Topic: Market Outlook

Executive Summary

• Private foundations are sustaining payout levels well above the 5% minimum, supported by recent strong market performance.
• However, forward-looking return expectations are moderating, while multi-year grant commitments remain elevated.
• This is forcing foundations to reassess the strategic questions around short-term grantmaking and long-term sustainability of the foundation assets.
• TIFF analysis highlights long-term purchasing power erosion, not short-term liquidity, is the major risk for foundations.
• Foundations should periodically reassess and scenario test portfolio return expectations and grantmaking plans and flexibility to ensure sustained long-term mission capacity.

The Current Environment: Capacity Has Expanded, But So Have Commitments

Recent data from the 2025 Report on Private Philanthropy indicates that private foundations paid out approximately 7.1% of assets in 2024, well above the statutory 5% minimum requirement.1 At the same time, many foundations continue to emphasize multi-year, targeted grant commitments that extend support and obligations several years forward.

This environment has been shaped by several years of strong public market returns. Asset growth has supported elevated grantmaking and, in many cases, longer-dated commitments. Boards appropriately leaned into mission impact.

However, forward-looking capital market assumptions are more measured than the realized returns of the recent past. For boards and investment committees, the key question is not whether foundations can afford elevated spending today, but whether it is sustainable across a full market cycle.

Structural Trade-Off: Real Return vs. Spending

At its core, sustainability is a function of basic arithmetic. For a foundation to preserve its purchasing power over time, the portfolio’s long-term return must cover both the spending rate and inflation. However, if spending plus inflation exceeds the portfolio’s long-term return, purchasing power will erode over time.

This erosion can be difficult to detect in certain environments, particularly during steady or rising markets. In these conditions, the impact may appear modest. Portfolios may continue to grow in nominal terms, while their real value (e.g., adjusted for inflation), and therefore future grantmaking power, slowly declines.

The dynamic becomes more consequential when market declines coincide with elevated spending and fixed multi-year commitments.

The most challenging scenario occurs during a material drawdown, when several forces compound at once:

• Asset values decline.
• Grant commitments remain fixed in dollars.
• The effective payout rate rises as a percentage of assets.
• The capital available to compound in recovery is permanently reduced.

Liquidity Isn’t the Risk—Erosion Is

Modeling representative private foundation portfolios under base case and stress scenarios shows a consistent pattern. Even when obligations remain fully fundable, maintaining elevated spending through a significant market decline materially accelerates long-term real erosion.2

The risk facing many foundations is not an immediate liquidity shortfall. It is the amplified long-term cost of maintaining fixed withdrawals during periods when assets are temporarily impaired.

Key Considerations for Boards and Investment Committees

As foundations navigate a normalizing return environment, several considerations may warrant renewed attention to ensure that mission ambition and portfolio capacity remain aligned across a full cycle:

• Alignment between spending and forward-looking return assumptions
  Is the current payout level supported by long-term real return expectations rather than recent experience?
• Interaction between commitments and portfolio behavior
  How would a material market decline affect effective withdrawal rates given existing multi-year obligations?
• Flexibility within grantmaking
  What portion of spending is structurally committed versus discretionary, and how clearly is that flexibility defined?
• Reassessment framework
  Have conditions been articulated in advance under which spending or portfolio risk tolerance would be revisited?

Conclusion

Private foundations have benefited from a period of strong market support. As conditions normalize, elevated payout levels may remain appropriate, but their durability depends on deliberate alignment with long-term real return capacity.

The most resilient institutions are not those insulated from volatility. They are those that define in advance how spending, commitments, and portfolio risk tolerance interact so that decisions made during periods of stress are disciplined rather than reactive, and long-term impact is not unintentionally impaired.

The materials are being provided for informational purposes only and constitute neither an offer to sell nor a solicitation of an offer to buy securities. These materials also do not constitute an offer or advertisement of TIFF’s investment advisory services or investment, legal or tax advice. Opinions expressed herein are those of TIFF and are not a recommendation to buy or sell any securities.

These materials may contain forward-looking statements relating to future events. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by terminology such as “may,” “will,” “should,” “expect,” “plan,” “intend,” “anticipate,” “believe,” “estimate,” “predict,” “potential,” or “continue,” the negative of such terms or other comparable terminology. Although TIFF believes the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, future results cannot be guaranteed.

The NACUBO-Commonfund Study of Endowments FY25 average one-year performance for all institutions is 10.9%, bringing the 10-year average return to 7.7%. TIFF’s November 2025 preliminary FY25 outlook reflects a similar view to the final NACUBO report’s findings on performance.

