We recently broke down the headline numbers from Giving USA’s 2026 report: total U.S. charitable giving reached a new high in current dollars of $617.2 billion in 2025 — the second-highest total on record when adjusted for inflation, behind 2021’s $660.76 billion. That came alongside a surge in bequest giving and a continued rise in donor-advised funds. But where did that generosity go, and what do four decades of data say about how giving actually moves with the economy? Read more in part 2 of our key takeaways.
Who Received the Most in 2025?
Giving USA tracks giving across nine major recipient subsectors, plus gifts made directly to individuals. Here’s the breakdown, by dollar amount and share of total giving:
Charitable Giving by Recipient Category, 2025
Total contributions, share of all giving, and year-over-year growth
| Recipient Category | 2025 Total | Share of Total | Growth (current $) |
Growth (inflation-adj.) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Religion | $151.58B | 23% | +2.4% | −0.2% |
| Human services | $99.50B | 15% | +5.3% | +2.6% |
| Education | $92.01B | 14% | +11.7% | +8.9% |
| Gifts to grantmaking foundations | $79.05B | 12% | −16.2% | −18.3% |
| Public-society benefit | $72.06B | 11% | +11.6% | +8.7% |
| Health | $61.43B | 9% | +6.1% | +3.3% |
| International affairs | $33.02B | 5% | +4.1% | +1.4% |
| Arts, culture & humanities | $27.31B | 4% | +7.5% | +4.7% |
| Gifts to individuals | $25.77B | 4% | +0.7% | −1.8% |
| Environment/animals | $24.57B | 4% | +11.0% | +8.2% |
Swipe the table horizontally to see all columns.
Bars are scaled relative to the largest category. Percentages may not sum to 100% due to rounding.
Two things stand out once you adjust for inflation. Religion, the largest subsector by far, was essentially flat in real terms, declining 0.2 percent, and five subsectors exceeded their previous inflation-adjusted highs in 2025.
As we noted in part one, education, public-society benefit, and environment/animals were the standout growth stories, while the pullback in giving to foundations was the year’s biggest outlier. That raises the question: why does giving move the way it does from year to year? Giving USA’s 40 years of historical data surfaces patterns that may signal what’s ahead for the sector.
Giving and the Economy: Indicators That May Move the Needle
Every year, Giving USA ties total giving back to a handful of economic indicators. A few of the relationships are more telling than the headline number alone.
Giving tends to track the stock market — with a couple of caveats. Over the past 10 years (2016–2025), the inflation-adjusted S&P 500 has swung between −25.4 percent and +26.6 percent year to year. Total giving, over that same stretch, has ranged from −10.5 percent to +10.9 percent. In 2025, the S&P 500 rose 13.4 percent in inflation-adjusted terms, more than four times the 3.0 percent inflation-adjusted growth in total giving. Giving generally moves in the same direction as the market, just with a lot less amplitude, and often with a lag.
Individual giving is steady as a share of income. Individual giving equaled 1.7 percent of disposable personal income in 2025, unchanged from 2024. Over the last 40 years, that figure has stayed within a narrow range: a high of 2.4 percent in 2005 and a low of 1.7 percent, first reached in 2023. Households give a fairly consistent slice of what they have left after taxes, regardless of what else is happening in the economy.
Corporate giving is closely tied to profits. Corporate giving is estimated at just 1 percent of corporate pre-tax profits in 2025, below the four-decade average of 1.1 percent and well below the 2 percent high reached in 1986. Profits were nearly flat last year, rising 0.8 percent, which helps explain why corporate giving grew the least of the four sources.
Zooming Out: What the Long View Adds
Giving USA’s 40-year dataset also shows how the composition of giving has shifted, and how growth compounds unevenly over time.
The mix of who gives has shifted substantially. Comparing the first five-year span in the dataset (1986–1990) against the most recent (2021–2025), individual giving has fallen from 80 percent of all charitable dollars to 65 percent, while foundation giving climbed from 7 percent to 18 percent. Bequests have held within a 7-to-10 percent range across all four decades, reaching their highest share in the 2021–2025 span.
Growth doesn’t arrive evenly. In current dollars, total giving grew the most of any 10-year stretch between 1996 and 2005 (up 110.5 percent), while 2006–2015 was the slowest, at 26.0 percent. On an inflation-adjusted basis, 1996–2005 still leads at 69.1 percent, but the slowest decade becomes 1986–1995, at just 6.4 percent. For the most recent decade, 2016–2025, inflation-adjusted giving grew 17.3 percent. Context like this is a useful reminder that any single year’s number, good or bad, should be read against a longer arc.
Total giving has held close to 2 percent of GDP for over a decade. Giving as a share of the U.S. economy dipped to 1.9 percent from 2009 through 2011, but has stayed at or above 2 percent every year since 2012, landing at 2.0 percent in 2025. The 40-year high was 2.3 percent in 2021. That stability suggests giving tends to track (or lag slightly behind) the broader economy rather than swinging wildly on its own.
What This Means for Donors, Foundations, Nonprofits, and Advisors
Giving USA is designed to be a benchmarking tool you can return to throughout the year. A few practical ways to put this year’s data to work:
Compare your growth to your subsector. If your organization sits in education, environment, or public-society benefit and grew slower than your subsector’s rate, that’s worth investigating. If it grew faster, that’s a data point worth sharing with your board. And check your numbers against the inflation-adjusted column, not just the nominal one. A 2 percent gain was a real-terms decline in 2025.
Keep an eye on the pullback in gifts to foundations. The 16.2 percent drop in gifts flowing into foundations is a reminder that foundation-to-foundation and donor-to-foundation transfers can swing significantly year to year, even as foundations’ own grantmaking continues to grow.
Use the 40-year view to your advantage. A single strong or weak year rarely tells the full story. The five-year and 10-year trend data can help you and your board distinguish a real shift in donor behavior from an ordinary, one-off year.
Between the source-side trends we covered in Part 1 and this deeper look at where the money goes, the 2026 Giving USA report offers one of the clearest pictures yet of a philanthropic sector that remains resilient, even as the mix of who gives, and who benefits, keeps evolving.
To learn more, read the full report.
Want more insights like these? Explore our Giving & Investing Trends Series.
Want to learn more about the ways we support philanthropists and their professional teams?
Schedule a call with us or reach us at 800-839-0054. Together, let’s #begiving.
