What portion of St. Jude's budget is spent on research versus direct patient services?

1. The headline number St. Jude gives — 82 cents — is aggregated, not a research-vs-care split

St. Jude’s donor-facing FAQ states that for the past seven years 82 cents of every dollar received "has gone to support the treatment, research and future needs of St. Jude" ^[1], language that explicitly bundles treatment and research together; the hospital’s main financial pages provide audited reports and annual reports but the quick public summary stops at that combined metric rather than showing a neat division between laboratory research budgets and bedside clinical care costs ^{[2] [3]}.

2. Official financial filings exist and would be the right place to find the precise split, but the accessible summaries here don’t give that figure

St. Jude and its fundraising arm ALSAC publish audited, GAAP-prepared combined financial statements ^{[2] [3]}, and those documents are the authoritative source for expense line items; the specific snippets provided in this set, however, do not include a quoted percentage that separates research expenditures from direct patient services, so this analysis cannot invent a split that the supplied reporting does not explicitly state ^[3].

3. Context: St. Jude is both a hospital and a research institution and budgets large multi-year investments toward research growth

The organization describes itself as "great research institutions, great hospitals and great charities" and emphasizes that its operating model requires ALSAC to raise most annual funds to sustain both research and care ^[5], while recent strategic planning announcements show a substantial ramp-up in research and capital commitments — the institution added $1.4 billion to a six-year operating and capital budget and highlighted increased funding for research teams and programs, including a target to raise research-related program funding to $160 million over five years for certain initiatives ^[6].

4. Outside coverage spotlights large reserves and family aid limits, complicating simple judgments about where money goes

Investigations by ProPublica reported that St. Jude accumulated large unspent revenue and reserves—reporting $886 million in unspent revenue in a high-revenue year and noting the charity’s multi-billion-dollar cushion—which frames questions about annual spending choices even as the hospital defends reserves as prudent for capital projects and economic volatility ^[4]; separate reporting examined how families experience limits on support such as housing and food allowances, suggesting that headline generosity does not always translate into unlimited direct family support ^[7].

5. What can be concluded from the reporting available here — and what remains unknown

From the available sources the defensible conclusion is that St. Jude publicly groups treatment and research in its headline efficiency metric (82 cents per dollar) and that the organization is making explicit, sizable multi-year investments in both research programs and capital expansion ^{[1] [6]}; what cannot be conclusively stated from the cited materials is a single precise percentage that allocates the hospital’s total budget into "research" versus "direct patient services" because the public summaries and the article snippets here do not publish that specific line-item breakdown ^{[2] [3]}.

6. How to get the precise split if desired

To obtain the exact portion of St. Jude’s budget spent on research versus direct patient services, consult the institution’s full audited combined financial statements and the notes to those statements (ALSAC–St. Jude combined financial statement FY2023 and annual reports), which are identified on the hospital’s financial pages and in the PDF filings referenced by St. Jude ^{[2] [3]}; absent extracting and analyzing those line items, public summaries will only support the aggregated "82 cents" framing and contextual reporting about reserves and strategic research investments ^{[1] [4] [6]}.