Quick Answer
Processors hold year-end donations when card volume suddenly outruns what the account was underwritten for. A dedicated credit card merchant account plus a seasonal forecast filed before GivingTuesday lets the surge clear.
Timing matters. In 2024, the Nonprofit Jenni Show urged nonprofits to start GivingTuesday and year-end planning before Q3 ends. I'd put the processor forecast on that same calendar. An underwriter who sees the spike coming has no reason to stop it.
Key Points
- The 2025 M+R Benchmarks Report puts December at roughly 40% of online one-time revenue, and December 31 alone brought in 5% of 2024 revenue .
- A dedicated credit card merchant account, offered by SeamlessChex to established organizations processing at least $25,000 per month , lets a forecast filed before GivingTuesday make the peak read as planned.
- The Urban Institute found that 48% of nonprofits with a government funding delay, pause or freeze had at least one lasting 12 weeks or longer .
Year-end card volume lands in a few days; whether it settles on schedule depends on what the processor expected.
Nonprofit finance teams already wrestle with year-end timing. In a 2021 episode, the Nonprofit Everything podcast took a listener question that still comes up every December: "What is your policy regarding year-end donations? Do you record based on the date received?" That debate assumes the money arrives.
I want to look one step earlier. Before a gift can be recorded, the processor decides whether December's credit card volume settles on schedule or waits for review. Underwriting makes that call.
So this piece follows the surge from the underwriter's side: when it lands, which signals get read, and the account setup that lets GivingTuesday clear.
A year-end payout hold rarely means a processor doubts your mission. The first question to ask your processor is simple: what monthly volume was this account approved for? Year-end giving runs on the tax calendar: university giving offices remind donors that a gift must be made on or before December 31 to count for that tax year, so many donors wait and then give at once. The deadline shapes everything. A risk system sees the spike long before it sees the reason.
When does year-end donation volume actually spike?
Year-end card volume lands in two bursts: GivingTuesday and the final days of December, when tax deadlines push donors to give before the calendar closes.
Before planning anything with your processor, map your own curve:
- Pull last year's daily card totals from late November through December 31.
- Mark GivingTuesday and December 29 through 31 as separate peaks.
- Compare each peak with the daily average of an ordinary month.
AP reporting put the most recent GivingTuesday at an estimated $4 billion in U.S. donations, and its AP-NORC poll found about one-quarter of Americans planned to give in the last weeks of 2025. Deadlines drive that timing. Saint Leo University's 2020 appeal told donors the CARES Act let itemizers deduct cash gifts up to 100% of adjusted gross income, but only for gifts made before December 31, 2020. Appeals built on a cutoff squeeze giving into days.
Estimates of December's share of annual giving vary widely, depending on whether you count online gifts alone or every channel. The research section below walks through these findings. Conventional wisdom treats that curve as pure good news. It is also the stretch when your card volume looks least like the rest of your year.
Your processor reads the curve against your history. SeamlessChex works with established organizations processing at least $25,000 per month, and that steady baseline is what a December peak gets measured against. The same comparison sits at the heart of high-risk credit card processing reviews, where a sudden departure from normal volume is exactly what reviewers are paid to notice.
How big is the December surge on a nonprofit's card account?
Ask how much of a nonprofit's year arrives in December and published answers run from under a fifth to two-fifths. Which figure applies depends on what you count.
Tim Sarrantonio, director of partnerships at a nonprofit software company, set out to test one of the sector's oldest adages. His company's data panel covered 2020 and every type of nonprofit and giving method, and it put December at 17% to 22% of an organization's revenue. December still deserves focus, he wrote, though it "isn't representing nearly one-third of giving."
Other counts land higher. In December 2025, Dianne Chipps Bailey of Bank of America's Philanthropic Solutions division cited National Philanthropic Trust estimates that nearly one-third of annual giving happens in the final month. An older digital giving index, built from online gifts on a single donation platform, has tracked December at 29% to 31%. The 2025 M+R Benchmarks Report counts only online one-time gifts, and it puts December at roughly 40% of the year's revenue for the average nonprofit. Earlier figures had it at about one-third.
As the measure narrows, December gets steeper. The narrowest of these measures is also the closest to what we underwrite: one-time gifts made online, through a donation page and a merchant account. The studies cover different years and use different methods, so they do not form a trend line. Even so, at 40%, December carries more than seven times the average share of each of the other eleven months.
Inside December, one day stood out in the M+R data.
5% of the year in one day
December 31 alone brought in 5% of 2024 revenue in the M+R Benchmarks.
The size of that day also changes from year to year. December 31 revenue in 2024 rose 11% over 2023. A nonprofit software company's roundup of the figures called it the first year-over-year increase in December 31 giving in three years, after declines in 2022 and 2023. A forecast that fixes the last day at one number can miss in either direction.
