Each year Americans make billions of dollars in charitable donations, and in a recent study, SmartAsset dug into IRS data to find the geographic sectors whose residents give the most.
The analysis measured how much people donate as a percentage of their net income and the proportion of people in each county who make charitable donations.
SmartAsset analysts did a county-by-county assessment of:
- The amount of money locals donate as a percentage of their net income
- The proportion of people who made charitable donations, using income tax data
- An indexed, weighted comparison of these two data points
Doing so yielded the following rankings in southeast Pa.:
| Rank | County | Contributions as Percentage of Income | Percentage of Returns Itemizing Charitable Contributions | Charitable County Index |
| 1 | Montgomery County | 2.20 | 11.98 | 50.72 |
| 2 | Chester County | 1.38 | 13.18 | 46.76 |
| 3 | Delaware County | 1.29 | 10.40 | 38.62 |
| 4 | Bucks County | 1.02 | 10.91 | 37.64 |
| 5 | Lancaster County | 1.76 | 6.15 | 31.42 |
| 6 | Philadelphia County | 1.21 | 5.90 | 26.06 |
| 7 | Centre County | 1.10 | 5.86 | 24.96 |
| 8 | Butler County | 0.90 | 5.68 | 22.79 |
| 9 | Allegheny County | 1.03 | 5.14 | 22.52 |
| 10 | Cumberland County | 0.84 | 5.72 | 22.38 |
More on the county-by-county assessment of charitable donations is at SmartAsset.
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Back in 2013, there was a general call throughout the upper echelons of business to
give away significant portions of their amassed fortunes, a challenge profiled by 60 Minutes.
