Granted Research
How concentrated is American foundation wealth?
There are 121,207 private foundations in the United States with assets on file with the IRS, and together they hold $1.53T. That wealth is not spread evenly. The typical foundation is small: half of them hold less than $459,687. But 141 billion-dollar foundations, led by the Lilly Endowment and the two Gates Foundation entities, control 46.6% of the total between them, and the wealthiest 1% of foundations hold 69% of every dollar. For an organization seeking funding, the lesson runs both ways: the money is concentrated at the very top, but the great majority of foundations are small, regional, and far less contested.
$1.53T
Total foundation assets
121,207 foundations
$459,687
Median foundation
half hold less
69%
Held by the top 1%
1,212 foundations
0.94
Gini coefficient
1.0 = total concentration
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<iframe src="https://grantedai.com/research/foundation-wealth-concentration/embed" width="100%" height="520" style="border:1px solid #e5e7eb;border-radius:12px" title="How concentrated is American foundation wealth? Granted AI" loading="lazy"></iframe>How the $1.53T splits by foundation size
Every U.S. private foundation with IRS-reported assets, grouped by how much it holds. The counts and the dollars run in opposite directions: most foundations are small, and most of the money sits in a few very large ones.
| Foundation size (assets) | Foundations | Share of foundations | Total assets | Share of assets |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under $100K | 39,106 | 32.3% | $785.3M | 0.1% |
| $100K to $1M | 36,566 | 30.2% | $16.0B | 1.0% |
| $1M to $10M | 33,820 | 27.9% | $113.4B | 7.4% |
| $10M to $100M | 10,043 | 8.3% | $290.2B | 18.9% |
| $100M to $1B | 1,531 | 1.3% | $398.6B | 26.0% |
| $1B or more | 141 | 0.1% | $715.1B | 46.6% |
Put differently: 75,672 foundations (62.4%) hold less than $1 million each, and together they control about 1.1% of all foundation wealth. The bottom half hold 0.4%. The average foundation looks rich at $12.7M in assets, but that average is pulled up by the giants: it is 27.5 times the $459,687 median. Gini coefficient of the distribution: 0.94 (0 = every foundation holds an equal amount; 1 = one foundation holds everything).
The 15 largest foundations
Ranked by IRS-reported assets. These are the most visible and most competitive funders in the country; between them the top 10 hold 23% of all foundation wealth.
| # | Foundation | State | Assets | Share of U.S. total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Lilly Endowment Inc. | IN | $105.9B | 6.9% |
| 2 | Gates Foundation | WA | $78.7B | 5.1% |
| 3 | Gates Foundation Trust | WA | $77.6B | 5.1% |
| 4 | Ford Foundation | NY | $17.5B | 1.1% |
| 5 | William & Flora Hewlett Foundation | CA | $14.2B | 0.9% |
| 6 | J. Paul Getty Trust | CA | $13.9B | 0.9% |
| 7 | Robert Wood Johnson Foundation | NJ | $13.4B | 0.9% |
| 8 | Bloomberg Family Foundation Inc. | NY | $12.1B | 0.8% |
| 9 | Gordon E. and Betty I. Moore Foundation | CA | $11.5B | 0.8% |
| 10 | Foundation to Promote Open Society | NY | $10.8B | 0.7% |
| 11 | John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation | IL | $9.3B | 0.6% |
| 12 | Jen-Hsun & Lori Huang Foundation | CA | $9.2B | 0.6% |
| 13 | W. K. Kellogg Foundation Trust | MI | $9.0B | 0.6% |
| 14 | David and Lucile Packard Foundation | CA | $8.5B | 0.6% |
| 15 | Andrew W. Mellon Foundation | NY | $7.8B | 0.5% |
The two Gates entities (the operating foundation and its separately-filing asset trust) file distinct IRS returns and so appear as separate foundations. Counted together their $156.2B would rank first, ahead of the Lilly Endowment’s $105.9B.
