Launching the Top 100 Museum Donors Ranking

Personal note from Nick Gray: Hi everyone! We have been slow over the last two months to update the database and make changes, as my team has been focused on a different project with all of our engineering resources. We are looking forward to getting back to development of this website and building out a lot more data soon. Thanks for your patience.

Today we launched a new page that I have wanted to build for a long time: Top Museum Donors in America.

🏆 The Top 100 List

This page ranks the 100 largest donors in the PatronView database by total documented giving. Together they account for more than $25.9 billion in contributions to museums and cultural institutions, all sourced from public annual reports.

A few highlights from the list:

• The Kinder Foundation sits at the top with roughly $890 million in documented giving.

• David H. Koch and Mortimer B. Zuckerman lead the individual donors.

• 51 of the 100 donors support five or more institutions. The rest concentrate their giving on one or two places they care about deeply.

Foundations and individuals appear side by side on this list. That is intentional: museums list them side by side in their annual reports, so we rank them the same way.

📊 What the Numbers Mean

One note on methodology: this national list ranks donors by total dollars given, while our city roundups rank donors by number of contributions. That is why the two sets of rankings can look different for the same donor.

These totals are documented giving, not lifetime giving estimates. Museums often publish donations as ranges like “$1,000,000 to $5,000,000,” and in those cases we use the midpoint. The numbers are not adjusted for inflation, and they only cover the institutions and years we have imported so far. So almost everyone on this list has given more than what we show.

I think this is still the most detailed public ranking of museum philanthropy anywhere. If you spot something that looks wrong, please tell us and we will fix it.

We have also published city roundups: Boston, Chicago, Houston, New York City, and Philadelphia.

🔜 What’s Next

By June 2026 the PatronView database had grown past 3 million contributions, and it keeps growing. The next couple of months are about getting back to basics: importing new annual reports, adding institutions, and writing short bios for more donors. Like I said in the intro, we’ve been distracted with deep engineering work on another project, but I can’t wait to get back to working on PatronView.

Thanks for reading. If you have feedback or ideas, email me at hello@nickgray.net or find me on LinkedIn.