Charitable Giving Statistics | NPTrust (2024)

NPT curates statistics from recent studies and reports on charitable giving in the U.S. Please refer to the footnotes for original sources.

General Philanthropy

• Americans gave $557.16 billion in 2023. This reflects a 2.1% decline from 2022.¹
• Corporate giving in 2023 increased to $36.55 billion—a 3.0% increase from 2022.¹
• Foundation giving in 2023 increased to $103.53 billion—a 1.7% increase from 2022.¹
• Giving by bequest in 2023 was $42.68 billion—a 8.0% increase from 2022.¹
• In 2023, the largest source of charitable giving came from individuals, who gave $374.40 billion, representing 67% of total giving.¹
• In 2023, the majority of charitable dollars went to religion (24%), human services (14%), education (14%), grantmaking foundations (13%) and public-society benefit (10%).¹
• Giving in 2023 increased in many sectors, with double-digit growth in gifts for foundations (15.4%), public-society benefit (11.6%) and education (11.1%). Giving declined precipitously to individuals (-17.2%).¹

Individual and Family Philanthropy

• For middle income earners, the average yearly charitable donation is approximately $3,296.²
• The average charitable donor in the U.S. is 64 years old and makes two charitable donations a year.³
• The average high net worth households donated $34,917 to nonprofits in 2022.⁴
• 85 percent of affluent households maintained or increased their giving in 2022, with the top motivation for giving reported as personal values and beliefs (69.5%).⁴
• Younger people want to forge their own philanthropic identity separate from their parents, said 88% of young women and 69% of young men surveyed.⁵
• The majority of donors (64%) prefer to give online with either a credit or debit card.⁶

Charitable Organizations

• According to the most recent data available, there are more than 1.8 million recognized 501(c) organizations in the United States.⁷
• In 2023, 501(c)(3) organizations made up the majority of 501(c) organizations in the U.S., with 1.5 million.⁷
• As of 2017, there were more than 12 million people employed in the U.S. nonprofit sector.⁸
• There are approximately 340K religious, 255K educational, 154K human services, 129K arts & culture and 64.5K public-society benefit nonprofit organizations in the U.S. in 2024. The least common nonprofit category, with only 9 reported, is mutual assistance research institutes.⁹

Volunteering

• An estimated 23.2% of U.S. adults—60.7 million Americans—volunteered between September 2020 and 2021, contributing an estimated 4.1 billion hours valued at approximately $122.9 billion.¹⁰
• Generation X had the highest rate of formal volunteering (27%) compared to Gen Z, Millennials, and Baby Boomers.¹⁰
• Baby Boomers had the highest rate of informal volunteering (59%).¹⁰
• Most people volunteer through a nonprofit organization (61%), but others volunteer through helping someone directly (29%), a religious organization (24%), civic organizations (22%), the workplace (10%), or a school where they’re enrolled (9%).¹¹

Donor-Advised Funds

• There were 1,948,545 donor-advised fund accounts in 2022.¹²
• Donor-advised funds held $228.89 billion in assets in 2022.¹²
• Total contributions into donor-advised funds were $85.53 billion in 2022.¹²
• Donor-recommended grants from donor-advised funds totaled more than $52.16 billion to charities in 2022.¹²
• The average donor-advised fund account size was $117,466 in 2022.¹²
• The average payout rate for DAFs was 22.5% in 2022.¹²
• Compare the DAF payout rate to the mean payout rate of foundations in 2023: 7.5%.¹³

Sources

¹ Giving USA 2023 Annual Report

²  Internal Revenue Service, Tax Policy Center

³ Nonprofit Fundraising Statistics to Boost Results in 2024 (doublethedonation.com)

⁴ Charitable Giving by Affluent Households Above Pre-Pandemic Levels

⁵ Chronicle of Philanthropy – Wealthy Donors Want Their Giving to Be Different Than Their Parents’, New Study Says

⁶ US Charitable Giving Statistics [2023] (reninc.com)

⁷ Internal Revenue Service, 2023

⁸ U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics (data modified in 2020)

⁹ Categories of nonprofits | Cause IQ

¹⁰ AmeriCorps – Volunteering and Civic Life in America Research Summary (covering 2020-2021)

¹¹ VolunteerMatch – How People Volunteered in 2022

¹² National Philanthropic Trust – Donor Advised Fund Report 2023

¹³ Foundation giving remained steady in 2023. What’s the outlook? (candid.org)

Find Out More

Learn about how a DAF works—and how it can work for you.

FAQs