America’s Top 100 Charities: A Year Of Pain After Trump Cuts

A health worker in Ethiopia measures the arm of a child at a Save The Children mobile clinic in January 2023, after the worst drought in decades plunged millions into what the UN described as "acute food insecurity."EDUARDO SOTERAS / AFP via Getty ImagesEarlier this year, Save The Children Federation, the nearly-century-old Fairfield, Conn.-based charity whose name describes its worldwide humanitarian focus, saw about half of last year’s nearly $500 million in annual U.S. Government funding evaporate. Meanwhile, New York-based International Rescue Committee (IRC), lost $400 million in U.S. funds. Originally formed to help refugees from Nazi Germany, the IRC had grown to serve the displaced around the world. “It’s a really tough time,” says Madlin Sadler, chief operating officer of the IRC, which has laid off a third of its 18,000 foreign workers and pulled out of one country, Tanzania, with plans to leave four more due to federal funding cuts. In March, IRC ran a full-page ad in the Sunday New York Times (paid for by a private donor) beseeching other private givers to “meet the moment.”There’s no denying that’s it’s been a hard time for some of the nation’s top charities.

Save The Children (STC) and IRC were sent reeling by the dramatic leveling of foreign humanitarian aid by the Trump Administration, with Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) wielding the ax. But domestic-focused charities have also had to scramble to adjust to less drastic cuts to the Federal Emergency Management Agency and support for food banks at home. The full impact of the Trump cuts will be long debated, but early estimates are dramatic. This month the Gates Foundation estimated that 200,000 more children around the world under the age of five will die this year than last, the first rise in global infant mortality in decades. Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates attributes much of this to the Trump Administration’s gutting of the U.S. Agency for International Development, the U.S. State Department unit that was the primary pump for an average of around $50 billion a year in foreign humanitarian aid. Much of this was routed through large U.S. nonprofits, which reported that income on their books as government support. Forbes’ 2025 list of America’s Top 100 Charities, released today, doesn’t directly reflect the extent of that damage, but it does show which charities were most at risk and may be deserving of your dollars now. That’s because our ranking, now in its 27th year, is designed foremost as a tool for individual donors and is based entirely on private contributions in each charity’s last reported fiscal year. In most cases, that year ended before President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January. While the ranking is based on private giving, the report on each charity also details other key financial data, including government support, a metric that shows, for example, why International Rescue Committee and Save The Children were particularly vulnerable. IRC, ranked No. 37 on the new list, took in $529 million in private donations in its fiscal year ended September 30, 2024, which was dwarfed by the $967 million in direct government support it received. No. 43 Save The Children took in $470 million in private money, more than matched by $497 million from the government in its fiscal year ending December 31, 2024. Other charities at risk from Trump’s international aid cuts: No. 15 World Vision, No. 34 Catholic Relief Services and No. 35 CARE USA. (You can view the full roster of 100 charities, and links to details about their finances here. Advice on how to use our list to analyze the finances of both the Top 100 and other smaller charities you’re considering donating to is here.)Private donations to the 100 entries on the 2025 Top Charities list rose 4.4%, beating the 2024 inflation rate of 2.9%. Collectively, they took in $66.5 billion, or 11% of the $592.5 billion given in 2024 to the country’s two million nonprofits, as measured by the Giving USA Foundation. Despite outliers like STC and IRC, government support on average came to only about one-quarter of private donations. Could private donors, spurred on by government cuts or a new tax break that kicks in next year allowing a modest charitable deduction for donors who take the standard deduction, make up for all the lost government funds? Probably not. But despite their oft-cited economic anxiety, ordinary folks are still giving. Benevity Inc., which provides a workplace donation platform to hundreds of companies, reported that donations it processed on Giving Tuesday earlier this month were up 7% from the year before. Meanwhile, a few of the richest Americans have stepped up in notable ways.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency may be reeling from budget and staff cuts, but in October the private Center for Disaster Philanthropy, which both advises on responses and makes grants, announced the largest donation received in its history—$60 million from MacKenzie Scott, the break-the-mold philanthropist worth $33.6 billion, who is the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. As for Gates, in May he accelerated his timeline for donating 99% of his wealth—his Gates Foundation now plans to give away $200 billion over the next two decades as it works to prevent maternal and infant deaths and fight infectious diseases and poverty. The private Gates Foundation, like many charities involved with such missions, has historically tried to multiply its impact by working with government and other partners. That helps explain why some of the Top 100 Charities had become dependent on Uncle Sam’s money. Save the Children Federation, also known as Save the Children U.S., was founded in the U.S. in 1932, during the Great Depression, and modeled after a similarly named British nonprofit started after World War I. Initially, it focused on disadvantaged children in the Appalachian Mountains, and, with an emphasis on nutrition and education programs, still runs Head Start programs in rural areas across six U.S. states. But in recent years, three-fourths of STC’s efforts have been directed internationally, mainly through Save the Children International, a network of 30 affiliates providing relief in more than 100 countries. Difficult places Save The Children operates in includes the Sudan, Gaza and Ukraine. This year, due to reduced federal funding, the charity has pulled out of Malawi, Senegal, Brazil, Poland, Georgia and Liberia. Despite the fact that slightly more than half its funding (pre-Trump) came from the government, STC boasts some 337,000 “Mom and Pop” private donors who in 2024 contributed $87 million. Its highly visible fundraising efforts include use of such entertainment world endorsers as Jennifer Garner (who is also a trustee), Enrique Iglesias, Dakota Fanning and Olivia Wilde. “We have been accelerating our diversification of our funding and our work with the private sector,” says Clare Rodger, STC’s chief marketing and growth officer. This involves approaches like playing up specific programs and specific countries.

