Which Countries Give The Most Aid Money?

Which countries give the most aid money? Which are generous, or altruistic?

In times of crisis, which governments help other countries, and people in need there, the most?

For decades, all of us NGO people who knew anything about grants and the various kinds of aid, knew that the USA was the biggest supplier of aid in the world. While there are many kinds of aid: financial aid, food aid, emergency aid, development aid, infrastructure aid, and more, the US government was the biggest global source, followed by the European Commission.

There are other sources of monetary aid too: like foundations, corporate donors, individual private donors, and the general public, who are my favorite. These are people who saw a disaster on the news, wanted to help, and donated to charities online, or dropped cash in a donation box. Donations from these wonderful, empathetic people easily add up to millions of dollars in aid, and save many lives. (Thank you!) These funds are also more difficult to tabulate for grand totals.

So today, I’ll stick to monetary aid from governments.

Without further ado, here’s the grand totals for total reported funding for the top 20 aid donors for all of 2025. Some of these are surprising.

The source for this total reported funding is the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Financial Tracking Service. (UNOCHA – FTS). I have used this website for NGO press releases sometimes; if you click around, it’s the best way to track which governments are giving aid for crises around the world, and which aren’t.

My biggest surprise on viewing this, is that in 2025 the US government was STILL the top donor! A total of $3.4 Billion was still donated, even after early in the year, the Trump administration disregarded congressionally approved foreign aid budgets, and slashed foreign aid down to levels not seen in years. (It’s a huge reduction from the previous year, more on that later.)

You may have noticed that the world’s 2nd largest economy, China (PRC) is not listed in this top 20. But I should mention that China gave a massive amount of infrastructure aid to countries in need, which obviously is also needed for disaster recovery, and for development.

But how have specific funding amounts changed? We all know that the US government massively cut aid from the 2024 budget. And what about other countries? Did they cut aid too?

Here are the totals from 2024:

So how have the numbers and countries changed?

At the top, the current White House administration, under its ‘America first’ policy, cut this aid down $10 BILLION from 1 year earlier, compared to the Biden administration, (which was still only around 1% of the US government budget). It was slashed from $14.1 Billion down to less than $3.5 Billion! That was huge drop, over a 75% cut in aid!

In the aid world, we know this is beyond a tragedy in the making. This huge drop in aid funding will result in the preventable deaths of many thousands of people, not just during this year, but in coming years.

As for other countries, many also made aid cuts, though not as drastic. Inflation and has taken a bite, and budgets were tightened. There has been increased European governments’ focus on aid for Ukraine too.

For other specific countries:

Germany cut their aid by more than half.

France cut their aid by 45%. Turkey cut their aid by 40%. Switzerland cut their aid by almost 39%. Australia cut their aid by nearly 30%. The UK cut their aid by 21%.

In 2025, Denmark fell out of the top 20 list. So did Pakistan.

It deserves mention, that European countries also contributed to the European Commission, last year’s 2nd highest donor.

On the positive side, Canada, Italy, Korea (RoK), Norway, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, and UAE increased their aid donations.

Qatar’s donor money more than TRIPLED!

THANK YOU TO ALL NATIONS THAT INCREASED YOUR AID!

But overall, aid donations are way down.

2026 has only just started.

And more aid will be urgently needed.

You can count on it.