- Chris Currens
- Read Time: 8 Minutes
What You Need to Know
What does record giving in 2025 mean for your organization’s fundraising strategy?
Headline numbers get the attention, but they rarely tell leaders what to do next. Total giving reached a record high in 2025, and the lasting value of that data is in what it reveals about where your own revenue comes from and where it is headed.
This article explores how to read the 2025 Giving USA findings through the lens of your own organization. The goal is not to chase a trend. It is to see your fundraising mix clearly so you can invest your people, time, and systems where they will sustain your mission for the long haul.
Key Takeaways
- Individuals remain the dominant force in philanthropy, driving roughly 80 to 85 percent of all giving when bequests, family foundations, and donor-advised funds are included.
- Headlines are catchy but rarely durable. Decades of data offer a more reliable lens for planning.
- Organizations tend to feel national trends most where their own revenue is most concentrated, and that concentration is neither right nor wrong.
- Recent tax changes may shift giving patterns in the short term, but your results depend on how you act on the data.
- Relationship-based fundraising takes time to build, and it is time well spent when the right people and systems are in place.
Giving is Up. Is Your Fundraising Strategy Keeping Up?
Charitable giving is up: $617 billion in 2025, a record figure. That is the headline from this year’s Giving USA Annual Report, one of the sector’s most closely watched snapshots of charitable giving. The headline number is worth a moment’s attention, but headlines don’t build fundraising plans. You and your data do. And as you head into next year’s planning season, the real story is underneath that number: where it’s coming from, how it’s shifting, and whether your organization is positioned to keep up. Our team has spent the months since the report’s release digging into exactly that. In this article, we’ll walk through what the 2025 data tells us and how to turn it into a sharper strategy for next year.
A (Quick) Recap of the Headlines
Total charitable giving in the United States reached $617.20 billion in 2025, a record high, up 5.7% over 2024, or about 3% after inflation.
Giving by Individuals remained the largest source of giving in 2025 at an estimated $395 billion. Individual giving saw healthy growth: 4.1% in current dollars, 1.4% after inflation. Foundations came in as the second-largest category at $117.15 billion, growing at an impressive clip of its own: 5.7% in current dollars, 3% after inflation.
Bequests and Corporate giving, the other two major sources, moved in very different directions in 2025. Bequests rose to $61.19 billion, up 19.7% from the prior year (16.6% after inflation), a big swing, but not unusual for a category that’s naturally volatile by nature. Corporate giving came in flatter at $43.67 billion, up 3.1% in current dollars but just 0.5% after inflation.
When it came to what sectors of the nonprofit world received in 2025, much stayed on trend from the last several years. Religion, Human Services, and Education remained the top three recipient categories, but where Human Services and Education saw impressive growth (5.3%/2.6% and 11.7%/8.9% in current/inflation adjusted dollars, respectively), Religion was flat, coming in at just 2.4% in current dollars, and when adjusted for inflation is actually a 0.2% decrease.
Key Insights & Trends
These findings and figures are interesting, but it is crucial to understand them in greater, longer-term context. Understanding what has been durable versus what might be a small blip on the radar is essential to get the most meaning out of this data.
One of the most durable insights in this report is that individuals remain the dominant force in philanthropy. Combine individual giving with bequests and family foundations (all individual decisions to give at their core), and you land at 80-85% of total giving being driven by individuals.
You can see how individuals have sustained philanthropy’s upward trajectory over time. Using 5-year rolling averages (a technique that helps smooth out large fluctuations from year to year to make long-term trends easier to see), we can see a clear upward trend within the Individuals category over about four decades.
Adjusting for inflation (or giving power, one could say) tells a similar story with one twist: while individual giving has followed a flatter trend more recently, foundation giving shows a more pronounced uptick, one more sign that more sophisticated donors are driving a greater share of giving.
Knowing individuals play an important role in bequests and foundations (about half of the foundations category is family foundations), we have a clear sense that individual donors continue to evolve their giving to be more sophisticated and strategic. Using 5-year rolling averages again, we see how significantly giving to foundations has trended upward in recent years, indicating any growth in giving from this category is poised to be sustained.
This all points to a key trend the industry has felt for years: high-net-worth (HNW) households are increasingly becoming a major driving force in philanthropy. Bank of America’s study on Charitable Giving by Affluent Households backs this up: HNW households give at higher rates than the general population (81% vs. ~50%), are more likely to have an explicit giving strategy (40%), and nearly half have or plan to create a giving vehicle in the next three years (48%).
