Americans donated a record $617 billion last year. Nine people drove a chunk of it.

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The era of the megadonor has arrived

MacKenzie Scott alone drove a third of U.S. mega-giving as total donations hit a record

By Colleen Cabili, Quartz Media

Published 23 hours ago

MacKenzie Scott and a handful of other megadonors helped push U.S. charitable giving to a record $617.2 billion in 2025, the first time annual giving has surpassed $600 billion in the six-decade history of the Giving USA annual philanthropy report, according to Giving USA 2026.

According to CNBC, just nine individuals were responsible for $22.32 billion of last year's charitable total. Scott led all donors with approximately $7 billion in gifts during 2025, a sum that pushed her cumulative philanthropic output to $26.2 billion over five years, Fortune reported. Other major donors included Michael Bloomberg at $4.3 billion, Bill Gates at $3.7 billion, Warren Buffett at $1.34 billion, and Susan and Michael Dell at nearly $1 billion.

At the category level, individuals remained the dominant source of contributions at $394.2 billion, even as that figure edged up only 1.4% in real terms. The fastest-growing segment was charitable bequests — inheritances directed to nonprofits — which climbed 16.6% in inflation-adjusted terms, reaching $62.19 billion. Across all sources, total giving increased 5.7% in current dollars, or 3.0% when measured against inflation, buoyed by a robust stock market. A single bequest accounted for a substantial portion of that surge: the estate of Paul Allen, the late Microsoft $MSFT -3.46% co-founder, directed $3.1 billion toward a science and technology research fund, representing close to one-third of the overall gain in bequest giving.

Foundation giving reached $117.15 billion, up 5.7% in current dollars, while corporate giving grew 3.1% to $43.67 billion.

Jon Bergdoll, interim director of data and research partnerships at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, said the gap between robust stock market returns and comparatively modest giving growth reflects the unusual economic environment. In real terms, the S&P 500 gained 13.4% over that same period — a pace of appreciation that outstripped growth in total charitable giving by approximately fourfold. Bergdoll attributed the gap in part to 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."

Cooper, who serves as vice chair of the Giving USA Foundation and runs fundraising platform Virtuous as its CEO, expressed ambivalence about the outsized role of billionaire philanthropy. He welcomed large individual commitments in principle, but cautioned against the sector becoming too reliant on them. "I actually don't want that number to grow too big," Cooper said. "I don't want a growing dependence on the megawealthy, whose giving patterns might be more volatile year to year."

Education, public-society benefit, and environment and animals each saw giving grow more than 10% in current dollars. Giving to religion grew 2.4% but was flat after adjusting for inflation.