why post-2020 is the operative window for foundation behavior

why the window begins in 2019

Why does aysra's analytical window begin in 2019? The answer is partly technical and partly behavioral. The 2019 filing year provides a useful baseline, while the years that follow show how foundations responded to changing conditions and whether those responses became lasting patterns.

On the technical side, comprehensive, structured filing data became more consistently available as the Taxpayer First Act moved exempt organizations toward mandatory electronic filing beginning with tax years after July 1, 2019.¹ Older filings are not useless. They still reveal longstanding priorities, institutional loyalties, geographic focus, and recurring relationships. But the structured data available from 2019 forward is better suited to comparing foundation behavior from one year to the next and across a large number of filers.

At nearly the same moment, the conditions shaping foundation grantmaking began to change. The COVID-19 pandemic pushed many foundations to reconsider payout, grant restrictions, application requirements, emergency support, and flexibility for grantees. MacKenzie Scott's large, unrestricted, low-friction grants made a different model of philanthropic practice highly visible.² Trust-based philanthropy³ gave language and structure to practices many nonprofits had long requested, including multi-year support, general operating support, streamlined paperwork, and fewer burdens on grantees.

These developments did not change philanthropy forever, nor did they cause every foundation to move in the same direction. That is part of what makes the post-2020 period so useful for understanding contemporary foundation behavior. Some foundations changed substantially. Others barely changed at all.

The post-2020 period is unusually revealing because more reliable structured data begins to overlap with a meaningful test of institutional behavior. This insight examines two signals that the filings capture comparatively well: payout behavior and grant size distribution.

Together, they ask two related questions. Did foundations put more money toward charitable purposes? And did that increase translate into larger grants?

Neither signal tells the whole story on its own. Taken together, they help distinguish temporary response from durable change, aggregate growth from changes in grantmaking practice, and broad sector narrative from what can actually be observed in 990-PF filings.

signal 1 | payout behavior

Private foundations reported substantially more in qualifying distributions during the pandemic, but their payout ratios did not rise with them. That divergence is the finding: qualifying distributions⁴ show the dollars put toward charitable purposes, while the payout ratio places those dollars in relation to the foundation's assets.

Across 18,553 private foundations that filed continuously from 2018 through 2023,^5,6 qualifying distributions rose from $8.7 billion to $12.5 billion. The largest annual increase came in 2020, when distributions grew by 10.5 percent, compared with 2.3 percent the year before.⁷ Put simply, foundations were putting more money toward qualifying charitable purposes.

Yet the median payout ratio remained near 5.3 percent throughout the period and fell to a series low of 5.04 percent in 2021.⁸ The ratio fell because foundation assets grew faster than qualifying distributions, enlarging the denominator against which payout was measured. The two measures must be read together: a foundation can substantially increase its qualifying distributions and still report a lower payout ratio if its assets grow faster.

The filings support a more specific account of pandemic-era payout. Qualifying distributions increased, with the largest single-year increase occurring in 2020. These increases did not produce a corresponding rise in the typical payout ratio because foundation assets grew faster than qualifying distributions. The sector reported more qualifying distributions in dollar terms without increasing the typical share of assets put toward charitable purposes.

Aggregate totals cannot distinguish foundations that raised distributions and kept them elevated from those that responded for one year and then returned to their earlier pattern, because this requires comparing each foundation with its own pre-pandemic baseline rather than treating the field-wide increase as a shared and lasting behavioral shift.

This analysis follows 18,553 private foundations that filed every year from 2018 through 2023. The cohort is built from filings present in aysra's corpus rather than from the full filing population. Because coverage for tax year 2021 is incomplete, the cohort is smaller than the true population of continuous filers, and foundations whose 2021 returns are absent from the corpus are not represented. Tax year 2024 is excluded because the IRS corpus remains substantially incomplete and is not yet comparable with prior years.

signal 2 | grant size distribution

Surprisingly, the pandemic did not produce a broad shift toward larger grants among private foundations. Across foundations that file Form 990-PF grant schedules, the typical grant remained relatively flat over the period for which annual coverage is sufficiently complete. A modest move toward larger grants appeared later, but it remained limited rather than spreading broadly across the sector.

