Donor retention
Donor Retention Benchmarks by Donor Type (First-Time, Repeat, Recurring, Major)
One blended average is close to useless. Benchmark each donor type on its own.
By Donor Insights · Published August 8, 2026 · Updated August 27, 2026 · 9 min read
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Key takeaways
- There is no single good donor retention benchmark. Benchmark first-time, repeat, recurring, and major donors separately, against your own history and published sector data.
- First-time donors are retained at 18.9%, while donors who gave seven or more times reach 87.4% (Fundraising Effectiveness Project).
- M+R Benchmarks put one-year online retention at 48% overall, 24% for new donors, and 66% for donors with prior giving history.
- Sector dollars rose 5.0% in 2025 while the donor base shrank 3.6% and retention sat at 43.3%, so a rising bottom line can hide a shrinking donor base.
- The most useful benchmark is your own file, year over year, split by donor type.
There is no single good donor retention benchmark, because retention differs sharply by donor type. A useful benchmark separates first-time, repeat, recurring, and major donors and compares each against your own history plus published sector data. As a starting reference, M+R Benchmarks put one-year online retention at 48% overall but only 24% for first-time donors and 66% for donors with prior giving history, according to M+R Benchmarks.
What is a good donor retention benchmark?
A good benchmark is the one that matches the donor type you are measuring. A file made up mostly of first-time donors will retain far fewer people than a file of long-time monthly givers, and comparing either against a single sector average tells you almost nothing. The two most cited public sources are the Fundraising Effectiveness Project, which aggregates data from more than 15,000 organizations and 7.8 million donors, and M+R Benchmarks, a vendor panel focused on online giving.
That 48% overall figure is the number most people quote when they ask what is normal. On its own it is misleading, because it blends a 24% new-donor rate with a 66% repeat rate. The blended average is a description of a file's donor mix as much as its retention, so it moves for reasons that have nothing to do with how well you keep people.
What are the donor retention benchmarks by donor type?
The Fundraising Effectiveness Project shows retention rising steeply with how many times a donor has given. Gift frequency is the clearest public proxy for donor type, and the spread between the bottom and top rows is the whole story:
| Gifts in the prior year | Retained to the next year |
|---|---|
| One | 31.9% |
| Two | 51.9% |
| Three to six | 70.0% |
| Seven or more | 87.4% |
| Donor type | Retained to the next year |
|---|---|
| First-time donors | 18.9% |
| Repeat donors | 59.3% |
Read against those bands, each donor type has its own reasonable target:
- First-time donors are the fragile group. FEP retains first-time donors at 18.9%, and M+R puts first-time online donors at 24%. If your first-time rate sits in that range, you are normal, and the work is to move more of them to a second gift.
- Repeat donors should clear the middle bands. Two gifts already lifts FEP retention to 51.9%, and three to six gifts reaches 70.0%, above M+R's 66% for donors with prior history.
- Recurring donors sit at the top. Monthly givers behave like the seven-or-more band, where FEP retention reaches 87.4%, because the gift renews on its own until someone cancels. M+R puts 71% of sustainers still active a year after they start.
- Major donors have no public retention band worth quoting. Their counts are small enough that one departure swings the rate, so benchmark them against your own file, not against a sector figure.
Why does one blended average mislead you?
A single retention rate averages your most loyal donors together with your most fragile ones, so it barely moves and hides where you are actually losing people. Worse, the sector's headline dollars can rise while the donor base shrinks. In 2025 total fundraising dollars grew 5.0%, the strongest in five years and driven almost entirely by donors giving $5,000 or more, while the donor base shrank 3.6% for a fifth straight year and overall retention sat at 43.3%.
That gap is the reason to read retention as a distribution, not an average. A rising bottom line can sit on top of a first-time cohort you are losing at 80 cents on the dollar. The fix is to calculate retention once per donor type and track each one against itself. Start with the plain donor retention rate formula, then run it separately for each group.
“Increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%.”
Donors are not customers, so the parallel is imperfect, but the direction holds in fundraising too: repeat, retained donors already contribute roughly 60% of total funding, which is why a few points of retention in the right segment are worth more than they look.
How do recurring donors change the benchmark?
Recurring donors are the strongest retention group you can build, because the gift renews by default. Monthly giving was 27% of all online revenue in 2025 and grew 12%, in a year when one-time giving jumped 17% on emergency response (M+R Benchmarks 2026). The durable part is retention: 71% of new sustainers are still giving a year later, against 24% of first-time one-time donors.
A single monthly gift is usually smaller than a one-time gift, but a monthly donor gives across the whole year and rarely lapses in a single step. That makes the recurring cohort the most valuable one to grow and the one where a benchmark against your own retention matters most. For how to size and read that group, see our recurring giving benchmarks.
How do you benchmark against your own file?
The public bands tell you whether a donor type is normal. Your own history tells you whether it is improving. The most useful benchmark is last year's rate for the same group, so you are comparing like with like rather than chasing a sector number built on a different donor mix.
Split the file before you compare
- 1.Tag each prior-year donor as first-time, repeat, recurring, or major, using gift count and gift size.
- 2.Calculate retention once per group, not once for the whole file.
- 3.Compare each group to its own rate a year ago, then to the public band as a sanity check.
- 4.Watch the first-time and recurring groups most closely, since that is where the largest swings and the largest value sit.
Doing this by hand across a full file is slow, and cohorts are easy to mislabel in a spreadsheet. Donor Insights reads your contacts and gifts the way a fund reads a portfolio and rebuilds retention and survival curves for each donor type, so the fragile segments are visible instead of buried in one average. The methodology starts from your own giving records, and the same platform tracks each type against its own history over time. For the longer view of how a single year's donors decay, see donor cohort analysis.
Frequently asked questions
- What is a good donor retention rate?
- It depends on the donor type. First-time donors are retained at about 18.9% to 24%, repeat donors in the 52% to 70% range, and frequent or monthly donors above 85%. A blended figure near the 48% M+R average is only meaningful once you know the mix behind it.
- What is a good first-time donor retention rate?
- The Fundraising Effectiveness Project retains first-time donors at 18.9%, and M+R Benchmarks puts first-time online donors at 24%. A first-time rate in that band is normal. The way to raise it is to move more first-time donors to a second gift.
- Why is my blended retention rate higher or lower than the benchmark?
- Because it depends on your donor mix. A file weighted toward long-time and monthly donors will beat the 48% average, while a file full of newly acquired first-time donors will run below it. Split the rate by donor type before comparing.
- Do these benchmarks come from a peer database of nonprofits?
- No. They come from public sector reports, mainly the Fundraising Effectiveness Project and M+R Benchmarks, combined with your own file's history. The most reliable comparison is each donor type against its own rate last year.
- How often should we benchmark retention by donor type?
- Calculate it annually against the fiscal year and review it by donor type each quarter, so a slide in the first-time or recurring group surfaces while you can still act on it.
Sources
Related articles
How to Calculate Donor Retention Rate (Formula, Example, Benchmarks)
The formula takes two minutes. Reading it well is where the money is.
Recurring Giving Benchmarks: Is Your Monthly Program Actually Healthy?
A monthly program can grow its revenue while quietly losing sustainers. Three health metrics tell you which is happening.
Donor Cohort Analysis: Read Your File the Way a Fund Reads a Portfolio
Group donors by when they joined, then watch each group age. The average never told you this.
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