Since Coutts stopped publishing its Million Pound Donor Report, UK fundraisers have had very little data on the biggest gifts. We wanted to fill some of that gap.
AAW has published Major Gifts to UK Charities and Universities, bringing together every publicly recorded gift of £1m or more from named individuals and foundations since 2019. We found 569 gifts worth £3.3bn.
Much of the biggest giving is hidden
Tracking gifts at this level is difficult. Many donors give anonymously and many institutions choose not to name them. We found 10 anonymous gifts worth £222m, mostly to universities, but these are only the gifts that were announced at all. Plenty of seven-figure donations never appear in a press release or a set of accounts.
More money is also moving through routes that are difficult to trace. Donor-advised funds in the UK made grants of £788m in 2024, up 22% on the previous year, according to NPT UK. Once money passes through a fund like this, the original donor can disappear from view.
Our dataset is therefore incomplete and inevitably favours gifts that have been made public. It is still the most comprehensive picture of publicly recorded major giving in the UK currently available.
There are not many £1m gifts
Across the seven complete years from 2019 to 2025, we recorded 537 gifts of £1m or more. That is fewer than 80 a year across the whole of the UK.
Most came from foundations. Only 64 of the 569 gifts in the full dataset were made directly by individuals, although these were much larger, averaging £19.6m compared with £4.0m for foundation gifts.
The top five named individual donors account for around £570m between them. Transformational individual philanthropy in this country depends on a very small number of people.
And they go to very few places
Higher education received £1.55bn, almost half the total value of gifts recorded. Oxford and Cambridge alone received £895m, representing 58% of the higher education total. Ten of the 13 largest named individual donors in the dataset gave mainly to universities or colleges. Chris Rokos's £190m gift to Cambridge this year is the largest single gift we recorded.
Mainstream charities receive far less. Social welfare charities received 103 gifts worth £202m, around 6% of the total. Their average gift was £2.0m, compared with £12.3m for universities.
This reflects what we see in AAW's own benchmarking. In this year's Fundraising Benchmarks Report, produced with the Chartered Institute of Fundraising, major donors accounted for just 5.6% of voluntary income across 104 charities which together raised £2.2bn. Only six reported receiving a gift of £1m or more from an individual during the year. For 41 charities, the largest major donor gift was under £100,000.
I regularly review fundraising strategies and appeal plans that depend on securing one or more seven-figure gifts. The data suggests that very few charities are achieving this. We need to be much more realistic about what it takes.
Why universities win
Part of the answer is relationships. Universities have alumni who stay connected for decades, and some of those alumni go on to become very wealthy. But I think the bigger factor is the scale of ambition.
Universities can put forward ideas that match the size of the gift. Stephen Schwarzman's £150m gift to Oxford in 2019 funded a new centre for the humanities. The National Gallery received two gifts of £150m each in 2025 towards a campus expansion that will transform a world-famous institution.
These are ambitious projects with a clear purpose and a lasting legacy. If you want to raise a really big amount of money, you need a really big idea.
Most charities do not present their work in this way. They ask major donors to fund a share of existing services, or a slightly larger version of what they already do. That can be a perfectly reasonable proposition for a gift of £50,000. It is unlikely to persuade someone to give £20m.
At that level, donors want to change something. They want to understand what their money will make possible and see the difference it can make.
Some charities are already doing this successfully. Great Ormond Street Hospital, the Type 1 Diabetes Grand Challenge and Cambridge Children's Hospital have all secured very large gifts for specific, ambitious projects. Before a charity starts researching prospects for a £10m gift, it needs a proposition that justifies asking for one.
The exception: legacies
There is one area of major giving by individuals that our report does not include, and it tells a very different story: gifts in wills.
UK legacy income reached £4.4bn in 2025, according to the Legacy Giving Report from Legacy Futures and Smee & Ford, with charities receiving most of this money. In our benchmarks, legacies account for 36.7% of voluntary income, more than six times the share from major donors.
Universities, despite their success with living donors, recorded just 12 legacies of £1m or more across 79 institutions in 2024–25, according to CASE.
There is a striking contrast here. Individuals who rarely make seven-figure gifts to charities during their lifetime are leaving very substantial sums in their wills. Charities are already trusted with major gifts from individuals. Many of those gifts simply arrive after the supporter has died.
The opportunity is to give people compelling reasons to make those gifts during their lifetime, when they can see the difference their generosity makes.
Big gifts need big ideas
The findings should prompt charities to look carefully at their major giving ambitions. A strategy built around securing gifts of £1m, £5m or £10m needs more than a list of wealthy prospects and a plan to approach them. It needs a proposition with the ambition to match.
That means thinking hard about what the charity could achieve with a transformational gift, what would be genuinely different as a result and why a donor would want to make it happen.
Not every charity will have a project worth £20m. But every charity thinking seriously about major gifts should be able to articulate its most ambitious ideas and the difference they could make.
Our new report provides a clearer picture of where the biggest gifts are going, who is making them and how concentrated this market has become. It is a useful starting point for any charity reviewing its major giving ambitions. Get your copy today!
AAW holds much more data than we can publish and works with clients on more detailed, bespoke benchmarking. If you would like to explore what the findings mean for your own major giving plans, please get in touch below.