In our 2025 grantmaking year, GiveWell approved $418 million in grants to highly cost-effective programs in order to save and improve lives as much as we can. Through years of deliberate groundwork, we’ve been growing our research capacity and scope in order to direct substantially more funding to the most impactful opportunities we can find. Last year’s grantmaking reflects this growth, and we will be continuing an intensive effort this year to scale our ability to partner with donors to help people in need.
Between February 1, 2025, and January 31, 2026, GiveWell approved 131 grants to 69 organizations—the most grants we’ve made in a year so far. This post provides an overview of the kinds of grants we made and the impact we had last year. This was only possible thanks to the generosity of our donors. We’re incredibly grateful for the trust you place in our research and for your partnership in trying to do the most good we can together.
Increased Grantmaking
In 2025, we launched more than 200 formal grant investigations, after reviewing many additional promising opportunities. Tens of thousands of hours went into this research, which resulted in 131 approved grants. This is more than double the number of grants we approved during 2024, and resulted in a year-over-year increase of more than 20% in total grantmaking dollars.
Double Our Cost-Effectiveness Threshold
In 2025, we generally considered funding opportunities that our research estimated to be at least 8x our cost-effectiveness benchmark. Overall, we estimate that the average cost-effectiveness of the money spent across all our grants was approximately double that: 16x our benchmark.
You can see a more detailed breakdown of our grant dollars by cost-effectiveness in the figure below, which excludes some smaller grants for which we did not create a formal cost-effectiveness estimate.
Expanded Cause Areas and Reach
While GiveWell is often known for its Top Charities, we’ve been substantially broadening our work over the last several years as part of our mission to help people in need as much as we can. Of our total 2025 grant funding, $309 million was allocated to highly cost-effective programs other than our Top Charities. As this shift shows, our growing research team is increasingly able to find a wider variety of highly impactful programs and cause areas to support.
Malaria prevention and treatment was the largest area of our grantmaking over the last year, and we directed substantial funding to a growing number of other global health and development areas as well. You can see a full list of our 2025 grants