Giving USA 2025 Finds Record $592.5 Billion in 2024 Charitable Giving, Yet Donor Participation Slump Deepens

The Giving USA Foundation’s 2025 annual report — the most comprehensive longitudinal study of U.S. charitable giving — reveals that Americans gave an estimated $592.50 billion to charitable causes in 2024, a new all-time high representing a 6.3 percent increase in current dollars (3.3 percent adjusted for inflation) over 2023. The gains were driven primarily by a strong stock market and rising personal incomes, fuelling growth in individual giving, which reached $392.45 billion — roughly 66 percent of all contributions. Corporate giving hit an inflation-adjusted record of $44.40 billion, up 9.1 percent, and foundation grantmaking crossed $100 billion for the third consecutive year, reaching $109.81 billion.

Beneath the headline figures, however, lies a persistent structural tension: even as total dollars grew, the number of charitable donors continued to fall. Donor participation dropped 4.5 percent from 2023 to 2024, extending a decade-long trend that researchers find increasingly alarming. Affluent household participation has fallen from 91 percent in 2015 to approximately 81 percent in 2024, concentrating philanthropic influence in a narrowing base of high-net-worth donors and introducing systemic fragility into the sector.

Public-society benefit — the subsector that includes national donor-advised funds such as Fidelity Charitable — led all categories with 19.5 percent growth to $66.84 billion, reflecting the continuing shift of philanthropic assets into DAF vehicles. Four subsectors reached all-time inflation-adjusted highs in 2024: education, health, arts and culture, and environment and animals. The report urges sector leaders to invest in broad-based donor cultivation programs to counteract structural concentration before it becomes an acute vulnerability.

Sources: Giving USA Foundation | Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy

Comments (0)

Urban Institute: A Third of U.S. Nonprofits Lost or Delayed Government Funding in the First Half of 2025

In one of the most consequential longitudinal surveys of the nonprofit sector in recent memory, the Urban Institute’s Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy documented the sweeping damage wrought by federal funding disruptions in the first half of 2025. Drawing on data from a nationally representative sample of 2,737 nonprofits, researchers found that approximately one in three organizations delivering community services experienced some form of government funding disruption between January and June 2025.

The breakdown was striking: 21 percent of respondents reported losing at least one grant or contract, 27 percent experienced delays or funding freezes, and 6 percent received stop-work orders. Taken together, these disruptions created a profound liquidity crisis for organizations that typically operate with lean reserves. Nonprofits that were disrupted reported government funding as 42 percent of their total revenue — nearly double the sector-wide average of 28 percent — making them acutely exposed to any interruption.

The human consequences materialized quickly. About 21 percent of disrupted nonprofits were already serving fewer clients by the time they completed the survey in spring and summer 2025. Nearly twice as many disrupted nonprofits (29 percent) reduced staff compared with the sector overall (15 percent). Hiring intentions collapsed: at year-end 2024, 52 percent of nonprofits planned to add staff in the coming year; by mid-2025, that share had fallen to 38 percent. Researchers also documented cascading effects — organizations that did not directly lose government funding nonetheless reported worsening fundraising conditions and reduced confidence in future financial stability, pointing to systemic disruption across the sector rather than isolated organizational failures.

Sources: Urban Institute — Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy | The Conversation

Comments (0)

NBER Study Confirms the 2017 Tax Law Caused a Permanent $16 Billion Annual Reduction in Charitable Giving

A rigorous analysis published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in 2024 offers the most authoritative quantification yet of how the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act reshaped American philanthropy. Conducted by researchers at Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy and the University of Notre Dame, the study finds that the TCJA’s near-doubling of the standard deduction caused total U.S. charitable giving to fall by approximately $20 billion in 2018, the law’s first year of implementation.

Critically, the researchers decompose this decline into two components. Roughly $4 billion — about 20 percent of the total drop — is attributed to re-timing: households that accelerated their 2018 giving into December 2017 to take advantage of itemizing deductions before the new standard took effect. The remaining $16 billion — fully 80 percent of the estimated decline — represents a permanent, ongoing annual reduction in charitable giving that researchers expect to persist as long as the higher standard deduction remains in force.

