Charitable Giving Statistics (2026)

US charitable giving reached an estimated $617.20 billion in 2025, according to Giving USA 2026, the annual report published by the Giving USA Foundation and researched by the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. That is up 5.7% in current dollars and 3.0% after inflation, and the first year the total has topped $600 billion.

The 2025 total is a record in current dollars and the second-highest on record after inflation. It followed a 6.3% rise in 2024 and a weak 2023, when giving grew 1.9% in current dollars but fell 2.1% after inflation. All four sources of giving rose in current dollars in 2025, and three of the four grew after inflation.

These are estimates, not a count. Giving USA builds them mainly from tax data, economic indicators and demographics, and revises them as final IRS data arrive, usually two to three years later.

Households give most of the money. Individuals gave an estimated $394.2 billion in 2025, 64% of the total. Foundations gave $117.15 billion (19%), bequests $62.19 billion (10%) and corporations $43.67 billion (7%), as the chart and table below show.

Growth differed sharply by source. Bequests rose 19.7%, foundations 5.7%, individuals 4.1% and corporations 3.1%, which is flat after inflation. Over a longer window corporations have done better: Giving USA reports corporate giving up 60% over the last five years, against 29% for total giving.

Individuals still give the most, but their share keeps falling. Giving by individuals was 67% of the total in 2023, 66% in 2024 and 64% in 2025, according to Candid's summary of the Giving USA data. Measured as five-year averages, individuals gave 80% of all charitable dollars in 1986 to 1990, 77% in 1996 to 2000 and 70% in 2016 to 2020.

Foundations have taken up the slack, rising from 7% of total giving in 1986 to 1990 to 18% over the last five years. Foundation giving has stayed above $100 billion every year since 2022. Over 2024 and 2025 combined, individual giving grew 13.4%, foundations 9.4% and corporations 7.3%, while bequests fell 13.3% because of a sharp drop in 2024.

Households are giving a smaller slice of what they earn. Individual giving as a share of disposable personal income fell to 1.7% in 2023, the lowest since 1995, and has barely moved since, per Giving USA data reported by Candid. The share peaked at 2.4% in 2000 and again in 2005.

In 2025 disposable personal income rose 4.4% in current dollars while individual giving rose 4.1%. Giving USA's researchers said the stock market lifted individual giving, but consumer sentiment stayed near historic lows and may have held back giving by some households.

Gifts made through wills grew fastest in 2025. Bequest giving rose 19.7% (16.6% after inflation) to $62.19 billion, and Giving USA notes bequests have risen 20% or more in current dollars in three of the last four years. They swing widely from year to year, which is why the 2024 and 2025 combined figure is still negative.

The very largest gifts also grew. Giving USA counts a mega-gift as one from an individual above 0.1% of the year's total giving, which in 2025 meant at least $600 million. Mega-gifts totaled $19.22 billion in 2025, up from $11.72 billion in 2024. They included $6.65 billion from MacKenzie Scott to many nonprofits, and gifts to affiliated foundations from Michael Bloomberg ($4.3 billion), Bill Gates ($3.7 billion) and Warren Buffett ($1.34 billion).

Giving to eight of nine recipient categories grew in current dollars in 2025. Education (up 11.7% to $92.01 billion), public-society benefit (up 11.6% to $72.06 billion) and environment and animals (up 11.0% to $24.57 billion) grew fastest, and these three have also had the largest annualized growth over the last five years (see the chart and table below).

The one decline was giving to foundations, down 16.2% to $79.05 billion after a 36.5% surge to a record in 2024. Giving to education, human services, health, the arts and environment and animals each reached new highs after inflation.

Religious organizations received $151.58 billion in 2025, about 23% of all giving and more than any other category. That was up 2.4% in current dollars and flat (down 0.2%) after inflation.

Human services came second at 15% ($99.50 billion), followed by education at 14%, giving to foundations at 12% and public-society benefit at 11%. Environmental and animal groups and arts and culture organizations each received about 4% of the total.

Fundraising platform data tell a different story from the dollar totals. The Fundraising Effectiveness Project (FEP), run by the AFP Foundation for Philanthropy and GivingTuesday, estimates that dollars raised grew 5.0% in 2025, the strongest growth in five years, while the number of donors fell 3.6%. 2025 was the fifth straight year of donor declines, though the pace of decline has slowed for three years running. FEP figures come from participating fundraising software providers, not a national survey.

The growth came from the top. Donors who gave $5,000 or more in a year (FEP's Major and Supersize tiers) were 3.4% of donors but 78.6% of dollars, and both tiers grew in count. Donors who gave $100 or less were 49.3% of donors but 1.4% of dollars, and their count fell 7.9% (see the chart and table below). Giving was up only 3.7% through the third quarter, so a strong fourth quarter carried the year.

Most people who give to a charity once do not give to it again. FEP's overall donor retention rate was 43.3% in 2025, up from 43.1%, meaning 43.3% of people who gave to an organization in 2024 gave to it again in 2025.

The split by donor history is wide. Only 18.9% of first-time donors from 2024 gave again in 2025, unchanged from the year before, while 59.3% of repeat donors did. Just 3.0% of lapsed donors came back. Retention also climbs with gift size, from 31.3% for donors giving $100 or less to 69.5% for those giving $50,000 or more.

