Prager University Foundation raised $76.57 million in 2025 and closed the year with $105.50 million in net assets. Contributions run about 95 percent of revenue. The foundation pays its chief executive more than a million dollars a year, has paid the founder’s company $3,573,626 since 2015, and pays the founder’s son more than half a million dollars a year. Those figures come off the e-filed returns, which anyone can pull from ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer.
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Marissa Streit joined in 2009 and became chief executive in 2011. Her base has sat near $738,000 since 2022. On top of that comes a bonus the returns describe as based on annual revenues, estimated and accrued by December 31 and reconciled after the audit. The bonus was zero in 2019 and zero in 2020. Then $94,500 in 2021, $211,321 in 2022, $168,354 in 2023, $249,999 in 2024 and $249,999 in 2025. Her total package reached $1,022,373 in 2024 and $1,031,315 in 2025. Two consecutive years landing one dollar under a round number tells you a cap exists at $250,000.
Candid, which publishes the standard reference on this question, drew its 2024 compensation report from the 2022 filings of more than 128,000 tax-exempt organizations. Among nonprofits with budgets above $50 million, median compensation ran $559,770 for male chief executives and $430,640 for female ones. The Chronicle of Philanthropy reported the full spread in that budget band: roughly $237,000 at the tenth percentile and above $1.5 million at the ninetieth. Streit sits in the upper stretch of that band, inside it.
Sal Khan founded Khan Academy, which does what PragerU does in a different key, free instructional video at scale. Khan Academy spent about $87.5 million in 2025 and Khan drew $871,000, according to an analysis of the filings by Class Central. Turning Point USA reported $85 million in revenue and paid Charlie Kirk about $390,000 in 2023, per Forbes. The Heritage Foundation, which holds $413.8 million in assets, paid president Kevin Roberts $953,920 in 2023, including a bonus of $300,300, as CharityWatch read out of Schedule J.
So PragerU pays its chief executive more than the Heritage Foundation pays its president, more than Khan Academy pays the man whose name is on it, and more than twice what Turning Point USA paid its founder. It also pays her within the going rate for a nonprofit of its size.
Scale it against the money coming in. Streit’s package equals 1.35 percent of 2025 revenue. Khan’s equals about 1 percent of Khan Academy’s spending. Kirk’s equaled about half a percent of Turning Point’s. That range is where large advocacy and education nonprofits live.
David Prager is chief development officer and Dennis Prager’s son. PragerU identifies him by that title on its own site. His total compensation ran $398,536 in 2020, $444,474 in 2021, $442,845 in 2022, $432,396 in 2023, $459,736 in 2024 and $523,616 in 2025. Before he came on payroll, his firm Palm Tree Consulting received $155,700 in 2018 and $38,700 in 2019, both disclosed on Schedule L with the family relationship stated. Development chiefs are the best-paid non-chief-executive officers at large nonprofits, and PragerU is a fundraising machine that turns donor cultivation into 95 percent of its income. Half a million dollars against $76.57 million raised is 0.68 percent of the money the job exists to bring in. Any outside fundraising consultancy would cost more. The rate fits the work.
Then Kansas and Brooklyn, the company Dennis Prager owns, received $150,000 in 2015, $200,000 in 2016, $250,000 in 2017, $237,500 in 2018, $301,667 in 2019, $382,913 in 2020, $462,083 in 2021, $493,333 in 2022, $375,000 in 2023, $446,130 in 2024 and $275,000 in 2025. Total, $3,573,626. Average, $324,875 a year. Prager is the voice, the face, the name and the founding argument of the organization. Nothing about $325,000 a year for that would raise an eyebrow if it appeared as salary on a line marked salary.
It does not appear that way. The returns describe it as compensation for consulting services performed by Dennis Prager, paid to an entity he owns. That is salary routed through a corporation. For 2015, 2016 and 2017 it showed up only as a line in the top-five independent contractor table, with the organization answering No to the Form 990 question about business transactions with interested persons and filing no Schedule L. The disclosure begins with the 2018 return, the same year Prager first appears in Part VII as President and Founder. The Center for Media and Democracy noticed that sequence in January 2020. He drops out of Part VII again after 2019 and has not reappeared through 2025.
The 2025 payment fell to $275,000 from $446,130. Prager was seriously injured in a fall in November 2024.
Two more names. Layne Thrasher, chief financial officer, took bonuses of $31,000 in 2023, $116,000 in 2024 and $110,000 in 2025. Craig Strazzeri, chief marketing officer, took $33,000, then $77,000, then $100,000. The 2023 Schedule O explained that a minority portion of their year-end bonuses is tied to annual revenues. That sentence is absent from the 2024 and 2025 returns, in the same stretch where both bonuses roughly tripled. The returns disclose their bonuses and not their base pay, so nobody outside can say what either man earns in total.
