U.S. Charitable Giving Hit $617 Billion in 2025, Driven by Wealthy Donors and Bequests.

The Record, Broken Down

U.S. charitable giving reached $617.2 billion in 2025, up 5.7% from 2024 in nominal terms and 3% after adjusting for inflation, according to the Giving USA Foundation's annual report released this week. The report is researched and written by the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University.

Individuals remain the largest source of donations at $394.2 billion, but that category grew only 1.4% in inflation-adjusted terms. The engine behind the record was bequests — gifts made through estates after death — which jumped 16.6% to an estimated $62.19 billion.

Foundations and corporate giving account for the rest. All categories together cleared $600 billion for the first time in six decades of tracking.

Who Is Actually Driving This

Jon Bergdoll, the report's lead analyst and interim director of data and research partnerships at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, is direct about where the momentum came from: wealthy Americans whose net worth tracks closely with equity markets.

"There's always a pretty tight connection between bequest and overall net worth, which in turn, is pretty connected to the market," Bergdoll told CNBC.

The S&P 500 rose 13.4% in inflation-adjusted terms between 2024 and 2025 — roughly four times the rate of growth in total charitable giving over the same period. Bergdoll said he expected a bigger uptick given those market gains, and attributes part of the shortfall to weak GDP growth and record-low consumer sentiment.

"While the market's doing well, and GDP is doing OK, it does seem like there is a lot of unease," he said. "We know that giving comes from a place of financial security for people, and so that could be dragging things down a little bit on the individual end."

Ordinary donors appear to be holding back even as asset values rise, because they don't feel the wealth in their daily lives the way someone sitting on a large equity portfolio does.

The Great Wealth Transfer Angle

The bequest surge may be an early signal of what financial analysts call the Great Wealth Transfer. Cerulli Associates estimates that more than $124 trillion in assets will change hands by 2048, with roughly $18 trillion allocated to charitable causes.

Bergdoll is cautious about overstating this connection. He told CNBC it's too early to determine how much of the bequest increase reflects that generational handover versus plain market appreciation boosting estate values.

What's not in dispute: the largest charitable gifts increasingly originate from estates and megadonors, not from broad-based participation.

The Legitimate Concern About Concentration

Critics on the left raise a fair structural question: when charitable giving is dominated by the very wealthy, the causes that receive funding reflect the priorities of a small, unelected group. A handful of billionaire bequests or donor-advised funds can shift hundreds of millions of dollars toward specific causes, universities, or political-adjacent nonprofits — with significant tax advantages along the way. That's a real concentration-of-influence argument that deserves to be heard on its own terms.

The counter-position is also real. Private charitable capital moves faster and with fewer bureaucratic strings than government spending. When individuals choose where their money goes, it tends to reach causes that resonate with actual communities rather than Washington priorities. And the tax deduction structure — while it benefits high earners more in absolute dollars — still incentivizes giving that wouldn't otherwise happen. Bergdoll himself flagged that tying giving too tightly to stock swings would be dangerous for nonprofits: "We wouldn't want it to be a one-for-one relationship."

Both concerns can coexist. More giving is better than less. But $617 billion concentrated at the top of the wealth distribution funds different things than $617 billion spread across millions of middle-class households.

What the AP Source Could Not Add

The AP News source for this story returned a page error — its article content was unavailable. The CNBC report by Robert Frank carried the substantive data and analyst commentary. All figures and quotes in this article are drawn from that CNBC report.

The Open Question

Bergdoll's warning about unease among ordinary donors matters for what comes next. If consumer sentiment stays depressed while the stock market continues to outperform the broader economy, charitable giving could bifurcate further: mega-gifts and bequests from the wealthy keep the headline number climbing, while community-level nonprofits that depend on mid-range individual donors see stagnation or decline. The Giving USA Foundation is expected to release regional and sector breakdowns in subsequent reports that would show whether that divergence is already materializing.