75.7 Million Americans Volunteered Last Year. Here's What That Actually Costs.

The Biggest Rebound Nobody Expected

AmeriCorps dropped its 2023 Civic Engagement and Volunteering data on November 19, and the headline numbers are genuinely surprising. After the pandemic drove volunteering off a cliff — from 30% participation to below 23% in 2021, the steepest two-decade decline on record — the rebound has been dramatic.

75.7 million Americans formally volunteered between September 2022 and September 2023. That is a 5.1 percentage point increase from 2021. The largest expansion of formal volunteering ever recorded in the CEV supplement's history.

They contributed 4.99 billion hours of service, valued at $167.2 billion using the Independent Sector's methodology.

To be clear about what that $167.2 billion means: it is calculated using Independent Sector's 2023 value of volunteer time at $33.49 per hour (they have since updated it to $34.79 for 2024). The hourly rate is derived from BLS average hourly earnings for production and non-supervisory workers on private non-farm payrolls, plus a 15.7% fringe benefit adjustment.

It is a big number. It is also, by most economists' assessment, a conservative one. It values a retired surgeon volunteering at a community health clinic at the same rate as a college student helping at a food bank. The replacement cost for the surgeon's skills would be considerably higher.

The Virtual Volunteering Shift

Here is the data point I find most interesting, and the one that has gotten the least attention: the CEV supplement tracked virtual and hybrid volunteering for the first time.

13.4 million Americans volunteered virtually or in a hybrid format. They averaged 95 hours of service — compared to 64 hours for in-person-only volunteers. Virtual and hybrid volunteers contributed 1.2 billion hours worth $41.5 billion.

Read that again. Virtual volunteers gave 48% more hours than in-person volunteers.

This makes intuitive sense if you think about it. The friction of in-person volunteering — driving to a location, parking, being there for a fixed block of time — limits how many hours someone can realistically give. Virtual volunteering removes that friction. A board member who can join a committee meeting from their kitchen at 8pm on a Wednesday will give more hours than one who has to drive 40 minutes to a clubhouse.

For any organisation running committees, boards, or working groups: this is data that should change how you think about volunteer engagement. The old model of "everyone meets in person at the clubhouse on the first Monday of every month" is actively limiting volunteer hours.

The State-by-State Picture

The national rate of 28.3% masks enormous state-level variation. Utah leads at 46.6%. Vermont and Minnesota are both above 40%. At the other end, New York, Nevada, and Florida are in the low 20s.

Independent Sector's state-level hourly values also vary dramatically: from $17.32 in Puerto Rico to $52.06 in DC. Massachusetts ($42.00), Washington ($41.70), and California ($40.14) all exceed $40 per hour.

If your nonprofit operates in a high-wage state, the dollar value of your volunteer labour is significantly higher than the national average. A California nonprofit with 50 volunteers each giving 100 hours per year is receiving $200,700 in labour at the state rate. That number belongs in every fundraising pitch, every board report, and every grant application.

What the IRS Does (and Does Not) Let You Do With This

A quick reality check for American nonprofits, because this comes up constantly: the IRS does not let you claim volunteer time as a contribution on Form 990. You cannot put it on Line 1 of Parts II or III of Schedule A. Volunteer time is not tax-deductible for the individual giving it, either — they can only deduct out-of-pocket expenses like mileage (at the frankly insulting rate of 14 cents per mile for charity, unchanged for years).

You can describe volunteer contributions in Part III of Form 990 (Statement of Program Service Accomplishments). You are required to report the estimated number of volunteers on Part I, Line 6. But hours and dollar value? Voluntary disclosure only.

Under GAAP (FASB ASC 958), donated services can only be recognized on audited financial statements if they create or enhance nonfinancial assets, or require specialized skills that would otherwise need to be purchased. Your volunteer coaches, event helpers, and committee members — the backbone of most community organisations — do not qualify for GAAP recognition.

This is, in my view, a significant gap. It means the organisations most dependent on volunteer labour have no formal mechanism to show it on their books. A youth sports league running on 10,000 volunteer hours per year looks identical on paper to one running on paid staff, except the volunteer-dependent one appears to have no labour costs. Which makes it look either tiny or impossibly efficient, neither of which is accurate.

The Youth Sports Problem

The AmeriCorps data does not break out sport and recreation volunteering in its public summary (the microdata is available if you want to dig). But the Aspen Institute's Project Play survey from 2024 fills in the picture.

61.6% of sports parents volunteer in some capacity with their child's teams. They average 4.21 hours per week — which, at $34.79 per hour, is $146.42 per week per parent, or about $5,270 per year.

Meanwhile, the number of coaches in youth sport decreased by 1.2 million between 2022 and 2024, according to the Sports and Fitness Industry Association. Participation is broadly stable but the people who make participation possible are leaving.

If you coach a youth team, you are statistically less likely to be replaced than you were two years ago. If you run a youth sports organisation, the economics of volunteer coaching labour are moving against you.

What Organisations Should Do With These Numbers

I am going to be blunt because I have watched too many nonprofits and community organisations treat volunteer valuation as an interesting factoid rather than a strategic tool.

Put the number in your annual report. Not buried in a footnote. On the front page. "Our 85 volunteers contributed 12,400 hours of service last year, valued at $431,396 (Independent Sector, 2024)." Let your board, your donors, and your community see the true cost of what you do.

Put it in every grant application. Most foundations and government grants accept in-kind contributions. $34.79 per hour, cited to Independent Sector, is the standard. If your grant requires $100,000 in matching contributions, your volunteer labour probably covers most of it.

Use it in budget conversations. When your board debates whether to spend $2,000 on management software or a part-time coordinator, show them what the alternative costs in volunteer hours. If the software saves 10 hours per week, that is $18,091 per year in volunteer labour. The ROI is not subtle.

Track the hours. The AmeriCorps data is a national estimate. Your organisation's data should be your organisation's data. Actual hours, recorded as they happen, not estimated retrospectively. Systems that capture volunteer activity as a byproduct of the work — event check-ins, task completions, meeting attendance — are far more reliable than timesheets that nobody fills in.

The 75.7 million figure is a recovery story, and a genuine one. But the structural pressures on volunteering — aging volunteer bases, cost-of-living constraints, competition for time — have not gone away. The organisations that thrive will be the ones that measure what their volunteers give, reduce the friction of giving it, and stop treating $167 billion in free labour as something that will always be there.