U.S. charitable giving tops $600 billion for the first time: mega-donors and bequests drive growth
Donors gave an estimated $617.2 billion to U.S. charities last year, up 5.7% from the year before. The data come from the Giving USA report, released this week, and reflect growth amid a strong stock market rebound.
The finding also marks the first time annual giving has topped $600 billion in the 60-year history of the annual philanthropy report. Adjusted for inflation, giving rose 3% year over year.
But the stock market boom had a more pronounced effect on the "deep-pocketed" donors. Individual giving remained the largest share of contributions at $394.2 billion, but it rose only 1.4% when adjusted for inflation; charitable bequests, meanwhile, jumped 16.6% to an estimated $62.19 billion.
The rise in bequests may be the latest signal of the Great Wealth Transfer. Cerulli Associates estimates that more than $124 trillion in assets will be passed on by 2048, with about $18 trillion of that expected to go to charity.
Jon Bergdoll, the report's lead analyst, said it is not yet possible to determine how much of the rise in bequests comes from the wealth transfer itself.
But Bergdoll said one thing is clearer: the wealthy Americans most likely to leave large sums to charity are also the biggest beneficiaries of the stock market boom.
"There's always a pretty tight connection between bequests and overall net worth, and net worth is tied to market performance," Bergdoll said, who serves as interim director of data and research collaboration at Indiana University's Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, which researches and writes the report.
The report said that "overall giving," which includes donations from foundations and corporations in addition to individuals, reacts more slowly and with less volatility to the stock market. Even so, Bergdoll said he would have expected a stronger rise in overall giving given the strong market gains in recent years.
According to the report, between 2024 and 2025 the S&P 500 rose 13.4% on an inflation-adjusted basis, while total giving grew at only about a quarter of that pace.
He partly blamed the gap on a disconnect between apparent wealth and actual giving. Reasons include weak gross domestic product growth and consumer confidence at historic lows.
"It's a somewhat strange economic environment. The stock market is still doing pretty well, and GDP is okay, but there seems to be a lot of unease. We know giving comes from people's sense of financial security, so that could be a drag on giving on the individual side," Bergdoll said.
Bergdoll also added that if charitable giving tracks the stock market too closely, that is not ideal for the nonprofit sector.
"We don't want it to be a perfect one-to-one relationship. Even if we might want giving to rise 20% when the market rises 20%, we really don't want giving to fall 20% when the market falls 20%."
The report also noted that some high-income donors may have accelerated gifts in 2025 to capture tax benefits tied to incentives that are set to expire in law. Bergdoll said the incremental boost from this front-loading "does matter," but is still a small part of overall giving.
The report estimated that donors gave an extra $1.71 billion in 2025 to make fuller use of expiring tax incentives.
Although U.S. charities are receiving more money, their dependence on the ultra-wealthy is increasing. The report estimated that nine donors contributed $22.32 billion of last year's total charitable giving as middle-class donors were squeezed by economic pressures. MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and a philanthropist, contributed the largest share at $6.65 billion.
These mega-donations, defined as gifts equal to at least 0.1% of total giving, can significantly change the philanthropic landscape from year to year. Nearly one-third of the increase in bequests came from the estate of late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen: he created a $3.1 billion fund for science and technology research.
Gabe Cooper, vice chairman of the Giving USA Foundation, said in an interview that he had mixed feelings.
"Of course I want people like Paul Allens and MacKenzie Scotts to give away more of their wealth, and I want more billionaires to do that too, absolutely," Cooper said. But "on the other hand, I don't want the number to get too large. I don't want non-wealthy groups to become more and more dependent on ultra-high-net-worth people, because their giving patterns can be more volatile from year to year."
While the rise in bequests is positive for charity, Cooper is more focused on the bigger long-term variable: heirs.
"If a billionaire dies and gives $200 million to charity, the remaining $800 million will probably go to the children, so I hope those children make better choices in their charitable decisions," Cooper said.
