Employee volunteering programs reached a 25% average participation rate among CECP-reporting companies in 2024. The same data shows wide variation by employer size, industry, program format, and geography, while company reports document millions of volunteer hours and thousands of nonprofit beneficiaries.
Contents
- How common are employee volunteering programs?
- Which formats are employers offering?
- What participation rates do programs achieve?
- How are hours and availability changing?
- What scale do large employers report?
- What community outputs are reported?
How common are employee volunteering programs?
The CECP Giving in Numbers: 2025 Edition reports an average employee volunteer participation rate of 25% across reporting companies in 2024. This is an average for the CECP comparison, not a universal rate for all employers.
Employer size was associated with a substantial difference. Companies with fewer than 10,000 employees recorded a 31% participation rate in 2024, compared with 16% among companies with more than 100,000 employees. The comparison therefore spans a 15-percentage-point difference between the two reported size groups.
Industry differences were also pronounced. Materials companies had the highest employee volunteer participation rate in the CECP comparison, at 43% in 2024. Consumer Staples companies had the lowest, at 16%.
Hours provide another view of program scale. The median company in the CECP 2024 dataset recorded 47,000 employee volunteer hours. The median employee volunteered 1.8 hours through employee volunteering programs during 2024. These are medians, so they describe the midpoint of the reporting companies and employees rather than a total across the sample.
Benevity’s The State of Corporate Volunteering reports 23.7 million Benevity-approved employee volunteering hours in 2025 and 1.87 million unique employee volunteers. Those figures cover Benevity-approved activity and should not be treated as the same population or measure as the CECP dataset.
Which formats are employers offering?
Program availability varies by whether an offering is available domestically or internationally. In the CECP 2025 report, virtual volunteering was offered to domestic employees by 82% of reporting companies in 2024. Pro bono service was available domestically at 66%.
Other domestic offerings were less common. Extended volunteer campaigns were available at 46% of CECP-reporting companies, while ambassador programs were available at 34%. Team grants were offered domestically by 14%.
The international comparison produces a different pattern for some formats. Team grants were offered internationally by 21% of reporting companies, above the 14% domestic figure. Virtual volunteering was the most common international offering in the comparison, at 47%. Ambassador programs were offered internationally by 20%, and board leadership by 13%.
| Employee volunteering format | Domestic availability | International availability |
|---|---|---|
| Virtual volunteering | 82% | 47% |
| Team grants | 14% | 21% |
| Ambassador programs | 34% | 20% |
| Board leadership | Not stated | 13% |
The percentages measure the share of CECP-reporting companies offering each format in 2024. They do not measure how many employees used each option.
What participation rates do programs achieve?
Availability and participation are different measures. A program can be offered broadly while attracting a smaller share of employees, or it can be designed for a narrower group with a different participation profile.
Flexible scheduling had the highest defined employee volunteer program participation rate in the CECP 2024 comparison, at 43%. Ambassador programs had a 1% employee participation rate, and board leadership had a 2% rate. These figures describe participation in the named program types, not the overall participation rate of the employers offering them.
The broader employer comparison was modestly higher for companies with ambassador programs. Companies with an ambassador program had a 27% overall employee volunteer participation rate in 2024, compared with 24% for companies without one. The association does not establish that the ambassador program caused the difference.
The previous CECP Giving in Numbers: 2024 Edition reported a median employee volunteer participation rate of 23% for 2023. Within that 2023 comparison, board leadership had a 3% employee participation rate, pro bono service had 4%, and bespoke programs grouped as “Other” had the highest listed rate at 39%.
The 2023 and 2024 figures come from different CECP editions and measurement periods. They are useful for context, but the reported measures should not be read as a perfectly controlled year-over-year series for every program type.
How are hours and availability changing?
CECP’s matched sets show increases in participation and volunteering hours over several periods. In one matched set, average employee volunteer participation increased by 12 percentage points from 2020 to 2024. In the same matched set, median employee volunteer hours increased 49% from 2022 to 2024.
Program availability also shifted from 2022 to 2024. The share of companies offering Dollars for Doers to domestic employees increased by 7 percentage points. Pro bono service offered to domestic employees increased by 5 percentage points. Volunteer Recognition Awards increased by 1.4 percentage points in the matched set.
Not every offering expanded. Team Grants were discontinued by 22% of companies in the matched set between 2022 and 2024. This figure describes discontinuation among the matched companies; it does not say that all companies ended Team Grants.
The CECP 2024 Edition found that average employee volunteer participation increased by 8 percentage points between 2021 and 2023 in a matched set. Median employee volunteer hours increased 75% between 2021 and 2023, and median hours in 2023 were 5% higher than in 2019. Employee Volunteer Recognition Awards offered to domestic employees increased by 9 percentage points between 2021 and 2023 in that matched set.
Taken together, these matched-set results show growth in reported participation and hours over the stated periods, alongside a changing mix of program offerings. They do not provide a forecast for future participation.
What scale do large employers report?
Large-company disclosures illustrate the range of activity that can sit behind aggregate statistics. Microsoft reported that employees volunteered more than 1.2 million hours worldwide in calendar year 2024. Its employees also gave more than $255 million, including company match, to over 36,000 nonprofits and schools during that calendar year. Microsoft separately reported more than 460,000 employee volunteer hours in Washington in 2024. These figures are from Microsoft FY25 Employee Engagement and Our people to give: Microsoft.
Salesforce reported 8.7 million employee volunteer hours accumulated through its 1-1-1 model by fiscal year 2024. The company said its technology supported more than 56,000 nonprofit and education customers by fiscal year 2024. Salesforce describes the 1-1-1 model as committing 1% of employees’ time to the community. These figures are reported in Annual Giving Back Update: Salesforce; the hours are cumulative through fiscal year 2024, not a single-year total.
BMC reported more than 50,000 volunteer hours during its January 15, 2024 International Day of Service. That event supported 369 nonprofit organizations across 38 countries, according to the BMC 2024 Corporate Citizenship and ESG Impact Report announcement.
What community outputs are reported?
Employer disclosures also quantify beneficiaries, projects, donations, and pro bono work. Thomson Reuters logged more than 51,000 volunteer hours in 2024, benefiting more than 2,300 charitable organizations. More than 9,000 of those hours were pro bono support for nonprofits, and more than 4,800 employees participated in impact through donations and volunteerism across 36 countries. The source is the Thomson Reuters Social Impact and ESG Report 2024.
Weyerhaeuser recorded 23,293 employee personal volunteer hours in 2024 and reported 782 Tree-Mendous employee volunteer projects. It also distributed $288,331 in employee volunteering reward funds to community organizations. These figures appear in the Weyerhaeuser ESG Data Table.
Jabil employees completed nearly 590,000 volunteer hours in local communities worldwide during calendar year 2024, surpassing the company’s 500,000-hour goal. The figures are reported in Jabil Sustainability: Our People and Communities. The 590,000-hour figure is a company-reported approximate total, while the 500,000-hour figure is the stated goal.
Pega reported more than 2,500 volunteer hours supporting more than 330 nonprofits across 17 countries in 2024, according to Impact at Pega. Valero reported more than 133,800 employee volunteer hours in 2024 in its Guiding Principles. Accenture reported that more than 81,000 people participated in its Season of Impact volunteering and impact activities in fiscal 2024, as described in An Inclusive Future of Work.
These company disclosures use different definitions: some count hours, some count participants, some count projects or organizations, and one Salesforce figure is cumulative. The numbers therefore show measurable forms of community activity, but they are not directly additive into a single industry total.