The bee is run on a not-for-profit basis by The E. W. Scripps Company and is held at a hotel or convention center in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area during the week following Memorial Day weekend.

Although most of its participants are from the U.S., students from countries such as The Bahamas, Canada, the People's Republic of China, India, Ghana, Japan, Jamaica, Mexico, Nigeria and New Zealand have also competed in recent years.

Historically, the competition has been open to, and remains open to, the winners of sponsored regional spelling bees in the U.S. (including territories such as Guam, American Samoa, Puerto Rico, the Navajo Nation, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, along with overseas military bases in Germany and South Korea).

The 2020 National Spelling Bee competition, originally scheduled for May 24, was suspended and later canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

It is open to students who have not yet completed the eighth grade, reached their 15th birthday, nor won a previous National Spelling Bee.

Its goal is educational: not only to encourage children to perfect the art of spelling, but also to help enlarge their vocabularies and widen their knowledge of the English language.

Scripps Company and 291 sponsors in the United States, Europe, Canada, New Zealand, Guam, Jamaica, The Bahamas, Ghana, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and American Samoa.

Scripps has 281 sponsors (mostly newspapers) from the U.S., Canada, The Bahamas, New Zealand, Asia, and Europe covering a certain area and conducting their own regional spelling bees to send spellers to the national level.

Sponsorship is available on a limited basis to daily and weekly newspapers serving English-speaking populations around the world.

During enrollment, school bee coordinators receive their local sponsor's program-specific information—local dates, deadlines, and participation guidelines.

While met with criticism by past contestants for deviating from the concept of a spelling bee, organizers indicated that the change was made to help avert perceptions that the competition was based solely on memorization skills (as had been showcased by television broadcasts), and to help further the Bee's goal of expanding the vocabulary and language skills of children.

Following the 2019 final, where the championship round ran to its conclusion without a winner being determined, and to meet time constraints, officials intended for 2020 to implement a new tiebreaker.

If multiple players have the same number and percentage of correctly spelled words, the event is a tie and co-champions are crowned.

The speller may watch a clock counting down from thirty seconds; no timing devices are allowed onstage.

Once 30 seconds remain, the light turns red and the speller must begin spelling the word as in Finish Time above.

In May 2012, Scripps announced tentative plans for an international version, in which three-person teams from as many as sixty countries would compete.

If logistical and financial details can be reached, the event would be officially announced in early 2013 with the first competition to take place the following December.

[16] The winner also receives other prizes, such as an engraved loving cup trophy from Scripps, a $2,500 savings bond, a reference library from Merriam-Webster, $400 in reference works and a lifetime membership to Britannica Online Premium from Encyclopædia Britannica, and an online course and a Nook eReader from K12 Inc. All spellers receive Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged on CD-ROM from Merriam-Webster; the Samuel Louis Sugarman Award, which is a $100 U.S. Savings Bond; a cash prize from Scripps for contestants who reach the Semi-finals; and as of 2015, a Microsoft Surface 3 with keyboard and stylus.

In 2014, spellers eliminated before the Semi-finals began receiving educational tools from Microsoft instead of a $100 cash prize given in years past.

[18] As the number of contestants continued to increase (first breaking 100 in 1978), an opening practice round was eliminated at the 1987 bee due to a record 185 entrants.

CNN was one of the first television channels to carry coverage of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, with personalities including Anderson Cooper and 1979 champion Katie McCrimmon.

[26] In 1994, Scripps began an agreement with ESPN to broadcast coverage of the national finals; the network added a larger focus on analysis and profiles on the competitors.

[27] ESPN would later expand its coverage to encompass the early rounds of the competition as well,[28][29] and added features such as a "play-along" broadcast on its streaming platforms.

ABC executives positioned the primetime broadcast as a form of reality television, while the move came on the heels of the release of Akeelah and the Bee—a drama film based on the event.

[32] The 2013 film Bad Words revolves around a forty-year-old eighth grade dropout (Jason Bateman) attempting to win a fictional equivalent of the SNSB.

The Academy Award-nominated documentary film Spellbound (2002) follows eight competitors, including eventual national winner Nupur Lala, through the 1999 competition.

The book American Bee, by James Maguire, profiles five spellers who made it to the final rounds of the competition – Samir Sudhir Patel, Katharine Close, Aliya Deri, Jamie Ding, and Marshall Winchester – as well as giving an overview of the history of the bee.

[34] Multiple episodes of the ESPN Classic show Cheap Seats featured the hosts revisiting broadcasts of the Bee from the 1990s.

2021 Champion Zaila Avant-garde was a holder of multiple basketball Guinness World Records, and the first African-American contestant to win the bee.