Long time lurker, first time poster - be nice please! :)
I was searching for summary data of EA funding trends, but couldn't find anything more recent than Tyler's post from 2022. So I decided to update it. If this analysis is done properly anywhere, please let me know.
The spreadsheet is here (some things might look weird due to importing from Excel to sheets)
Observations
- EA grantmaking appears on a steady downward trend since 2022 / FTX.
- The squeeze on GH funding to support AI / other longtermist priorities appears to be really taking effect this year (though 2025 is a rough estimate and has significant uncertainty.)
- I am really interested in particular about the apparent drop in GW grants this year. I suspect that it is wrong or at least misleading - the metrics report suggests they are raising ~$300m p.a. from non OP donors. Not sure if I have made an error (missing direct to charity donations?) or if they are just sitting on funding with the ongoing USAID disruption.
Methodology
- I compiled the latest grants databases from EA Funds, GiveWell, OpenPhilanthropy, and SFF. I added summary level data from ACE.
- To remove double counting, I removed any OpenPhilanthropy grants that were duplicated in GiveWell's grant database. Likewise for EA Funds.
- I inflation adjusted to 2025 $ based on the US CPI data from WorldBank.
- For 2025 data, I made a judgement call on how much data was "complete" and pro-rated accordingly - e.g. from GiveWell, it looks complete up until the end of June, so I excluded any grants made in H2 and doubled the sum.
Notes
My numbers are a bit different from Tyler's. I've identified the following reasons:
- Inflation adjustments (i.e. an upward boost from using 2025$)
- I've used GiveWell's grant database rather than their metrics reports,
- Different avoidance of double counting (I removed from OP, Tyler removed from GW. I also went through more manually - from what I can see Tyler removed any GW grant that has OP as a donor, but this will remove too much for many grants that have multiple donors.
- Tyler excludes "Other" grants, I've left them in.
Thanks for reading, hope this is interesting!
Looking into this a bit more, from this thread it seems like OP's grants database may currently be missing as much as half of their 2025 GCR spending.
Love this Jacco, thanks for posting! I feel like I'm constantly reading someone lament that the best data they can find on EA funding is from 2022, this is really helpful.
(I'd still like to see more work here - especially it'd be cool to see someone double check this work/ see if they get the same results, and for any funders who know better to read this post and comment).
Thanks Toby! And yes, I definitely agree it would be great if anyone can double check this :)
This is really awesome work, it's great to have someone put this together!
Hopefully the drop in @GiveWell's grants is just a timing or reporting issue and not nearly as large as it seems. Maybe they'll be able to clarify further!
If you wanted to extend this and cover more EA grants, I know Farmkind has a public database of grants from their platform that would be great to add. It also would be awesome if this could capture high-impact donations from Founders Pledge, but I'm not sure they provide granular enough data to be able to track by year and cause area. Maybe talking to @Matt_Lerner could shed some insight?
This is an incredible first post! Thanks so much for sharing!