Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations.
On Tuesday, the Giving USA Foundation and the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy released Giving USA 2026, the annual report the profession budgets by, and it carried a milestone: American charitable giving crossed $600 billion for the first time. This issue departs from the usual format, because one report was the news of the week and it deserves more than a single card.
The headline number is only the start. Inside it are an all-time high for education, a surge in bequest giving that did much of the year’s heavy lifting, and a donor base that keeps narrowing even as the dollars climb. Here are the four findings worth carrying into your fiscal-year planning. Subscribe to get next Friday’s briefing first.
Tuesday · June 23, 2026
American Charitable Giving Crosses $600 Billion for the First Time
U.S. charitable giving reached an estimated $617.2 billion in 2025, up 5.7% in current dollars and 3% after inflation, according to Giving USA 2026: The Annual Report on Philanthropy for the Year 2025. It is the first year total giving has topped $600 billion, and in inflation-adjusted terms it is the second-highest year on record, behind only 2021. All four sources of giving, individuals, foundations, bequests, and corporations, grew in real terms, and eight of nine recipient subsectors grew in current dollars. The one decline was giving to foundations, which fell 16.2% after a record 2024.
All four sources growing in real terms is something last year’s report could not say, and the growth arrived in a year of federal funding fights and market jitters. The aggregate environment fundraisers worked in was stronger than the year’s headlines suggested.
Tuesday · June 23, 2026
Education Giving Hits an All-Time High
Giving to education grew more than 10% in current dollars in 2025, among the largest gains of any recipient subsector, and reached a new high in inflation-adjusted dollars. The sector’s trajectory is long as well as recent: education’s share of all U.S. giving has climbed from roughly 9% to 14% over the past 40 years. Analysis of the report by the gift-planning firm Stelter also notes that, according to Fidelity’s 2026 giving report, education received the highest percentage of donor-advised fund grant dollars of any sector, a channel that now carries a meaningful share of individual giving.
The subsector setting the record is the same one that absorbed the year’s sharpest policy pressure. Whatever donors made of the public fights around higher education, the giving data shows their support deepened rather than retreated.
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Tuesday · June 23, 2026
Bequests Surge 19.7%, the Fastest Growth of Any Giving Source
Bequest giving rose to $62.2 billion in 2025, up 19.7% in current dollars and 16.6% after inflation, the strongest growth of the four sources of giving. The rebound from $51.95 billion in 2024 amounts to roughly a third of the year’s total increase in giving, even though bequests make up only about 10% of the total. Bequests are historically the most volatile source, since a small number of large estates can swing the annual figure, but the Association of Fundraising Professionals’ analysis of the report calls the sustained surge one of the clearest signals in the data, and the report frames it against the intergenerational wealth transfer now underway.
A swing this large from estates traces to decisions donors made years or decades ago; the shops recording these gifts now are collecting on cultivation that predates most current strategic plans. If the report’s wealth-transfer framing holds, 2025 reads less like an outlier than a preview.
Tuesday · June 23, 2026
Underneath the Record, the Donor Base Keeps Thinning
Individuals gave $394.2 billion in 2025 and remain the largest source of charitable dollars, but their share of total giving fell to 64%, down from 80% in the late 1980s. Individual giving as a share of disposable personal income sits at 1.7%, well below its 2.4% peaks in 2000 and 2005. The BBB Wise Giving Alliance’s read of the report pairs those trends with donor-participation research: growth is concentrated in larger gifts, donor counts keep declining, and among lapsed higher-income donors surveyed in its own donor-trust research, a leading reason for not giving was simply never being asked.
The record total and the shrinking base come from the same tables. Aggregate growth now leans on estates, foundations, and the largest gifts, while the individual share has fallen 16 points in four decades. Which of those two stories a given program lives inside depends on where its revenue concentrates.
The report hands the profession two truths at once. American generosity set a record, education led the growth, and every source of giving expanded in real terms. At the same time, the growth is consolidating: estates, foundations, and the largest gifts are carrying more of the total while the share from individual donors keeps narrowing. The number that made this week’s headlines was built substantially on relationships someone tended 10 and 20 years ago, and the quiet work of widening and keeping the base is what determines whether the next record has anything underneath it.
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