Donations to non-profit organizations in Puerto Rico increased 136.5% in eight years

Report from the Institute of Statistics and UPR reveals that donations deducted from payroll exceeded $329 million in 2023

The Puerto Rico Institute of Statistics and the Graduate School of Public Administration (EGAP) of the University of Puerto Rico published the new Generosity Report 2015-2023, an analysis that reveals sustained growth in monetary donations reported by taxpayers in Puerto Rico over the past eight years.

The report, based on official data from the Department of Treasury on deductions claimed for donations to non-profit organizations, shows that total monetary donations increased from $139.5 million in 2015 to $329.8 million in 2023, representing a cumulative increase of 136.5%.

The analysis also reveals that, during the period studied, taxpayers in Puerto Rico claimed an average of $231.9 million annually in deductions for donations. The largest annual increase occurred between 2020 and 2021, when deductions grew 19.6%, a behavior that coincides with the period after the pandemic and multiple emergencies that impacted Puerto Rico.

“The report confirms that in Puerto Rico there is a culture of support and solidarity that deserves to be documented and studied in greater depth. This data allow us to begin to measure Puerto Rico's philanthropic behavior, using official and comparable information,” said Dr. Luz Mairym López-Rodríguez, associate professor at EGAP and project manager.

The doctor added that “the preparation of this report represents an opportunity for Puerto Rico to join the discussion on generosity, particularly in the context of Latin America and the Caribbean. In addition, it will make it possible to promote academic research based on concrete data.” He also expressed his gratitude to Omar Álvarez González, the Institute's statistical project assistant, for his collaboration in the development of the report.

“In many jurisdictions around the world, there are efforts to measure and document the ecosystem of generosity. In Puerto Rico, there is still little statistical information on this topic, so this report represents an important step in generating comparable data and bringing a new dimension to the economic and social analysis of Puerto Rico,” said Dr. Orville M. Disdier Flores, executive director of the Institute of Statistics.

Disdier also mentioned that “non-profit organizations and philanthropy are an important part of the social and economic fabric of Puerto Rico, and having official statistics on generosity allows us to better understand how people support community, educational, cultural and health causes, among others. That is why we welcomed the collaboration proposed by Dr. Luz Mairym López-Rodríguez to develop this analysis.”

The report also includes interactive graphics and maps that allow us to visualize trends and compare the behavior of deductions for donations over time. Although the total amount of donations increased, the study points out that the number of taxpayers who claimed deductions for donations showed a reduction during the period analyzed, suggesting that the average contributions claimed are higher than a decade ago.

The report is available at: Generosity Report 2015-2023.

‍

Author: Alejandro López Flores and Ronald G. Hernández Maldonado

Date: November 6, 2025

‍

Poverty must be contextualized with social variables to understand and address it effectively. The Backwardness Index for Puerto Rico is an indicator composed of five variables that comprise two dimensions: Economic Mobility and Demography. This index seeks to measure poverty beyond income thresholds, and to incorporate elements of social backwardness and relative deprivation. An exploratory factor analysis was carried out on a set of variables to validate the construction of the multidimensional deprivation model, and to retain the variables that best captured the phenomenon of deprivation. Then, the retained variables were normalized using thresholds. The thresholds were obtained with data from the Puerto Rico Community Survey (ECPR or PRCS in English) and the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS in English). The scores of the different variables were aggregated by dimension, using the arithmetic mean, and the scores resulting from the dimensions were aggregated using the geometric mean. The values of the index lie between 0 and 1 where, the higher the score, the worse the result of the phenomenon.42 municipalities showed a decrease in their index score between the periods compared. Of these 42 municipalities, 22 showed a decrease in their score greater than 5%. Likewise, there are concentrations of municipalities with high Lagging Index scores in the central-southwest and southeastern areas of Puerto Rico.

‍

Demographic profile of Electoral Districts released