say so; most cuts take us a day.

Licensing & pricing

  • Academic & journalistic use — one-time exports from $99, with citation. If you are a student or your newsroom is small, write to us anyway; we are flexible.
  • Commercial use — one-time exports from $499 depending on scope; API access priced by volume. Redistribution of the raw file is not included.
  • AI / LLM grounding — if you are building retrieval or agentic products that need authoritative U.S. church data, we offer bulk snapshots plus change feeds. See also our llms.txt.

Underlying public sources (IRS, Census, NRHP, Chronicling America, OpenStreetMap) carry their own terms; our data dictionary marks the provenance and license of every field, and our compilation, matching, and corrections layer is what you license from us.

Why this data is hard to reproduce

The core list is only the start. The value is in the joins: matching a congregation's street address to its IRS record, its historic-register entry, and its 1890s newspaper mentions is slow, error-prone work that our pipeline re-verifies every night — plus a human corrections loop, where churches themselves submit fixes that we verify and apply, typically within a day or two.

Get a sample

Write to letters@churcheslist.com with the subject "Dataset licensing". Tell us your use case and the slice you need; we answer with a free 500-row sample, the data dictionary, and a quote — typically within two business days.

A note on neutrality: licensing data does not buy placement, ranking, or editorial treatment in the directory. The dataset and the editorial product are separate; our principles apply to both.