Giving USA 2025 out

July 15, 2025

The 2025 edition of Giving USA was posted today. Online, in PDF format, at least; paper editions of the book have been hard to find in recent years, alas. The Giving USA report contains time series estimates for the United States of charitable giving in the aggregate as well as by charitable area and type of donor. The new report updates numbers through calendar year 2024. Here are a few observations.

Giving has ticked back up in real terms

After two years where total contributions failed to keep up with inflation — effectively meaning a decline in the real value of total giving — the Giving USA estimate of inflation-adjusted giving increased by about 3%. In dollars, total contributions in 2024 were $593 billion dollars. That’s a lot of money, by the way; the entire Department of Veterans Affairs spent just $516 billion in fiscal 2024. It’s still below the surge in giving observed during the COVID-19 crisis, but substantially more than inflation-adjusted pre-COVID levels.

Giving continues to secularize

The uptick in giving is driven by increases across the board to specific, secular giving causes, all of which are receiving 20-50% more in inflation-adjusted giving than they did a decade ago in 2014. The big exception to this trend is in the largest area of giving: religion. According to Giving USA, religious giving peaked in inflation-adjusted terms in 2016, and has fallen almost 10% from that peak since.

Put another way: for a long time, religion was about half of all American giving. It’s now only about one-quarter.

Legacies are flat

Growth in giving is coming from corporations and individuals; giving out of estates has been largely stagnant for a decade, possibly reflecting reduced incentives under the post-2017 estate tax rules.