Save The Children also has boosted its lobbying and advocacy efforts through its Save The Children Action Network, a social welfare organization with a 501(c)(4) tax status that allows political activity, including lobbying and even endorsing candidates. The IRC’s origins were life-saving but more ideological. Two predecessor groups (one blessed by Albert Einstein), were originally based in Hitler’s Germany and focused on getting political activists, intellectuals and Jews out of that country. The nonprofit later played a similar role during the 1956 uprising in Hungary against Communist rule and for much of its history was viewed by some as a stalking horse for the activist U.S. foreign policy establishment—indeed, one of its presidents, William J. Casey, later became director of the Central Intelligence Agency under Ronald Reagan. But IRC these days is more of a traditional aid agency, active in more than 40 countries. While retaining an emphasis on resettlement activities including into the U.S. (resettlements that Trump has halted), IRC has dived into war zones—Gaza, Sudan, Afghanistan and Ukraine, among others. Ciarán Donnelly, IRC’s senior vice president for international programs, says this year’s layoffs are due to U.S. government funding cuts. “It goes back to that challenge of making tough, ethical choices around what funding we have, and how do we deploy it,” he adds. IRC relies on large institutional private funders, but, like Save The Children, claims 300,000 private donors, most of them small and long-standing givers, and now needed more than ever. Vanguard Charitable, a donor-advised fund handling donations earmarked by individual donors of varying wealth, reported that $11 million went to IRC last year. Most top charities on our list are less dependent than these two on government funds. For the fourth straight year, No. 1 on our list is Feeding America, which rose to the top after the Covid 19 disruption of the economy and attention on food insecurity in the U.S. The Chicago-based umbrella for several hundred food banks around the country reported private contributions of $5 billion for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2024, up 1%. The bulk of that came in the form of private-sector food donations, but the charity still received nearly $300 million in cash donations. There are now eight food banks on the Top 100 Charities list. They, too, have had a trying year, with the Trump Administration cutting $500 million in emergency food aid earlier this year. (That’s before its temporary halt in SNAP food aid, a.k.a. food stamps, during the government shutdown.) No. 2 again was Good360. For the year ending December 31, 2024, the Alexandria, Va.-based clearinghouse that routes donated corporate gift-in-kind products to charities listed $3 billion in donations received, up 14%. When it comes to raising a lot of dollars from small donors, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, No. 3 on our list, remained the standout. From just a single location, the Memphis institution raised $2.8 billion in private donations in the year ending June 30, 2025, an 8% increase, while spending $431 million to do it. (You’ve seen the ads.) No. 4 was United Way Worldwide. The Alexandria, Va.-based network of more than 1,100 legally separate U.S. nonprofits emphasizing paycheck deductions had been the nation’s largest charity on our list for years until 2022, despite a steady decline due to the rise of specific-cause charities and alternative workplace giving platforms. For the year ending June 30, 2025, United Way received donations of $2.5 billion, down $10 million from the year earlier.The donation cutoff for this year’s roster—No. 100—rose 4% to a record-for-this-list: $204 million. That spot went to Wycliffe Bible Translators, of Orlando, Florida, dedicated to rendering Christianity’s holiest work into every language. Since this list is designed to inform would-be donors in the general public, we don’t look at colleges and other academic institutions soliciting specifically for themselves, on the theory their donations come primarily from their own alumni. We generally also avoid religious institutions, since they are not required to disclose financial information, and most don’t. (A notable exception is No. 6 Salvation Army, based in Alexandria, Virginia, which is technically a church as well as a major social services agency.) Read more here about our methodology for compiling the list and how this can help you evaluate any charity you consider supporting. As part of our due diligence for donors, we also report for each charity such metrics as overhead, fundraising costs, charitable commitment (how much goes to program support), and how much the top earning employee at each organization is paid. A record 31 of the 100 nonprofits on our list reported total compensation of more than $1 million for at least one employee (usually the CEO), up from 28 charities last year. As in past years, the highest paid were chief executives of large nonprofit hospital/medical operations. Peter L. Slavin, CEO of Cedars-Sinai Health System in Los Angeles, was the top earner, at $8.8 million. He was followed by New York’s Mount Sinai Health Systems CEO Kenneth Davis, Cleveland Clinic Foundation CEO Thomas Mihaljevic and New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center CEO Selwyn Vickers, who all earned around $7 million.

International Rescue Committee CEO David Miliband, a former British foreign secretary, received $1.2 million.

Save The Children CEO Janti Soeripto earned about half of that, at $650,000. There are eight newcomers or returnees-after-a-gap to the list. In alphabetical order: Atlanta Community Food Bank (96), Breakthrough T1D (94), Combined Jewish Philanthropies (83), Covenant House (99), Fellowship of Christian Athletes (86), Stephen Siller Tunnel to Towers Foundation (42), United Service Organizations (92) and World Resources Institute (85). They replaced: Father Flanagan’s Boys’ Home, Hadassah the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Metropolitan Opera Association, New York-Presbyterian Hospital, Patient Access Network Foundation, Providence St. Joseph Health, Teach for America and United Negro College Fund. The UNCF might return to our list next year, thanks to a $70 million gift it received from MacKenzie Scott in September after the close of its latest complete fiscal year. The list of the Top 100 Charities is here. A fuller description of our methodologies and how donors can use the same metrics, along with other information, to help evaluate any charity is here.