The distributional impact was sharply uneven. Religious congregations, whose donors give largely out of faith commitment rather than tax motivation, were almost entirely unaffected. In contrast, organizations delivering basic-needs services — food banks, housing assistance, emergency relief — absorbed the greatest share of lost donations. The study’s price-elasticity estimates range from 0.6 for average donors to above 2.0 for donors most responsive to tax policy changes. These findings carry direct relevance for the current congressional debate over the TCJA’s scheduled expiration and proposed modifications to the charitable deduction, underscoring that tax policy decisions are, in effect, philanthropy policy decisions.

Sources: National Bureau of Economic Research — Working Paper No. 32737 | Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy

Comments (0)

Stanford PACS Blueprint 2025: Civil Society Faces Mounting Structural and Political Pressure at the Digital Frontier

Since 2009, the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society has published its annual Blueprint — an industry forecast examining the evolving relationship between private resources, technology, and the public good. The 16th annual edition, released in January 2025, finds civil society organizations navigating a moment defined by two simultaneous and compounding pressures that together challenge the sector’s capacity to sustain independent action.

The first pressure is structural: the rapid expansion of the generosity ecosystem now encompasses not just traditional nonprofit giving but impact investing, online crowdfunding, donor-advised funds, and new organizational forms. This proliferation creates opportunities but also introduces fragmentation and accountability gaps that established regulatory frameworks were not built to address. The Blueprint argues that philanthropic leaders must develop accountability norms governing the full spectrum of giving vehicles — not merely those recognized under IRS definitions — if the sector is to maintain public trust.

The second pressure is political and regulatory: a shifting legal environment that increasingly constrains civic action and expresses ambivalence toward civil society’s role as an independent counterweight to state and market power. Author Lucy Bernholz convened three global virtual conversations following the report’s release — with the Impact Trust, Why Philanthropy Matters, and the Center for Transformational Change — to explore these themes with practitioners across continents.

The 2025 Blueprint also highlights mutual aid as a resilient form of civil society activity operating largely outside formal institutional structures, and suggests it may offer the broader sector key lessons for navigating constrained and contested times ahead.

Sources: Stanford PACS — Blueprint 2025 | Full PDF Report

Comments (0)

Urban Institute Survey: Nonprofit Leaders’ Financial, Workforce, and Programming Concerns Sharply Intensified in 2025

The Urban Institute’s ongoing National Survey of Nonprofit Trends and Impacts — the most comprehensive longitudinal dataset of its kind, running since 2020 — provides a sobering panoramic view of where the sector stood entering 2025. Comparing findings from its 2024 and 2025 survey waves, researchers at the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy documented a marked intensification of financial anxiety, programming strain, and workforce pressure across organizational leaders nationwide.

The shift in tone between survey waves was pronounced. In 2024, leaders described their outlook as uncertain — aware that a challenging funding environment loomed but not yet confronting its full force. By 2025, uncertainty had sharpened into concrete distress. Some 75 percent of 2025 respondents anticipated increased demand for their programs and services, while simultaneously reporting declining or stagnant revenues, creating an acute gap between mission requirements and organizational capacity.

Workforce pressures proved equally challenging. Seventy-two percent of nonprofit leaders identified salary competition as a critical barrier to recruitment and retention, while 66 percent cited budget constraints as an aggravating factor. These dynamics are deeply interrelated: underfunded organizations cannot compete for talent, and understaffed organizations cannot meet rising demand, generating a compounding capacity deficit that erodes program quality over time.

The survey also documented differential impact by organization size, with smaller nonprofits disproportionately affected by both funding instability and workforce churn. Researchers concluded that the sector faces not merely a funding gap but a structural resilience deficit — one that short-term philanthropic injections are unlikely to resolve without sustained, strategic investment in unrestricted operating support and long-term organizational infrastructure.

Sources: Urban Institute — Nonprofit Leaders’ Top Concerns Entering 2025 | Urban Wire

Comments (0)