A new study suggests that Northern California’s pocketbooks are frequently opened for charitable causes, with six counties in the Bay Area listed in the top 10 most generous counties in the state.
The counties of Marin, San Mateo, Santa Clara and Contra Costa consecutively topped the charts by taking up the first four spots, according to the ranking from financial technology company SmartAsset. The study “calculated how much people donate as a percentage of their net income and the proportion of people in each county who make charitable donations,” according to the company.
San Francisco County ranked seventh in the state, and Alameda County ranked tenth. Across the state of California, charitable contributions made up around 1.23% of people’s income; only 9.28% of income tax returns itemized charitable contributions. The study analyzed the Statistics of Income dataset at the county level by the Internal Revenue Service; researchers did not tally specific charities or causes that benefited from donations in the study.
San Mateo County was listed as the county that donated the most in proportion to residents’ income. Of the tax returns that itemized contributions in San Mateo County, the amount of money donated was equal to 3.5% of residents’ income, the study found. In both San Francisco and Santa Clara counties, contributions were equivalent to 3.2% of income.
Marin County was ranked the most generous county in California, with 23.50% of its over 130,000 returns filed itemizing charitable contributions. San Mateo County came in second, with 18% of the county’s tax returns listing charitable contributions. Contra Costa County came in third with 17.9% of tax returns showing donations.
A report in 2023 found that Northern Californians had donated more than Southern California residents, according to an Orange County Register story. In fact, residents who live in San Francisco ZIP code 94104, located between Chinatown and the Financial District, donated the the highest percentage of their adjusted gross income, 17.6%, to charity out of the more than 1,400 California ZIP codes reported by the IRS. Palo Alto ZIP code 94301, known as “Professorville,” ranked second in the analysis and another ZIP code near Stanford University — 94304 — placed third, giving 12.9% of their incomes to charity.
The San Francisco Bay Area is known for its wealth and extensive history of philanthropy. The National Center for Family Philanthropy has highlighted that the Bay Area is one of the most prosperous areas in the U.S., but also one of its most economically unequal places at the same time due to widening income inequality and under-resourced nonprofits, both of which worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic.
A July 2020 study by the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society at Stanford University analyzing how high-capacity Bay Area millennial donors used their money, supported the idea that donors want to know that they will get a “return on investment,” or a visible impact, on the organization or cause they donate to. The study also found that millennials were less likely to donate to traditional causes, such as religion, their alma maters and the arts, but were more likely to support causes that were political, local or “existential,” such as climate change, the future of democracy, inequality, criminal justice and homelessness.