The mission matters as well. In 2024, Rights nonprofits raised 52% of their online revenue in December and Cultural nonprofits raised 23%, according to M+R. Sarrantonio's earlier analysis, using 2019 and 2020 data, found that "the final days of December tend to attract the largest flow of gifts no matter what." The days before that varied widely by type of organization.
| Type of nonprofit | December giving pattern (2019 and 2020 data) |
|---|---|
| Religious | Nearly flat every day until a major spike on December 31 |
| Health, human services, international | A spike on GivingTuesday, then steady until a major spike on December 31 |
| Public and societal benefit | Biggest spike right before Christmas |
| Arts and culture, environment and animal rights, education | A steady ebb and flow through the month |
The peak also brings in new donors. The same software company's recurring giving research found that recurring gifts made in the last three days of December rose 21.34% in 2023, and first-time donors setting up recurring gifts rose 34.48%. During those three days, volume rises, gifts arrive faster and more donors are new.
Last December may also make a weak template. Starting in 2026, taxpayers who take the standard deduction can deduct up to $1,000 in cash gifts to public charities, or $2,000 for joint filers. Itemizers can deduct only the giving above 0.5% of adjusted gross income. In December 2025, the AP reported that some itemizers might give more that year to get ahead of the new floor. If they did, some of last year's peak was pulled forward. None of our sources measures how much.
The numbers describe a peak that is steeper, later and newer than the familiar December figure suggests. It is steeper because online one-time gifts are more concentrated in December than giving overall. It is later because one closing day can carry 5% of a year. And it is newer because first-time donors arrive inside that window. The exact shape depends on the mission and on a tax year whose rules have just changed.
For a finance team building a seasonal forecast, five steps follow:
- Build the December forecast from your own online card history, month by month, rather than from an annual total that covers every giving method.
- Forecast December 29, 30 and 31 as separate lines, with December 31 as its own figure, and share those dates with your processor before GivingTuesday.
- Match the forecast to your own pattern and show your processor which days your history says will spike: GivingTuesday, the week before Christmas or only December 31.
- Estimate how many first-time and new recurring donors your year-end campaign aims to bring in, and put that estimate in the forecast.
- Ask your tax adviser whether the 2026 deduction changes could shift when your largest donors give, before you copy last December into this year's plan.
How we checked this
We used benchmark research (the 2025 M+R Benchmarks Report, as summarized by a nonprofit software company), donor data analysis by that company's director of partnerships, AP reporting on an AP-NORC poll, and an analyst's essay on the 2026 donor tax rules. None of the figures in this section are ours. The December measures cover different years, methods and organizations, so they cannot be compared as a trend. The sector timing patterns come from 2019 and 2020 data, and the recurring gift figures are from 2023. The company behind much of this research sells software to nonprofits. We underwrite dedicated donation merchant accounts for established organizations processing at least $25,000 a month, so we have a stake in how forecasts are built. Still unknown: how much giving moved into 2025 ahead of the new floor, and how card volume alone compares with all online one-time gifts.
- M+R Benchmarks 2025 report, figures as published in a nonprofit software company's year-end giving statistics roundup, February 4, 2026, updated September 29, 2026.
- Tim Sarrantonio, Giving USA article on how donors give in December, data from 2019 and 2020.
- Associated Press, AP-NORC poll report on year-end giving, December 22, 2025.
- Arvind Mozumdar, essay on government funding disruption and nonprofits, November 3, 2026.
What makes a donation account look high-risk to a payment processor?
A donation account looks risky when its card activity stops matching what was underwritten: more volume, faster, from new cards, at different gift sizes, all at once.
Underwriters do not see a mission. They see a pattern against a baseline. Here is how I read the signals a year-end surge sends.
| Signal | What the risk system sees | What makes it read as expected |
|---|---|---|
| Volume above the underwritten monthly figure | Processing well past the approved monthly amount | A forecast on file naming the expected peak |
| Single-day concentration | GivingTuesday or December 31 dwarfing the daily average | Campaign dates shared ahead of time |
| Shifting ticket mix | Average gift size jumping or falling sharply | An expected gift range for appeals and matches |
| Wave of new cards | Many first-time cardholders in a short window | Notice of donor acquisition campaigns |
| Future dispute exposure | A bigger sales base that could turn into chargebacks | A clean dispute history and clear donor receipts |
No single signal says fraud. Together, they look like a merchant suddenly behaving differently. That is the pattern that often comes before losses, so the processor pauses payouts to buy time.