1. Everyone’s a winner in 2025: There were many ways to win in FY25, as no single asset class was an outlier in performance, in contrast with prior years. No major asset class had negative returns and the bottom 10% of endowments still returning 8.4%. Those who eked out top quartile performance likely had overweight allocations to AI themes (public or private), precious metals (e.g., gold), international equities and hedge funds.
2. Size didn’t matter for the first time in a long time: FY25 performance was relatively even across size-based cohorts. With strong performance across a variety of asset classes, the asset allocation differences across size segments didn’t materialize in meaningfully different performances. While the $5B+ peer group had the highest average FY25 returns at 11.8%, the second-highest returning peer group was the $51M-$100M group with an average return of 11.1%. Historically, endowment size has been a strong determinant of performance, with larger endowments historically outperforming smaller endowments due to larger allocations to private assets. We saw this reverse the past two years (FY23-24), when smaller endowments outperformed their larger counterparts.
3. Narrow band of outcomes: Due to strong performance across all asset classes, there was not as much dispersion in investment outcomes compared to previous years. The interquartile dispersion, which measures the gap between the 75th and 25th percentiles, was 2.4% in FY25. This is low compared to the previous five fiscal years, which saw interquartile dispersion ranging from 3.1% to 7.1%.
4. Operating budgets lean more on endowments: Institutions appear to be increasing use of the endowment to support their mission. In FY25, the average portion of the operating budgets funded from endowments reached 15.2%, compared to 14.0% in FY24 and 10.9% in FY23. While spend rates have remained relatively stable, special appropriations have increased in recent years, particularly for larger endowments. In FY25, the majority of specially appropriated funds went towards the operating budget.
5. Strong returns, persistent headwinds: Despite a positive endowment performance year, higher education faces a myriad of headwinds that are putting pressure on institutions to lean on their endowments. Pressures come from both sides: revenue (declining enrollment, gifts and federal funding) and costs (higher inflation, increased endowment tax). However, different size segments face different pressures. For smaller endowed institutions, enrollment tops the list of concerns, while they also face challenges in fundraising and increasing financial aid. For the largest endowed institutions, the predominant concerns are federal funding cuts and liquidity.

FY25 Asset Class Returns

The materials are being provided for informational purposes only and constitute neither an offer to sell nor a solicitation of an offer to buy securities. These materials also do not constitute an offer or advertisement of TIFF’s investment advisory services or investment, legal or tax advice. Opinions expressed herein are those of TIFF and are not a recommendation to buy or sell any securities.

These materials may contain forward-looking statements relating to future events. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by terminology such as “may,” “will,” “should,” “expect,” “plan,” “intend,” “anticipate,” “believe,” “estimate,” “predict,” “potential,” or “continue,” the negative of such terms or other comparable terminology. Although TIFF believes the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, future results cannot be guaranteed.

Anne Duggan, Managing Director, Client CIO Group, spoke with the Philadelphia Business Journal about the factors impacting endowment performance for large universities in 2025.

Read the full article here

Disclaimer: To access this article, a subscription is necessary. Please note that TIFF does not possess the rights to distribute this content.

The materials are being provided for informational purposes only and constitute neither an offer to sell nor a solicitation of an offer to buy securities. These materials also do not constitute an offer or advertisement of TIFF’s investment advisory services or investment, legal or tax advice. Opinions expressed herein are those of TIFF and are not a recommendation to buy or sell any securities.

These materials may contain forward-looking statements relating to future events. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by terminology such as “may,” “will,” “should,” “expect,” “plan,” “intend,” “anticipate,” “believe,” “estimate,” “predict,” “potential,” or “continue,” the negative of such terms or other comparable terminology. Although TIFF believes the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, future results cannot be guaranteed.

FIN News recently covered TIFF Investment Management’s article, “FY25 Performance Drivers: Insights from the Biggest University Endowments.” The paper’s author, Anne Duggan, Managing Director, Client CIO Group, shared with FIN News that as the performance difference between public and private markets has narrowed, private markets are now proving to be a major driver of performance for university endowments.

Read the full article here

Disclaimer: To access this article, a subscription is necessary. Please note that TIFF does not possess the rights to distribute this content.

The materials are being provided for informational purposes only and constitute neither an offer to sell nor a solicitation of an offer to buy securities. These materials also do not constitute an offer or advertisement of TIFF’s investment advisory services or investment, legal, or tax advice. Opinions expressed herein are those of TIFF and are not a recommendation to buy or sell any securities.

These materials may contain forward-looking statements relating to future events. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by terminology such as “may,” “will,” “should,” “expect,” “plan,” “intend,” “anticipate,” “believe,” “estimate,” “predict,” “potential,” or “continue,” the negative of such terms or other comparable terminology. Although TIFF believes the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, future results cannot be guaranteed.

Chief Investment Officer recently interviewed TIFF Managing Director, Client CIO Group, Anne Duggan, for a piece discussing her research on university endowment performance in FY25. She shared her expertise, adding that “this year was unique, in that both risk and safety net assets had solid positive performance.”

Read the full article here

The materials are being provided for informational purposes only and constitute neither an offer to sell nor a solicitation of an offer to buy securities. These materials also do not constitute an offer or advertisement of TIFF’s investment advisory services or investment, legal or tax advice. Opinions expressed herein are those of TIFF and are not a recommendation to buy or sell any securities.

These materials may contain forward-looking statements relating to future events. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by terminology such as “may,” “will,” “should,” “expect,” “plan,” “intend,” “anticipate,” “believe,” “estimate,” “predict,” “potential,” or “continue,” the negative of such terms or other comparable terminology. Although TIFF believes the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, future results cannot be guaranteed.