This finding may seem at odds with the philanthropic narrative of 2020 and 2021. Bridgespan's work on "big bets," along with annual reporting on the country's largest individual donors, documented a real increase in large, unrestricted gifts. Those gifts happened, and aysra's analysis does not suggest otherwise. But the most prominent giving of the period was not necessarily representative of private foundations as a whole. MacKenzie Scott does not operate through a private foundation that reports its grants on Form 990-PF. Her giving is therefore absent from this corpus as private-foundation grantmaking, even though it was central to the public narrative of the period.

The question the filings can answer is simpler: did private foundations broadly follow?

For the most part, they did not. Among private foundations, the median qualifying grant was $4,000 in 2019 and $4,053 in 2020, rising to $5,000 by 2022.⁹ The interquartile range held at $1,000 to $15,000 in both 2019 and 2020, widening only to $1,000 to $17,952 in 2022.¹⁰ Grants above $1 million accounted for 0.74 percent of qualifying grants in 2019, 0.70 percent in 2020, and 0.84 percent in 2022, remaining well under 1 percent throughout.¹¹ Tax year 2021 is excluded from the primary year-over-year interpretation because aysra's ingestion backfill for that year remains incomplete. The 2019 figure is drawn from the pre-mandate e-filing population, which skews toward larger foundations, so it is not measured on the same universe as later years.

A separate comparison group of public charities and regranting organizations reporting grants on Schedule I shows a somewhat clearer, though still limited, increase. Their median grant rose from about $15,600 in 2019 to $20,000 in 2021, then eased back toward $19,000 by 2024.¹² The movement is better understood as a small upward adjustment than a transformation in grantmaking practice. The share of active funders making at least one grant above $1 million remained narrow throughout the observed period, at roughly 7 percent in the later-year data.¹³ These Schedule I figures extend through tax year 2024, which is excluded from the private-foundation trend above, so the two series do not cover the same span and should not be read against each other year for year. The increase was modest and did not indicate broad adoption of very large grants across the sector. Once inflation is considered, the apparent growth becomes smaller still. Between 2019 and 2024, inflation reduced the purchasing power of a nominal $1 million grant by roughly one-fifth.

The filings do not show a sector-wide surge in grant size. They show that very large grants continued to come from a narrow share of funders, with only limited expansion later in the period. The behavioral signal is not that large grants swept through private-foundation grantmaking after 2020, but that most of the field did not follow the most visible examples.

Tax year 2024 remains incomplete and is excluded from the primary private-foundation trend interpretation. Figures are based on filings with clean, single-count provenance and represent a large annual sample rather than a complete census.

what the signals show together

Two narratives came out of the period. Foundations distributed substantially more money, and that expansion brought a turn toward much larger grants. Both draw on real and highly visible examples, but set against the filings, they do not travel equally far across the foundation sector.

The first narrative is broadly supported. Qualifying distributions rose sharply in 2020 and continued to climb through 2023. Foundations reported billions of additional dollars in qualifying distributions, with the largest annual increase occurring during the first year of the pandemic. The payout ratio tells a more complicated story: it remained flat to slightly lower because foundation assets grew faster than qualifying distributions.

The second narrative receives less support. The typical private-foundation grant held flat between 2019 and 2020 and rose modestly by 2022. Grants above $1 million continued to come from a narrow share of funders, staying under 1 percent of qualifying grants throughout, without evidence of a field-wide shift toward very large grants.

Read together, the two signals show that foundations reported more in qualifying distributions without fundamentally changing the size of the typical grant. The pandemic produced a clear increase in aggregate distributions, but not the general shift toward larger awards that the most prominent examples might suggest.

This distinction is central to aysra's way of reading these filings for behavioral insights. A sector can grow in dollars without changing in the same way at the level of individual grants. A headline gift can be consequential without being representative, and a median payout ratio can fall even as overall grant distributions rise. External research frames the question, while several years of filings show whether the answer reflects a temporary response, an enduring practice, or the behavior of a visible few.