There's No Generosity Crisis. The Money's Growing, and the Biggest Wave Is Just Arriving.

What does the data mean for 2026 giving trends in America?

• Giving hit a record $617 billion in 2025 — up 3% after inflation, with every major source growing.
• The $124 trillion intergenerational wealth transfer has started to arrive, with bequests jumping nearly 17% after inflation — the second-highest year for legacy giving on record.
• Millennials are already in motion: 80% plan to give to a new nonprofit this year, and 42% already use a donor-advised fund.
• The real risk is not being ready: four out of five first-time donors never give again — organizations that fix retention grow roughly 9.5% per year.
• The instinct to brace for the worst is wrong. The work now is building the systems to keep the donors who are already on their way.

Giving USA 2026 Annual Report: The numbers that end the debate

‍If you've followed me for a while, you know where I land on this. There's no generosity crisis.

The new Giving USA 2026 Annual Report numbers just made the case for me. Americans gave $617 billion last year. A record, and up 3 percent even after inflation. Every major source grew. In forty years of this data, giving has fallen in only four of them. This sector is one of the most resilient things in the economy, and we keep talking about it like it's one bad quarter from collapse.

At GiveCon we told the room the money was there. It still is, and now there's more of it.

And yet I keep walking into conference halls and board rooms where everyone's bracing for the worst. Donors are tapped out. Young people don't give. Plan for a hard year. I understand where it comes from. It just isn't what the data says.

Here's the part I think the sector reads backwards. Giving is concentrating. More of it now comes from foundations, from the wealthy, from estates, with fewer donors carrying more of the total. The instinct is to call that fragility.

I see the opposite. That's the wealth transfer beginning to land.

We've talked for years about the $124 trillion that will pass between generations over the next two decades, the largest transfer of wealth ever recorded. It doesn't announce itself, and it shows up first in estates. Last year bequests jumped almost 17 percent after inflation, the second-highest year for legacy giving on record. That's not a blip. It's the front edge of the money we've been promised for a decade, finally arriving.

And the generation that will inherit it is already in motion. In our own Giving Signals Report with The Harris Poll, 80% of millennials told us they'll give to a new nonprofit this year, and 42 percent already use a donor-advised fund, more than any generation before them. They're giving, they're using the vehicles, and they're deciding right now which organizations earn their loyalty. The donors the bequest data points to aren't hypothetical. They're choosing today.

So the very thing that worries some people is the best news in the report. The only real risk now is not being ready for it.

And readiness is ours. Start with the uncomfortable part: four out of five first-time donors never give again. We pour everything into finding new donors and let them leak right back out, year after year, and we've called it normal for so long it's baked into our budgets. The organizations that fix that, that build a real system to keep donors instead of constantly replacing them, grow far faster than the rest. We see it in our own customers, who grow revenue about 9.5 percent a year on modern tools, and in the giving moving through our platform, up nearly 29 percent in a year. Same economy. Better readiness.

So tell your board the real story. Giving's growing, the largest wave of generosity in history is starting to move toward you, and the donors carrying it are already in your database. The ones who'll inherit are one relationship away. The only question is whether you'll keep them.

That's the work now. Not bracing. Building.