This has created a phenomenon where more of philanthropy comes from fewer donors, but recent change could be poised to introduce some disruption to that trend and make it less sticky.
Coming Policy Impacts on Fundraising
Recent tax changes under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) could bring meaningful shifts to the charitable landscape, creating new opportunities for some organizations while presenting challenges for others.
Organizations in the private education space may see new opportunities through a federal tax credit for contributions to eligible Scholarship Granting Organizations (SGOs), beginning in 2027. As schools explore partnerships with SGOs, they may be able to expand scholarship funding and attract contributions they might not otherwise have received.
For nonprofits more broadly, a new charitable deduction for non-itemizers could encourage additional giving. Research from the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy suggests this provision could increase household giving, though its impact may be offset by other changes in the law that could reduce charitable contributions overall.
Changes to the tax treatment of charitable gifts for high-income individuals and corporations may also influence when donors give, potentially concentrating contributions in certain years to maximize tax benefits (a phenomenon called “bunching”). Tax incentives are far from the greatest motivating factor for people to give, but their impacts are measurable and reasonably predictable. The impact of these changes will vary across organizations, creating different opportunities and challenges for fundraisers. How your organization responds to these shifts and insights can make a meaningful difference in planning your path forward.
Where Does Your Organization’s Revenue Actually Come From?
These insights are most useful in the context of your own organization. There are plenty of nuances in how closely these trends align with your organization’s experience, but experience has taught us these trends are present in some way with most organizations, and can be especially pronounced where a revenue mix is highly concentrated in a particular giving source.
For an organization that has a robust corporate giving program, you have likely seen that do well over the last couple of years, but might feel some limitations and struggles to move beyond some ceilings (since corporate giving is consistently tied to about 2% of corporate profits).
For an organization that has leaned into direct appeals to individuals, you have likely seen some solid performance over the last few years, but may have felt some stagnation with mass-market fundraising efforts.
In both examples, the concentration is neither right nor wrong. An organization’s fundraising mix shows a response to opportunities that have presented themselves. They have undoubtedly helped the mission succeed and grow to what it is now. They are something to be celebrated.
The opportunities of the past are not always the opportunities an organization needs for its future. That’s where leaders must discern how trends in their own organization match the environment around them and lean into what will sustain them for the long haul.
From Revenue Mix to Resource Allocation
Just because an opportunity or threat exists does not mean your organization will automatically reap the benefits from it nor be negatively impacted by it. Success in fundraising comes from having the right resources in place with a clear understanding of your environment, your goals, and the strategies and resources needed to achieve them.
Building paths towards opportunities and away from pitfalls is a key part of this work. For example, as donors become more sophisticated and strategic, taking the time to understand how they give, why they give, and what problems they can help you solve can have significant benefits. That decision steers you away from the pitfall of having donors being more transactionally influenced by tax incentives (or something else) more than the needs of your mission. That also takes people and systems to do the work, track it, and understand how to best engage with your donors over time. When you have clarity on what you want to do and what you want to avoid, data like this is an extremely helpful tool in illuminating your path.
At Mission Advancement, the work we do with our clients like this – building a culture of relationship-based fundraising – yields much fruit, but not overnight. Relationships take time to grow sufficient trust. Keeping those at a scale where you can grow them well both externally with your donors and internally with your own team is key to making the work sustainable. That takes time, but when that produces high trust, belief, and the ability to make quality decisions, it is time well spent.
How You Turn Trends Into Strategy
Headlines are catchy, but often not durable. Decades of data and practices are much more durable, and are available in spades through reports like these. They are just the durable type of insight that serves as a great lens to think about how your organization fundraises in the years ahead and where you stand in the landscape.
While reading industry reports might not be everyone’s favorite part of their job, they serve as a great tool for you and your organization when you do the work to see yourself in them.
The fruit is real, but it rarely shows up without intention. When you take the time to understand industry trends, your own organization’s trends, the resources you currently have, and what you need to help your mission flourish, the course to follow becomes clear and true.
Giving is up. Generosity continues to prove itself to be a powerful force moving the charitable sector forward. The real question, heading into next year, is whether your strategy is keeping up with it. Let’s chat about it.