Where the wealth sits
The eight states with the most private-foundation wealth, by the foundations headquartered there. Together they hold roughly 65% of the national total.
| State | Foundations | Total assets | Share of U.S. total |
|---|---|---|---|
| California | 12,469 | $239.7B | 15.6% |
| New York | 11,782 | $210.5B | 13.7% |
| Washington | 1,934 | $186.1B | 12.1% |
| Indiana | 1,680 | $118.9B | 7.8% |
| Texas | 9,792 | $93.0B | 6.1% |
| Illinois | 5,615 | $54.6B | 3.6% |
| Florida | 9,193 | $51.6B | 3.4% |
| Pennsylvania | 6,179 | $50.2B | 3.3% |
California and New York hold the most foundation wealth on the strength of their large numbers of foundations. Washington ranks third and Indiana fourth on the strength of just a few giants: the two Gates entities put Washington’s 1,934 foundations third nationally, and the Lilly Endowment alone accounts for $105.9B of Indiana’s $118.9B.
What the numbers show
The shape of foundation wealth looks a lot like the shape of American wealth in general: an enormous long tail of small organizations sitting under a handful of giants. A Gini coefficient of 0.94 is close to the theoretical maximum of 1.0, and the reason is visible in the ranking. The single largest holder, the Lilly Endowment, controls 6.9% of all foundation assets in the country by itself; the top 10 hold 23%, and the top 100 hold 43%.
For most organizations that write grant proposals, though, the more useful half of this picture is the tail, not the top. There are 121,207 foundations in this data, and the median one holds $459,687. The mega-foundations are the names everyone knows and everyone applies to, which is exactly what makes them competitive. The far larger population of small and mid-size foundations, many of them local or regional, has real money to give, with far less competition for it. A funding strategy built only around the Gateses and Fords of the world is aiming at the most crowded 23% of the field.
One important caveat: this study measures wealth, not giving. The figure behind every number here is a foundation’s total assets as reported to the IRS, not the grants it paid out in a year. The two are related. Private foundations are generally required by the IRS to distribute about 5% of their assets in grants and charitable expenses each year, so the asset ranking is a reasonable proxy for grantmaking capacity. But a foundation’s assets are the stock of money it holds, not the flow of grants it makes, and the two can diverge in any given year.
So the headline is real: American foundation wealth is extraordinarily concentrated, and a few dozen institutions hold most of it. But the number that matters more for a nonprofit or a school is the other one: there are more than a hundred thousand foundations in the country, the typical one is small, and the money at that scale is far more reachable than the $1.53T top line suggests. The full methodology and the reconciliation of the universe are below.
Methodology & sources
- Data source
- Foundation asset amounts from the IRS Exempt Organizations Business Master File (EO BMF), as mirrored in Granted’s foundations database. Of 135,942 foundations in the database, 121,207 (89.2%) carry a positive IRS-reported asset amount; those are the universe for this study.
- What the asset figure is (and is not)
asset_amountis the book value of a foundation’s total assets from its most recent IRS filing. It is not annual grants paid: the BMF carries no reliable grants-paid field, so this study measures the stock of foundation wealth, not the flow of grants. We make no claim about how much any foundation gave in a year.- Universe (private foundations)
- All 121,207 asset-positive rows are private foundations by IRS foundation code: 112,486 private non-operating (grantmaking) foundations holding $1.43T, 8,420 holding $74.8B, and 301 private operating foundations holding $27.3B. Grantmaking foundations are 93% of the total wealth.
- One filer, one foundation
- Foundations are counted per EIN (one IRS filer equals one row). Related entities that file separate returns, such as the Gates Foundation and the Gates Foundation Trust, appear as separate foundations. Foundation names are lightly normalized for display (capitalization and punctuation); ranks, states, and asset amounts are verbatim from the source.
- Concentration and Gini coefficient
- Cumulative asset shares are computed over the 121,207 foundations ranked from largest to smallest; the Gini coefficient is computed over the full distribution of positive asset values, where 0 is perfect equality and 1 is maximum concentration. The rank-based cumulative shares were cross-checked against an independent pure-SQL window query and matched to five decimal places.
- Reproducibility
- Every number on this page is generated by a committed analysis script (
scripts/research-studies/foundation-wealth-concentration/analyze.py). The downloadable CSV lists the top 1,000 foundations with their rank, assets, and cumulative share. See our data methodology for how Granted sources and maintains this data.
Free to cite and republish with attribution to Granted AI (grantedai.com/research/foundation-wealth-concentration) under CC BY 4.0. Questions or corrections: nathan@grantedai.com.