U.S. Charitable Giving Tops $600 Billion for the First Time: Mega-Donations and Bequests Drive Growth

Donors gave an estimated $617.2 billion to U.S. charities last year, up 5.7% from the year before. According to the Giving USA report, released this week, the growth was closely tied to the year’s strong stock market rebound.

The result also marks a milestone: in the 60-year history of this annual philanthropy report, yearly giving surpassed $600 billion for the first time. After adjusting for inflation, giving rose 3% year over year.

Still, the stock market boom had a much bigger effect on deep-pocketed donors. Individual giving remained the largest share at $394.2 billion, but after inflation adjustment it rose only 1.4%. By contrast, charitable bequests—gifts left after death—are expected to jump 16.6% to $62.19 billion.

The rise in bequests could be the latest sign of the “great wealth transfer.” Cerulli Associates estimates that more than $124 trillion in assets will pass to heirs by 2048, with about $180 billion of that expected to flow to charity.

Jon Bergdoll, the report’s lead analyst, said it is not yet clear how much of the bequest growth is directly tied to large-scale wealth transfers.

What is clearer, Bergdoll said, is that wealthy Americans who are more likely to leave large gifts to charity have been among the biggest beneficiaries of the stock market’s rise.

“The relationship between bequests and overall net worth is usually pretty tight, and net worth is highly correlated with market performance,” Bergdoll said. Bergdoll is also the interim director of data and research partnerships at Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, which studies and writes the report.

Total giving, which includes foundation and corporate donations, tends to react more slowly and more mildly to the stock market. Bergdoll also said he expected a stronger increase in giving, given the market’s robust gains over the past several years.

The report says the S&P 500 rose 13.4% after inflation adjustment from 2024 to 2025, but total giving grew at only about a quarter of that pace over the same period.

Bergdoll attributed part of the gap to nominal wealth growing faster than the real economy, along with weak GDP growth and consumer confidence at record lows.

“The economy is a little strange for this kind of stock-market growth. The market is doing well, GDP looks okay, but there still seems to be a lot of unease. We know giving comes from a need for financial security, so there may be some drag on the individual side,” he said.

Bergdoll added that it would not be ideal for the nonprofit sector if charitable giving tracked stock-market swings too closely.

“We do not want a one-to-one relationship. We might want the market to rise 20% and giving to rise 20%, but we also would not want the market to fall 20% and giving to fall 20%,” he said.

Tax Incentives and Bequest Growth: The Shape of Giving Is Changing

Some high-income groups were expected to accelerate their giving in 2025 to take advantage of incentives that may disappear. Bergdoll said this front-loaded giving increase was “notable,” but still limited relative to total giving.

The report estimates that donors contributed an extra $1.71 billion in 2025 to maximize soon-to-expire tax incentives.

Even as U.S. charities receive more money, they are also becoming more dependent on ultra-high-net-worth donors. The report notes that, as economic pressure squeezes the middle class’s ability to give, more funds are coming from the ultra-wealthy.

The report estimates that nine donors contributed about $22.32 billion last year, a very significant share of total charitable giving. Philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, gave the largest share at $6.65 billion.

These mega-donations, which are at least 0.1% of total giving, can significantly reshape the charitable landscape from one year to the next. Nearly one-third of the increase in bequests came from the estate of the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, which set up a $3.1 billion fund for science and technology research.

The Pros and Cons of Mega-Donations: Views from Bergdoll and a Foundation Executive

Gabe Cooper, vice chair of the Giving USA Foundation, has mixed feelings about mega-donations.

“Of course I hope billionaires like Paul Allen and MacKenzie Scott are more willing to give away large amounts of wealth, and I hope more billionaires do that,” Cooper said.

But on the other hand, he does not want that dependence to grow too much: “I do not want reliance on the super-wealthy to grow too quickly, because their giving patterns can be more volatile from year to year.”

At the same time, Cooper is looking further ahead: the choices of heirs themselves.

“If a billionaire dies and gives $200 million to charity, the remaining roughly $800 million may go to the children. So I hope heirs can make better choices when it comes to philanthropy,” he said.