IRS Data Show Non-Cash Giving Fell 19.2% in 2023, the Newest Year Counted

A nonprofit deciding whether to build the capacity to receive gifts of property rather than cash needs some estimate of how large and how steady that kind of giving is, because the decision commits staff time and system costs against revenue that has not yet arrived. Two very different kinds of record speak to that question. A commercial platform that processes asset gifts can publish its own processed volume within months of the year it covers, while the federal government counts gifts of property through Form 8283, which an individual donor files to claim an itemized deduction for giving property instead of money. The federal count runs on a much slower cycle, and the newest tax year the Internal Revenue Service has published is 2023.

That 2023 record is worth reading closely, because it is the most recent federal measurement of this category. The total value of non-cash charitable contributions that individuals carried from Form 8283 onto their tax returns fell by 19.2 percent, from 115.9 billion dollars to 93.7 billion dollars. The number of returns carrying such a gift moved much less, from 2.9 million to 2.8 million, so the count of households making a property gift held far steadier than the worth of what those households gave.

Understanding where that contraction sat matters for anyone planning around a specific asset, because the category is not evenly composed. Corporate stock accounted for 57.7 percent of the total amount carried onto those returns in 2023, and the value of donated stock fell 29.8 percent, from 77.1 billion dollars to 54.1 billion dollars, so the largest single component contracted faster than the category containing it. The average stock donation per return came to approximately 361,700 dollars, and a single return can carry gifts to more than one charity, so that average describes the scale at which donors of stock operate rather than the size of any one organization's gift.

Setting that record beside the figures more commonly quoted in fundraising conversations requires care, because the two describe different years and different populations. The Giving Block, a commercial company that processes digital asset gifts for nonprofit clients, reported processing more than 100 million dollars in cryptocurrency donations through its own platform during 2025, with 66 percent growth in that platform volume from the prior year, online stock donation volume through the platform up 127 percent, and digital donation volume for donor-advised funds more than doubling. A donor-advised fund is a charitable account a donor puts money into in advance and then directs to nonprofits over time. Those figures describe one company's processed volume for 2025. The federal figures describe individual taxpayers who filed Form 8283 for 2023, so the two cannot be laid end to end as a single trend.

A second limit on the platform figures deserves stating, because it affects how much weight a board can put on them. A processor's volume rises when existing donors give more and it also rises when the processor signs additional nonprofit clients, and a single published growth rate does not separate those movements. That is an ordinary property of commercial reporting, and it is precisely why a measurement drawn from tax returns answers something the platform figures were never built to answer.

The gap between the two publishing cycles is what bears on decisions being made this autumn, because an organization can read a processor's account of 2025 while the government's account stops at 2023. Any check of the faster figures against an independent measurement therefore has to wait for a publication cycle no organization controls. The practical effect is that capacity decisions get made on the evidence that happens to be available rather than on the evidence that would settle the question.

Stating the limits of the federal record protects against reading it too hard. The publication reports amounts and does not report causes, so it does not explain why the total fell, and it describes neither 2024 nor 2025. A drop in the value of donated stock therefore establishes nothing about whether donors grew less willing to give assets. Growth in one processor's volume establishes nothing about the size of the national pool either, because a single company can take a larger share of a pool that is itself shrinking, and neither record carries the figures that would separate those two possibilities.

For nonprofit and foundation professionals, the consequence lands on how you build the business case, because a projection anchored to a processor's growth rate imports that processor's client mix and that processor's year into your forecast. Your own donor file gives you a steadier basis, meaning the count of your supporters who have ever given property and what those gifts were worth, so that the case for building intake capacity survives a year in which the national figure contracts by nineteen percent as it did in 2023.

For digital and crypto-native giving leaders, the same gap puts unusual weight on what you disclose, because your reporting reaches the field years before the federal count covering the same period does, and finance committees are reading it in the meantime. Describing the method underneath the number, meaning which clients were counted and what was included in volume over which period, gives a committee something it can examine on its own.

For donors and family-office advisors, the federal record supplies a useful check on how steady this form of giving is, because the total value of donated stock fell 29.8 percent in a single year while the number of returns carrying any property gift barely moved. A client who gives appreciated assets, meaning holdings such as stock that have grown in value since purchase, is giving something whose worth can move sharply between one giving season and the next, so a multi-year plan calibrated to a single year's asset values carries a risk the 2023 figures make concrete.