The first FEP report for 2026, built on a revised methodology, shows dollars raised up 4.3% year over year in the first quarter, slower than the year before, and donor counts down 0.8%, the shallowest decline since 2024. The Q1 dataset covers 3.2 million donors, $3.5 billion and 15,700 organizations.

FEP's analysts suggest some of the very strong late-2025 giving may have come from donors moving gifts earlier ahead of the 2026 tax changes, so part of that growth may have been pulled forward. They also report that new-donor counts kept falling in the first quarter while existing donors grew.

Far fewer households claim a tax break for giving than before 2018. IRS Statistics of Income data show 11.75 million returns claimed a charitable deduction for tax year 2023, the latest year published, out of 160.6 million returns filed. That is 7.3% of returns, against 37.98 million returns, or 24.8%, for tax year 2017.

The drop came in tax year 2018, the first year under the 2017 tax law, when the number of itemizers fell from 46.85 million to 17.53 million. Itemizers were about 9.4% of all returns in 2023. Charitable deductions claimed totaled $212.0 billion for 2023, down from $222.4 billion in 2022 and $263.3 billion in 2021 (see the chart and table below).

Among itemizers, deducted giving is concentrated at the top. For tax year 2023, the 25,658 returns with adjusted gross income of $10 million or more claimed $49.9 billion of charitable deductions, 23.6% of the total, an average of about $1.95 million each. Returns with income above $1 million, about 4.3% of claimers, accounted for 44.8% of deducted dollars.

Returns under $200,000 of income made up about 64.5% of claimers but 27.3% of deducted dollars. The average deduction across all claiming returns was about $18,044 (derived from the IRS table). These figures cover itemizers only, so they leave out the giving of most households, who take the standard deduction.

IRS data on noncash gifts (reported on Form 8283 when noncash deductions exceed $500) show 6.2 million returns claimed a noncash charitable deduction for tax year 2023, down from 6.5 million in 2022. The total carried to Schedule A fell 19.2% from $115.9 billion, according to SOI Publication 5337 (June 2026).

Donated corporate stock made up 57.7% of the noncash total, with an average stock gift of about $361,700 per return, though stock donations fell 29.8% from 2022. Easements, real estate and land made up 14.9%, with easements averaging $4.4 million per return. Clothing donations averaged about $3,150 per return. Donor-advised funds were the largest noncash recipient at $27.2 billion, 29.0% of the total and up 90.8%. Taxpayers aged 65 and older claimed 37.1% of the noncash amount, about $50,975 per return.

A donor-advised fund (DAF) is a charitable account held by a public charity sponsor: the donor takes a deduction when money goes in and recommends grants to charities later. The Annual DAF Report 2025, now produced by the DAF Research Collaborative from IRS Form 990 filings, counts 3.56 million DAF accounts at 1,485 sponsors in fiscal year 2024, up 18.4%.

Contributions to DAFs jumped 37.3% to a record $89.64 billion, grants from DAFs rose 19.0% to $64.89 billion, and assets grew 27.5% to $326.45 billion. The payout rate, grants divided by the prior year-end assets, was 25.3%. The report links contributions to stock market performance: they fell in FY 2023 after the late-2022 downturn and rebounded with the 2023 and 2024 rally.

DAFs are growing faster than giving overall. DAF contributions equaled 15.1% of total giving in 2024, up from 10.2% in 2020, and 22.8% of individual giving, using Giving USA's 2025-edition totals (see the chart and table below). Account growth is driven by workplace and online donation processors; accounts outside those platforms grew 6.9% to 710,634.

Private foundations are larger but pay out a smaller share. The DAF report, citing FoundationMark, puts private foundation assets at about $1.63 trillion at the end of 2024, with $118.50 billion of grants and related spending that year, a payout rate of 8.1%. DAFs held $326.45 billion and granted $64.89 billion, a 25.3% payout rate.

Foundations must distribute at least 5% of assets a year, counting some administrative costs. DAFs have no minimum payout requirement, and only grants to qualified charities count toward their payout.

Two federal changes from the 2025 tax law (the One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act) apply starting with tax year 2026. Until now, charitable gifts were deductible only for people who itemize on Schedule A. Beginning in 2026, people who do not itemize can deduct up to $1,000 of cash contributions to eligible charities, or $2,000 on a joint return, per IRS Topic 506 and Publication 6196.

Gifts to donor-advised funds generally do not count toward the non-itemizer deduction, and gifts to individuals remain non-deductible. For itemizers, the IRS lists a new floor: contributions must exceed 0.5% of the contribution base before any deduction is allowed. Given that 7.3% of returns claimed a charitable deduction for 2023, the non-itemizer rule extends a tax break to many households that had none. The first returns using it will be filed in 2027.

Charitable giving tracks wealth as well as income. Giving USA's researchers credit strong financial markets for much of 2025's growth in individual, foundation and bequest giving, and the DAF report finds DAF assets moving with the S&P 500, which rose 24.2% in 2023 and 23.3% in 2024. More than half of noncash gifts claimed on 2023 tax returns were corporate stock.

For households that give appreciated shares or fund a DAF, the giving decision and the portfolio are linked. Walnut, an AI investing app, can read a connected brokerage account to show how a person's own holdings are doing.