Revenue-linked pay to insiders is the part of this that has a body of law behind it. The rebuttable presumption of reasonableness requires approval by a conflict-free body, comparability data gathered before approval, and contemporaneous documentation. PragerU cites compensation studies dated November 2018, November 2020, November 2022 and September 2024, and never names who prepared them or what organizations served as comparables. The 2025 return still leans on the September 2024 study. Over the same years the board shrank from ten voting members to five.
A hundred and five million dollars sounds like a war chest. Against $76.57 million of annual revenue it comes to about seventeen months of operating money, which sits inside what charity analysts treat as prudent.
None of these numbers is an outlier for the sector. Every one of them is a number the sector produces routinely, and the sector’s donors would recognize almost none of them. The unexamined material is the September 2024 comparability study, the written agreement setting Streit’s bonus formula, and whatever contract governs what Kansas and Brooklyn is paid to deliver.
The number of people at PragerU earning more than $100,000 was one in 2012, one in 2013, two in 2015, two in 2016 and five in 2018. Those figures sit on the last line of Part VII, Section A of each return. The organization grew from $523,785 in revenue in 2012 to $18.60 million in 2018, and the six-figure payroll grew with it.
For 2016 the entire six-figure roster is two men and one woman’s worth of salary. Allen Estrin, co-founder, listed as executive director at thirty hours a week, took $200,000 in base pay with no bonus. Marissa Streit, chief executive, took $205,000, also flat. Schedule J that year answered No to the question asking whether anyone’s pay was contingent on the organization’s revenues.
Two years later that answer is Yes. The 2018 Schedule J breaks the five out. Streit received $275,000 in base and $122,864 in bonus and incentive pay, $397,864 in all. Estrin stayed at $200,000 flat. Craig Strazzeri, chief marketing officer, received $160,000 in base, $23,715 in bonus and $4,260 in other reportable compensation. Layne Thrasher came on as chief financial officer in April 2018 at $137,500 plus $4,936. Robert Kuns came on as chief creative officer in June at $125,579 plus $5,026. Dennis Prager, listed for the first time as president and founder at forty hours a week, took zero.
The formula appears in Part III of that same schedule, and it is worth reading closely. Strazzeri receives 0.9 percent of online fundraising. Streit receives 1.25 percent of fundraising, with an annual amount not to exceed $400,000. The organization answered Yes to the line about revenue-contingent pay and No to the line about non-fixed payments, which is consistent, since a percentage set by contract with a stated ceiling counts as a fixed formula under the instructions for Schedule J.
A bonus of $122,864 at 1.25 percent implies a fundraising base near $9.83 million. Total revenue that year was $18.60 million. So the word fundraising in her contract covers something narrower than everything the organization took in, and the return never defines it. Strazzeri’s $23,715 at 0.9 percent implies online fundraising near $2.64 million. Nobody outside the building can say how either base is drawn or who draws it.
Later returns drop the percentages and say only that the chief executive’s bonus is based on annual revenues, estimated and accrued by December 31 and reconciled after the audit. Her bonus came in at $249,999 in 2024 and $249,999 again in 2025. One and a quarter percent of 2025 revenue would be more than $950,000, and the ceiling written into the 2018 return was $400,000. Something in the arrangement changed between 2018 and now.
Then the consulting. Across eleven years the returns give one description of what Kansas and Brooklyn sells: consulting services performed by Dennis Prager. The 2018 Schedule L calls him founder and president; later years call him co-founder. No hours, no deliverables, no scope. Prager appears on camera in the videos, hosts the Fireside Chats, headlines the donor events and lends the name that the organization is built on. Any of that is a plausible service.
Paying a media performer through a corporation he owns is ordinary. Actors, hosts and writers have used loan-out corporations for decades. The performer sells his services to several buyers, the corporation collects the fees, and it pays him a salary while carrying his retirement plan and his business expenses. Under subchapter S he can split the income between salary and distribution and lower his self-employment tax. The buyer skips payroll tax, benefits and workers compensation and writes one check against an invoice.
Money paid to an employee lands in Part VII, Section A with a title, an hours figure and a compensation column, and once it passes the threshold it lands again on Schedule J broken into base, bonus, other, deferred and nontaxable benefits. Money paid to a contractor lands in Part VII, Section B as a name, an address, a phrase and a single number. For 2015, 2016 and 2017 that single number is all a reader got, alongside a No answer to the question about business transactions with interested persons. The 2018 return is the first to route the payment onto Schedule L, and it does so through line 28c, the question about an entity in which a listed officer holds an ownership interest. That route is open only because Prager appears in Part VII that year.
If any part of the payment licenses his name, his likeness, his trademarks or his back catalog, the organization would still be entitled to call the contract consulting on a Form 990.