For corporate giving and CSR leaders, meaning those running corporate social responsibility and company giving programs, the most useful property of this dataset is what it leaves out, because it counts individual taxpayers only and carries nothing at all about corporate contributions. A benchmarking exercise that borrowed the nineteen percent decline as a read on corporate non-cash giving would be citing a population containing no companies, which means the figure belongs in a briefing as context on individual donor behavior and has no standing as a peer comparison.

For NGOs and international organizations, meaning nonprofits that move money or run programs across national borders, the lag itself is the operational problem, because program budgets and institutional funding agreements are often fixed years ahead. An organization committing in 2026 to a three-year program is setting revenue assumptions that the independent evidence will not be able to test until well after the program has been delivered, which argues for building the funding plan so that a contraction year can be absorbed without a mid-program cut.

"The federal count of non-cash giving arrives years after the decisions it could have informed, which is a reason to read it carefully when it lands, because it is the one account of this category that the industry did not produce for itself."

EILEEN HERNANDEZ, THE STRATEGIC STEWARD

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This question belongs to the first pillar of the Disintermediated Impact Architecture Protocol, Algorithmic Trust, which concerns the confidence a system earns through verifiability instead of reputation. Where the quickest available evidence about a category is published by companies that sell into it, that confidence has not yet been built, however accurate those companies turn out to be. The slow federal count carries a weight its lateness disguises, because it remains the part of this evidence that an outside party can check without the industry's cooperation.

Sources and Frameworks

Internal Revenue Service, Statistics of Income, Individual Noncash Charitable Contributions, Tax Year 2023 (Publication 5337). "The number of returns that were filed with a Form 8283 totaled 2.8 million in TY 2023, down from 2.9 million in TY 2022." "The total amount that was carried from Form 8283 to Schedule A decreased by 19.2%, from $115.9 billion in TY 2022 to $93.7 billion in TY 2023." Schedule A is the section of an individual tax return on which itemized deductions, including charitable gifts, are listed. "Corporate stock donations accounted for 57.7% of the total amount donated. These donation amounts decreased 29.8% between TYs 2022 and 2023, from $77.1 billion to $54.1 billion, yielding an average stock donation per return of approximately $361,700 in TY 2023." Retrieved 17 September 2026 from https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p5337.pdf. Tax year 2023 is the most recent year published as of that date, confirmed against the Statistics of Income data tables listing tax years 2003 through 2023.

The Giving Block, 2026 Annual Report on Crypto Philanthropy and Digital Fundraising Innovation, reporting 2025 data. "In 2025, that momentum reached a major milestone: we processed over $100 million in crypto donations." "With 66% year-over-year growth from 2024 to 2025, crypto donations are no longer experimental." "Compared to 2024, online stock donation volume increased 127% in 2025." "2025 marked our strongest year for digital DAF donations to date, with donation volume more than doubling compared to 2024." Every figure above describes donations processed through The Giving Block's own platform and not the crypto philanthropy sector as a whole. The Giving Block is a commercial donation processor, and the report presents self-reported platform data rather than independent research. Retrieved 17 September 2026 from https://thegivingblock.com/annual-report/

Cole, A. L. (2026, March 5). Crypto, stock, and digital asset giving grow. NonProfit PRO. Trade coverage reporting the same platform total, the same 127 percent stock figure, and the same doubling of digital donor-advised fund donation volume. This article does not carry the 66 percent growth figure, which is drawn from the report itself, and its restatement of company-reported figures is not an independent measurement of them. Retrieved 17 September 2026 from https://www.nonprofitpro.com/article/crypto-giving-hits-100m-but-stock-and-daf-giving-signal-a-broader-shift/

DIA Protocol pillar referenced: Algorithmic Trust, the first pillar, concerning the confidence a system earns through verifiability instead of reputation.

Scope note. The two data sources describe different years and different populations and appear here as separate records. The federal figures cover individual taxpayers who filed a Form 8283 for tax year 2023 and carried the amount to Schedule A, which means donors who did not itemize their deductions are not represented in them. The platform figures cover one company's processed volume for 2025. No comparison between the two is offered or implied, and neither is used to describe the other.