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A version of this article first appeared in CNBC’s Inside Wealth newsletter with Robert Frank, a weekly guide to the high-net-worth investor and consumer. Sign up to receive future editions, straight to your inbox.
Donors gave an estimated $617.2 billion to U.S. charities last year, up 5.7% from the year prior on a blistering stock market rally, according to a Giving USA report released this week.
The findings mark the first time yearly giving has topped $600 billion in the 60-year history of the annual philanthropy report, which is published by the Giving USA Foundation. Adjusted for inflation, giving was up 3% year over year.
The effect of the stock market boom, however, was more pronounced with deep-pocketed donors. Individual donors still made up the highest share of contributions at $394.2 billion, but that sum grew just 1.4% in inflation-adjusted dollars, while charitable bequests – gifts made after death – surged by 16.6% to an estimated $62.19 billion.
The rise in bequests could be the latest signal of the Great Wealth Transfer. Cerulli Associates estimates more than $124 trillion in assets will pass down by 2048, with about $18 trillion allocated to charity.
Jon Bergdoll, the report’s lead analyst, said it’s too early to tell how much of the increase in bequeathed gifts is due to the massive handover of wealth.
What’s clearer, according to Bergdoll, is that wealthy Americans who are most likely to leave large sums to charity are the biggest beneficiaries of the stock market boom.
“There’s always a pretty tight connection between bequest and overall net worth, which in turn, is pretty connected to the market,” said Bergdoll, interim director of data and research partnerships at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University, which researches and writes the report.
The stock market’s impact on overall giving, which includes gifts by foundations and corporations, is slower and more muted. That said, Bergdoll said he expected a bigger uptick in giving considering the past few years of strong market growth. Between 2024 and 2025, the S&P 500 jumped 13.4% in inflation-adjusted dollars, roughly four times the rate of growth in total giving, per the report.
He attributed much of the gap between paper wealth and total giving to tepid growth in gross domestic product and record-low consumer sentiment.
“This is a somewhat strange economy for that stock market growth,” he said. “While the market’s doing well, and GDP is doing OK, it does seem like there is a lot of unease. 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.”
Bergdoll added that it would be detrimental for the nonprofit sector if charitable giving followed stock fluctuations too closely.
“We wouldn’t want it to be a one-for-one relationship,” he said. “As much as we might want giving to go up 20% when the market goes up 20%, we really don’t want giving to go down by 20% when the market goes down by 20%.”
Many top earners were expected to pull forward donations in 2025 to take advantage of tax benefits set to decline due to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Bergdoll said the uptick was significant but small relative to overall contributions. The report estimated donors gave an additional $1.71 billion in 2025 to take fuller advantage of expiring tax incentives.
While U.S. charities are receiving more dollars, they have become increasingly reliant on the ultra-wealthy as economic pressures squeeze middle-class donors. The report estimated that nine donors accounted for a whopping $22.32 billion of last year’s total philanthropy. MacKenzie Scott, philanthropist and ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, contributed the largest share at $6.65 billion.
These donors’ megagifts, or contributions of at least 0.1% of total giving, can reshape philanthropy year to year. Nearly a third of the increase in bequest giving came from the estate of late Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, which established a $3.1 billion fund for science and technology research.
Gabe Cooper, vice chair of the Giving USA Foundation, told CNBC he had mixed feelings about megagifts.
“Do I love when the Paul Allens and MacKenzie Scotts of the world commit to giving away a lot of their wealth? Yes, 100%, and I wish more billionaires would do the same,” said Cooper, who is also the CEO of fundraising platform Virtuous. “On the flip side of that, I actually don’t want that number to grow too big. I don’t want a growing dependence on the megawealthy, whose giving patterns might be more volatile year to year.”
While the rise in bequests is a boon for philanthropy, Cooper has his eye on the bigger prize: heirs.
“If a billionaire passes away, and they give $200 million to charity, the other $800 million is probably going to their kiddos, and so I want those kiddos to make really good decisions in terms of philanthropy,” he said.
