What percentage of donations go to care for st. Jude children's hospital
Executive summary
St. Jude’s public materials and FAQs state that 82 cents of every dollar received goes to “support the treatment, research and future needs” of the hospital — a figure the institution repeats across its financial pages and donor FAQ [1] [2]. ALSAC, the fundraising arm that supports St. Jude, figures into outside analyses that note different internal flows between fundraising, program support and reserves, but the St. Jude site emphasizes the 82% program-support metric for recent years [3] [2].
1. What St. Jude itself says about “how much goes to care”
St. Jude’s website and donor FAQ state plainly that for the past several years “82 cents of every dollar received” has gone to support treatment, research and future needs of St. Jude — the line appears in their FAQ on donation use and on the hospital’s financials page [1] [2]. The site frames that 82% as covering treatment, research and future needs together, and reiterates that families never receive a bill for treatment, travel, housing or food [4] [2].
2. How that 82% is described and what it includes
St. Jude’s wording groups “treatment, research and future needs” under the 82% figure rather than isolating a single percentage for direct bedside patient care. The financials page pairs the 82% claim with references to donations, research grants, insurance recoveries and investment returns as sources included in the calculation, suggesting the numerator and denominator are broader than simply cash gifts directed to the hospital [2].
3. The fundraising structure behind the figures
St. Jude operates with ALSAC as its fundraising organization; independent commentators note ALSAC raises funds and manages marketing and development activities while St. Jude provides clinical care and research [3]. That separation matters because some public analyses have focused on ALSAC’s own financial statements — for example, questioning what share of ALSAC revenue is passed to the hospital versus spent on fundraising or saved — even while the hospital-level claim of 82% persists [3].
4. Independent or third‑party context in the available reporting
The provided non‑St. Jude item (Paddock Post) reports that ALSAC historically has “consistently given about 50% or less of revenue to St. Jude’s annually, consistently spent about 30% of revenue on fundraising annually, and consistently saved about 20% of revenue raised annually,” and frames ALSAC and St. Jude as separate 501(c) entities [3]. That claim, if taken at face value, appears to reflect ALSAC’s internal allocation decisions rather than the single 82% program‑support number presented on St. Jude’s consolidated financial pages [3].
5. Why different numbers can coexist without being contradictory
Different metrics answer different questions. St. Jude’s 82% figure is presented as the share of “every dollar received” that supports treatment, research and future needs at the hospital level and is quoted on the hospital’s own financials and FAQ pages [2] [1]. Outside analyses that isolate ALSAC fundraising costs, transfers and reserves look at money flow between two legally separate entities and therefore can produce lower percentages of donor dollars transferred from ALSAC to the hospital [3]. The two approaches are measuring different slices of the financial picture [2] [3].
6. What the sources do not answer or do not provide
Available sources do not provide a single reconciled line‑by‑line accounting in this dataset that traces: (a) a typical $100 donor gift to ALSAC, (b) how much ALSAC retains for fundraising and reserves, and (c) exactly how much is then spent directly on inpatient care versus research or capital — at least one independent piece asserts allocations but the hospital’s pages use the consolidated 82% metric [3] [2]. Available sources do not mention a contemporary audited schedule here that reconciles ALSAC’s spend to St. Jude’s consolidated program percentage in these search results [2] [3].
7. How donors can get the detailed answers they might want
St. Jude’s financials page invites readers to view its annual report and combined financial statements and to contact the hospital for copies [2]. For donors seeking the most granular breakdown — e.g., exact dollars spent on bedside care, housing, research salaries, and fundraising overhead — the institution points to its annual report and financial statements as the primary source [2].
Bottom line: St. Jude publicly states that 82% of every dollar goes to treatment, research and future needs [1] [2]. Independent commentary about ALSAC’s internal allocations raises different figures by tracking fundraising organization flows [3]. For a reconciled, line‑by‑line picture, the hospital’s annual report and combined financial statements are the next documented step [2].