Giving USA 2026: giving crossed $600 billion while donor counts fell

Giving USA 2026 arrived with a headline worth celebrating: Americans gave more in 2025 than in any year on record. Read past the topline, though, and the report describes a sector winning on dollars while quietly losing people. That second story is the one your 2026 plan needs to answer.

The record is real, and so is the leak

Total giving rose 5.7% in current dollars (3.0% after inflation) to $617.2 billion. Over the same year, the Fundraising Effectiveness Project’s tracking of thousands of US nonprofits shows donor counts falling another 3.6%, continuing a slide that began in 2021. Both things are true at once: generosity is growing, and participation is shrinking.

Researchers call that combination concentration. More of the total is arriving as fewer, larger gifts from older donors. M+R’s digital benchmarks describe the same shape online: revenue growth driven by one-time gifts and year-end spikes that M+R itself calls difficult to repeat.

The bequest signal

The fastest-growing source in Giving USA 2026 wasn’t a fundraising channel at all. Bequests, meaning gifts left in wills, grew nearly 20% to $62.2 billion. Every one of those gifts was decided years earlier, by a donor who stayed close to an organization for decades.

Who grew in 2025

• Education, public-society benefit, and environment and animal organizations each grew more than 10% in current dollars, the year’s fastest subsectors.
• Corporate giving reached $43.7 billion but stayed at about 7% of the total. US philanthropy remains driven by individuals.
• Foundations supplied 19% ($117.2 billion), a steady share as individual participation thins.

What to do with this report

Giving USA is a big-picture estimate, so it can’t tell you anything about your own donors. What it does is set the weather, and the weather says dollars are available, donors are scarce, and loyalty pays compound interest. Three moves for the fall:

• Budget for retention the way you budget for acquisition. With donor counts falling across the sector, a donor you keep costs less than a donor you find. The FEP puts first-time retention near 19%, so the second gift is where the leverage is.
• Give your loyal donors a reason to stay for decades. The bequest boom is the return on years of being thanked well. Looking after your five-year donors is your planned-giving program.
• Don’t mistake a record December for a durable base. If your growth came from one-time year-end gifts, your January job is converting them: thank them, report back, and invite a second gift before the momentum fades.

The full report is published by the Giving USA Foundation; the free highlights are in the IU Lilly Family School release.