The 20 charities that receive the most donations in France

Every year in France, €9.2 billion is given to charities working for the public good. A large share of it goes to the same handful of organisations: the French Red Cross, the Restos du Cœur, the Ligue contre le cancer, AFM-Téléthon, Médecins Sans Frontières. The figures are impressive. The names are familiar. The causes are worthy.

Marie D'ovidio

2025 data · 25 min read

And yet receiving a lot of donations is not the same as getting the most impact out of every euro.

The independent evaluators who compare how effective charities are (GiveWell for global health, Giving Green for climate, the Happier Lives Institute for wellbeing) all reach the same conclusion: the gaps in effectiveness between charities are huge. According to the Happier Lives Institute's chapter in the World Happiness Report 2025, the most rigorously evaluated charities create around 150 times more wellbeing per euro than the average charity, and up to 3,500 times more than some common interventions.

This article starts with the factual ranking of the charities that receive the most donations in France. It then explains why that ranking can't answer the real question: where can a euro do the most good? Finally, it sets out a practical method for giving with impact per euro in mind.

Find the charities with the most impact, not the biggest fundraising →

The 20 charities that receive the most donations in France

Scroll the table sideways to see every column.

Beyond the top 20: ranks 21 to 30

The five types of income that fund a charity

When people talk about a charity's budget, they are actually lumping together several very different streams of money.

Top 5 for donations from individuals

Few charities separate individual donations from corporate giving and legacies. This table uses the "donations" figure exactly as each charity publishes it.

Top 5 for legacies, lifetime gifts and life insurance

A legacy is a planned decision: someone names one or more RUP charities as beneficiaries in their will. This channel favours well-known, long-established charities, the ones notaries and will-writing services already know.

Across the top 20 charities that publish a breakdown, legacies account for more than a third of public generosity. Two of the five biggest recipients of legacies (Institut Pasteur, FRM) fund medical research, a cause that resonates strongly with end-of-life decisions. The heaviest reliance sits just outside the top 20: in its latest published accounts (2022), Fondation Brigitte Bardot drew 92% of its public generosity from legacies. Fondation 30 Millions d'Amis also receives large legacies (€18.5M in 2024, nearly half its public generosity). In October 2025, France's national audit office, the Cour des comptes, warned that it risked hoarding funds, with €86M built up in reserves.

Top 5 for grants and public funding

A reminder: these are not donations. They are funding contracts with governments, international organisations or local authorities. This money has no place in a "public generosity" ranking, but charities always include it in the "total income" figure they put forward.

The French Red Cross, Institut Curie and Apprentis d'Auteuil come top because they run facilities paid for with public money: health and social care facilities, a hospital, children's homes. For these three organisations, public generosity makes up between 9% and 30% of income. Handicap International relies on institutional donors instead (humanitarian demining, prosthetics, health programmes in conflict zones): your euro makes up 26% of its budget. At Médecins du Monde, your euro makes up 47% of the budget, roughly level with public funding.

Top 5 for income from own activities

This line covers income that is neither donations nor public funding: patents and licences, research contracts, sales, services and contributions from beneficiaries.

If charities were ranked by total budget, the French Red Cross would come out far ahead, with €1.75 billion in income. But more than 90% of that budget doesn't come from donations: it pays for facilities and contracted public services.

Change the yardstick and the leader changes

Why receiving a lot of donations doesn't mean being effective per euro

Fame and fundraising don't measure impact per euro

The top 20 charities receiving the most donations in France is first and foremost a ranking of fame and fundraising power. The charities at the top have the biggest communications budgets, the longest-standing media partnerships (the Téléthon with France Télévisions since 1987, the Restos du Cœur with the Enfoirés charity concerts since 1986), the widest volunteer networks and the longest history in French public life.

This ranking of visibility tells you nothing about what happens to each euro once it has been raised. Two charities can raise similar amounts and differ in impact by a factor of 100 or 1,000.

The idea that giving to any of the big, well-known charities will be effective doesn't stand up well to the numbers: you could be missing out on 99% of what your donation could achieve.

None of France's biggest charities is recommended by independent evaluators

None of the charities in this ranking appears on the current recommendation lists of the main independent effectiveness evaluators: GiveWell for global health, Giving Green for climate, Founders Pledge across several causes, and the EA Animal Welfare Fund and Animal Charity Evaluators for animals.

Every year, these evaluators review hundreds of charities around the world against strict criteria: cost per unit of impact (for example, the number of healthy years of life gained per €1,000 donated), the quality of impact evidence (ideally from randomised controlled trials), the capacity to put extra funding to good use, transparency about negative results and discontinued programmes, and counterfactual impact (what would have happened without the charity).

France's biggest charities fall short of these criteria for two reasons. The first is a lack of clear priorities. MSF runs emergency humanitarian programmes in conflict zones, long-term health programmes, advocacy campaigns and epidemic responses all at once. The World Happiness Report 2025 calls this kind of organisation a MANGO (Multi-Armed NGO) and shows that, by design, these organisations can't claim to focus their resources where the benefit per euro is highest.

The second is not using the evidence that already exists. Many of these charities' programmes could be rigorously evaluated (food distribution, primary healthcare, schooling, housing). The methods exist. So do the tools: DALYs (disability-adjusted life years) and WELLBYs (wellbeing-adjusted life years). But these organisations choose to report activity indicators (number of beneficiaries, number of countries, number of programmes) rather than effectiveness indicators.

Why we don't recommend these charities, cause by cause

The charities in this ranking fall into a few broad groups. For each one, we have published an analysis explaining why we think the same euro can do more good elsewhere.

"Low overheads" is a misleading test

A widespread idea is to judge a charity by how much of its budget goes on "programmes" rather than "overheads". The lower the overheads, the more effective the charity, or so the thinking goes.

This intuition is largely wrong. A charity with 5% overheads that funds weak programmes does less good than a charity with 20% overheads that funds highly effective ones. The overhead percentage is misleading: overheads typically include rigorous impact evaluation, staff training, beneficiary follow-up and data collection. A charity that underinvests in these saves on its headline costs but loses on the effectiveness of every euro spent on its programmes.

How to decide where to give if you want the most impact per euro

Step 1: choose a priority cause

Not all causes are equally cost-effective. Distributing anti-malaria bednets in countries where the disease is endemic costs a few euros per child protected and sharply reduces child mortality. The deadliest diseases in low-income countries are no longer a major cause of death in rich countries, where preventing them costs vastly more per life saved.

Independent evaluators single out four causes as especially effective:

What these causes have in common is that they are underfunded relative to the size of the problem, and they offer interventions with proven effectiveness per euro.

Step 2: rely on recognised independent evaluators

Once you have chosen a cause, comparing charities is a huge, technically demanding job. That work has already been done. Several specialist organisations spend tens of thousands of hours a year on it and publish their recommendations openly and for free. This is exactly the method Mieux Donner uses to identify high-impact charities: we cross-check these evaluators' recommendations.

These evaluators are independent of the charities they recommend. Their methods are public. Their recommendations are updated every year. If a recommended charity becomes less effective or can no longer put extra funding to good use, it drops off the list.

Step 3: choose how to split your giving between high-impact charities

Frequently asked questions