Account structure changes the odds. In 2022, Candid described two kinds of processors: aggregators that put many organizations on one merchant account, cheaper but less secure, and dedicated processors that create a merchant account for each organization. Candid also told nonprofits to check hold period policies before signing. On a pooled account, your spike gets judged inside a shared risk model. With dedicated merchant payment processing solutions, the review starts from your own history.
Governance gets read too. A 2024 thread on Reddit's r/nonprofit described a bank saying it would close an account as "too risky to service" once it learned a debit card was being shared. My takeaway: how you control money can matter as much as how much arrives. If a fiscal sponsor accepts gifts for your project, ask whose merchant account those cards settle into: in a 2024 Beyond the Donation podcast interview, a Calloway Stern Group consultant said a sponsor cannot act as a pass-through, so each release of funds has to be justified.
How do you set up a donation account so a GivingTuesday surge clears?
Run donations through a dedicated credit card merchant account built on your established monthly volume, then file a seasonal forecast before GivingTuesday so the peak reads as planned.
I'd do it in three steps, in this order:
- Move donations onto a dedicated credit card merchant account. Your processing history then belongs to you, not to a pool of other organizations.
- File a seasonal forecast before the season starts. Include last year's daily December totals, your GivingTuesday and December 29 through 31 campaign dates, the gift range you expect, and any matching or monthly giving drives.
- Update the forecast when plans change. A new matching gift or a bigger email push reshapes the curve, and your processor should hear about it from you first.
The research section above walks through these findings. Ask your processor who should receive the forecast and how they will confirm it is attached to your account. Timing is the whole game.
A quick, honest aside. When Candid compared processor types in 2022, it called aggregators the cheaper option, and that is a real advantage. A dedicated account asks for more documentation up front, and our qualification standard is built for established organizations rather than brand-new ones. For a nonprofit whose year depends on December, I think that trade is worth it.
Planning this early is normal for fundraisers. In a 2016 podcast interview, a strategist at Blue State Digital said the agency runs year-end fundraising as a year-round process organized by quarter and aims to finish end-of-year plans by mid-September. Add the forecast to that September plan as its own line item, with a named owner and a send date. A second rail helps too: moving some larger or recurring gifts to Seamless ACH bank payments spreads December volume across two channels instead of piling every dollar onto one card account.
What happens if a year-end payout stays frozen into January?
The gifts meant to fund next year's operations can sit out of reach while payroll and program costs keep coming, so a hold costs far more in January than in November.
That risk is sharper now. The Urban Institute found that 48% of nonprofits with a government funding delay, pause or freeze had at least one lasting 12 weeks or longer. Grant cash already runs late for many organizations. December donations should not run late too.
Ask your processor now who your contact is if a seasonal review starts, and how you will hear about it. Then list which January bills, payroll first, depend on December card settlements. Any review that starts runs while your donors' gifts are still waiting to settle.
Frequently Asked Questions
What else do nonprofit finance teams ask about year-end payout holds?
Most questions come down to timing: when gifts land, when underwriting reviews them, and how fast an organization can get a dedicated account in place before the season.
Why do payment processors hold year-end nonprofit donations?
A payout hold is a pause on settling card funds to the organization's bank account while the processor reviews activity. It usually follows volume that no longer matches what the account was underwritten for. The gifts are not lost. They are waiting.
Why do so many gifts land in the final days of December?
Tax deadlines pull them there. RPI Giving tells donors that a charitable gift annuity must be established before 12/31/25 to get a 2025 charitable deduction, and deadline-driven vehicles like that push large gifts into the last week of the year, exactly when review teams are thinnest.
Does record private giving make up for delayed grant money?
Not for any given organization. Private giving reached a record $617.2 billion in 2025, yet donors and government agencies tend to fund different things. I would plan each revenue stream on its own timing.
What should we review after the giving season ends?
In 2016, Blue State Digital recommended auditing infrastructure after year-end: how the platform performed and whether fundraising pages went down. I'd add one line to that list. Write down when each settlement actually reached your bank.
How quickly can SeamlessChex set up a donation account?
SeamlessChex offers same-day onboarding with no contracts for established organizations that meet our volume minimum, with credit card processing first and ACH alongside it. Underwriting still reviews the application, so start the conversation at seamlesschex.com/contact well before GivingTuesday.
Can we take donations at in-person events too?
Yes. SeamlessChex accepts credit card and ACH payments online or in person. Put the gala and the year-end appeal in the same seasonal forecast, because an underwriter sees one combined volume curve.
Written by
Lily Flanigan
Operations Manager, SeamlessChex
Lily Flanigan is Operations Manager at SeamlessChex, a credit card processing and fintech payments platform recognized on the Inc. 5000, where she focuses on operations and process optimization.
Connect on LinkedInSeamlessChex works with established businesses processing a minimum of $25,000 per month.