Where grant money goes, by field

Private and public charities report the grants they make on their annual returns. We read those filings and add them up, so this is a measurement of what was actually given rather than an estimate of what is available.

$1.34 trillion in cash grants since 2018, counted 15 September 2026 ET.

  • Health care $113 billion 21%
  • Education $112 billion 21%
  • Philanthropy and grantmaking $63.7 billion 12%
  • Human services $44.2 billion 8.2%
  • Arts, culture and humanities $24.4 billion 4.6%
  • International affairs $22 billion 4.1%
  • Religion $19.8 billion 3.7%
  • Community improvement $17.7 billion 3.3%
  • Environment $14.7 billion 2.7%
  • Civil rights and advocacy $10.2 billion 1.9%
  • Youth development $9.57 billion 1.8%
  • Crime and legal services $8.94 billion 1.7%
  • Housing and shelter $8.88 billion 1.7%
  • Recreation and sports $8.76 billion 1.6%
  • Public and societal benefit $8.21 billion 1.5%
  • Food, agriculture and nutrition $7.54 billion 1.4%
  • Mental health and crisis intervention $7.51 billion 1.4%
  • Medical research $6.66 billion 1.2%
  • Employment $6.22 billion 1.2%
  • Disease and medical disciplines $5.17 billion 1.0%
  • Animals $5.12 billion 1.0%
  • Science and technology $4.53 billion 0.8%
  • Unclassified $2.54 billion 0.5%
  • Public safety and disaster relief $1.52 billion 0.3%
  • Social science $1.4 billion 0.3%
  • Mutual and membership benefit $483 million 0.1%

Covers $536,219,535,104 of $1,343,730,494,323, which is 39.9 per cent of the money in these filings. The remaining $807,510,959,219 went to recipients whose filings stated no employer identification number, or one we hold no organization under, so it cannot be attributed to a field and is not distributed across the ones above.

How this is counted

Each grant is counted once. A grant reported on more than one schedule of the same return is one grant, and where the schedules state different amounts we take the smaller, so the total understates rather than overstates.

A grant is placed in a field by the recipient's National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities code, which is the classification the IRS holds for that organization. It is the recipient's field, not the funder's: this page answers who received the money, not what kind of organization gave it.

Money that cannot be attributed is reported as its own figure and is not spread across the fields above. Distributing it in proportion would make every field larger than the filings support.

Source

IRS Form 990 Schedule I, Schedule F and Form 990-PF Part XV, as filed by the organizations themselves and published by the Internal Revenue Service. Read on the date shown above. We hold no data about individual donors or recipients who are people; these filings record grants between organizations.