A Simple Gesture can quantify volunteer labor with new $36.14 estimate
A Simple Gesture can now turn volunteer hours into a $36.14 figure that funders and board members immediately recognize.
Independent Sector and the Do Good Institute set the 2025 value of a volunteer hour at $36.14, giving nonprofits a fresh number to attach to donated labor as they talk with funders, boards and corporate partners. The estimate, announced on April 21, 2026 during National Volunteer Week, was up 3.9 percent from the year before and was built from 2025 wage data and U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics earnings for private-sector production and non-supervisory workers.
For A Simple Gesture, the figure offers a concrete way to put a price tag on the work that keeps its food recovery system moving. The Guilford County nonprofit says it has operated since 2015 as a 501(c)(3), using green bags, volunteer drivers, pantry partners and SHARE school programs to collect food from doorsteps and move it into the local hunger-relief network. In that setting, the hidden labor is not just the donated cans in a porch bag. It includes route coordination, volunteer recruitment, training, scheduling and recognition, all of which take staff time and infrastructure.
Independent Sector says charitable organizations commonly use volunteer-time values to show the community support they receive, while corporations use them to measure employee volunteer efforts. That matters at A Simple Gesture because its model depends on recurring donors, regular pickups and reliable pantry partnerships. A dollar figure lets chapter leaders show that volunteer labor is not an extra, but part of the operating base that makes the program sustainable.
The estimate also lands in a sector where volunteer dependence is already high. Independent Sector pointed to 2025 Urban Institute research finding that 75 percent of nonprofit organizations said volunteers were important to operations, and 23 percent said they were entirely dependent on volunteers. The group also provides state-by-state figures for all 50 states, Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico, underscoring how the value changes with regional labor costs rather than with the worth of the volunteer’s work itself.
The spread is wide. The NonProfit Times reported that Washington, D.C. had the highest 2025 value at $54.77 an hour, followed by Washington state at $42.98 among states, while Mississippi was lowest among states at $28.39 and Puerto Rico came in at $17.99. Georgia had the biggest year-over-year increase at 7.9 percent. For A Simple Gesture, which began with Jonathan Trivers in Paradise, California, where the program says it has more than 1,700 food donors and collects more than 132,000 pounds of food a year, the new benchmark gives leaders a common language to show how neighborhood generosity translates into measurable economic value.
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