Which charities do the most good per dollar, on your assumptions?

Published cost-effectiveness analyses, rebuilt so every number has a source, a range and an explanation, and re-ranked live by the assumptions you set.

Our models: the evaluators' analyses plus your assumptions and our accounting adjustments.

Good done per dollar, as a multiple of GiveDirectly · central estimate (dot) with joint low to joint high (bar), log scale

1
Sinergia Animal
Animal welfare · from Animal Charity Evaluators
157×0.25×–8,643×
614 SADs per dollar3 flags: wide range, mostly judgment, stale source
2
GiveDirectly (Malawi)
Global health · variant · from GiveWell
1.5×0.46×–4.7×
1.26 × 10⁻² UoV per dollar2 flags: mostly judgment, stale source
3
GiveDirectly (Kenya)
Global health · from GiveWell
1.0×0.30×–3.3×
8.60 × 10⁻³ UoV per dollar2 flags: mostly judgment, stale source

No single assumption, moved to the end of its range, changes this order.

Source: charityevals re-implementations of GiveWell's GiveDirectly analysis (November 2024) and Animal Charity Evaluators' Sinergia Animal analysis (2025); each model page links its spreadsheet and model file.

Joint low and joint high set every input to whichever end of its range lowers or raises the result. They are wider than a confidence interval and are not probabilities. Cross-cause multiples depend entirely on the exchange rates you set.

1Sinergia Animal157×
2GiveDirectly (Malawi)1.5×
3GiveDirectly (Kenya)1.0×

Your assumptions

Moral weights and exchange rates are judgment calls. Drag them and every result on the site recomputes.

How impact is counted

Count staff salary sacrifice as a donation

What this means

Many nonprofit staff earn less than they could in comparable for-profit jobs. That gap is a donation in kind: the staff pay part of the cost of the impact. When this is on, the cost of the work is cash spending plus that forgone salary, so your dollar is credited with only its share of the impact.

When it's off, as in GiveWell's and ACE's models, all of the impact is credited to cash donations. Each model estimates its own staff costs and pay gap, and says how.

Give full credit for outcomes shared with other organisations

What this means

Most outcomes need several organisations: a corporate pledge follows campaigns by several groups. Off (the default, and ACE's approach) credits each charity with its estimated share. On credits each with the whole outcome, on the view that removing any necessary link would have stopped it.

Shares never add up across charities under full credit, so comparisons between charities that share outcomes get harder. Use it to see how much a ranking depends on the choice.

Exchange rates between causes

Units of value per human DALY averted2

Why this value

Bridge from health to GiveWell's units. A rough derivation: GiveWell values an under-five death at 116 units, and a child death in sub-Saharan Africa costs roughly 55–65 years of life, so one year of healthy life is worth about 2 units.

This ignores GiveWell's age weighting and treats years lost to disability like years lost to death. Ours, not GiveWell's.

Human DALYs per suffering-adjusted day1.10 × 10⁻³

2.70 × 10⁻⁴2.70 × 10⁻³

Why this value

Suffering-adjusted days (SADs), from Ambitious Impact, count days of animal suffering weighted by pain intensity and by a species' welfare range relative to humans. ACE uses them.

We read one SAD as one human-equivalent day of disabling-level pain and give that day a disability weight of 0.4 (0.1–1.0), so one SAD is 0.4 / 365 DALY. AIM doesn't publish an official SAD-to-DALY rate, so this is the least grounded number on the site and often decides whether animal charities rank above or below global health.

Extra weight on animal suffering, beyond welfare ranges1×

0.05×1×

Why this value

SADs already scale suffering by each species' welfare range. At 1 you take those welfare ranges at face value. Below 1 you discount animal suffering further, for example because you're unsure animals are sentient or because you give more weight to humans for other reasons.

Moral weights

Value of raising ln(consumption) by 1 for one person for one year1.44

1.081.8

Why this value

GiveWell defines one unit of value as doubling one person's consumption for one year. Doubling raises ln(consumption) by ln 2, so one unit of ln(consumption) is worth 1/ln 2 ≈ 1.44 units.

The low and high ends are the ±25% uniform range GiveWell itself uses in its Monte Carlo inputs. Moving this moves the value of consumption gains relative to deaths averted.

Value of averting the death of a child under five116

70160

Why this value

GiveWell's moral weight: averting one under-five death is worth as much as doubling consumption for 116 person-years. It comes from a mix of donor surveys, a survey of people in Ghana and Kenya, and staff judgment.

GiveWell doesn't vary this in its own uncertainty analysis. The 70–160 range is ours, to show how much the ranking leans on it.

Economics

Annual discount rate4%

0%8%

Why this value

How much less a benefit a year from now counts than one today, compounding. GiveWell and ACE both use 4%.

Used where a model discounts explicitly (ACE's cage-free campaigns). GiveWell's GiveDirectly model has the 4% built into its year 2–10 consumption ratio, so changing this doesn't affect it yet.