DAF Assets Soar 30% to $326 Billion

The amount of money in donor-advised funds has continued to balloon, reaching $326 billion in 2024, up from $250 billion the year before, according to the Annual DAF Report 2025 released Thursday.

Now put out by the DAF Research Collaborative, the report uses data from informational tax returns to determine how much money is being contributed to DAFs, how much they hold in their accounts, and how much they’re sending to charity, among other metrics. 

Donors put more money into the funds in 2024 than in any other of the past five years, according to the report. Contributions to DAFs reached $89.6 billion in 2024.

DAFs gave $64.9 billion to charities in 2024, which was more than half as much as the $118.5 billion private foundations gave to charity that year, the report said.

“Contributions are up, grants are up quite a bit, and then assets are up,” said Danielle Vance-McMullen, a co-founder of the research collaborative, who worked on the report, alongside co-founder Dan Heist and collaborative researcher Jeff Williams.

DAF Payouts Increased

Critics of DAFs contend that they allow donors to receive an instant tax break but have very lax rules about when the money must actually be disbursed to charities, making them ineffective and a way for people to gain tax advantages without benefitting society.  

The payout rate for DAFs in 2024 was 25.3 percent, up from 24 percent in 2023. Williams contends that DAF donors, when you look at them on an individual basis, rather than using aggregate tax data that includes outliers, do move a good portion of the money to charities.

“A lot of the concern about DAFs sitting on money, we’re just not seeing writ large when we look at account level information,” Williams says, noting there needs to be a comparison point. “Compared to private foundations, DAFs on the whole pay out faster.”

The 2024 payout rate for private foundations was 8 percent, according to the report.

The research collaborative is evaluating the data differently than the National Philanthropic Trust did in past years. The trust’s report included data from payment processor DAFS, often used by workplace giving programs. Williams noted that a large employer with 30,000 employees giving to charities would result in 30,000 DAF accounts created by the payment processor. The money would be held for a short period and then distributed to the charity the employee had designated. Researchers discovered that processors accounted for 80 percent of the total number of DAF accounts, but taking them out of the data didn’t have much impact on the payout findings. 

How Fundraisers Can Use This Data

Because the report is based on aggregate data, it doesn’t get into the motivations of donors with DAFs, but it still has value to fundraisers, the researchers say.  

Because aggregate data like this will never give fundraisers a view into individual donors’ thinking, they need to communicate with donors to better understand how they use their DAF, says Heist.

Fundraisers should also remember that DAFs aren’t a scary mystery but just a tool for payment. “They really should be in a model of, Is it coming as cash, check, credit card, or DAF?” Williams says. The report discusses the many types of organizations that allow users to create DAFs, known collectively as DAF sponsors: national sponsors, community foundations, and single-issue sponsors. Williams suggests thinking about ways to market your organization to those various types of sponsors.

The data from the report is public and can be a great starting point for fundraisers trying to connect with local DAFs, said Rachel Sumsion, a consultant who also worked on the report. “There are lots of fundraisers that we talk to that are like, ‘Oh, I got a grant from a random community foundation that they don’t know who it is or they don’t realize that it’s a DAF,” she says. Having the list helps them identify those local DAFs and understand what opportunities exist for connecting with that sponsor. That is where the conversation can begin.