Maine's arts and cultural nonprofits supported an estimated 7,333 full-time and part-time jobs in 2025 when their operations and related spending are counted, according to a University of Maine analysis.
Economist Todd Gabe's September report, announced by the university Oct. 28, identified 1,424 nonprofits through Internal Revenue Service records. They include libraries and museums as well as theaters, musical groups and historical organizations.
The organizations themselves accounted for an estimated 5,650 jobs. Of those, 5,269 were reported on the nonprofits' Form 990 tax returns. The remaining 381 were estimated for organizations with revenue but no observed employment figure. Gabe used revenue and organization type to estimate those missing values.
The report puts the nonprofits' own annual economic output at about $322 million and employee compensation at about $125 million. Most of the compensation figure was reported on tax returns; about $10 million was estimated to fill missing records.
Adding purchases from Maine suppliers and spending by workers' households brings the estimated total to $660 million in annual economic activity, 7,333 jobs and $226 million in labor income. Those figures describe activity supported by existing operations, not jobs newly created in 2025.
The calculations use IMPLAN, a model that estimates how spending moves through an economy. The report labels the statewide results as 2025 estimates but does not specify the model's data year or the filing years of individual tax returns.
The analysis excludes extra spending by visitors at hotels, restaurants and stores, and does not put a dollar value on benefits such as access to cultural activities. Its starting point is nonprofit operations, rather than Maine's entire arts economy.
Maine had about 103 arts and cultural nonprofits per 100,000 residents in the report's count, behind only Vermont and Washington, D.C. Vermont's rate was 147. The population comparison uses the Census Bureau's 2024 five-year American Community Survey estimates.
The work was supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the Maine Agricultural and Forest Experiment Station. Cultural Alliance of Maine, an arts advocacy group, provided input, according to the university.