How Many Women Donate Eggs Each Year? What the Data Actually Shows

It’s one of the most common questions people ask about the egg donation industry: how many women actually donate eggs in the United States each year? The answer, surprisingly, is that no one knows precisely — not because the data doesn’t exist, but because the national systems that track fertility treatment aren’t designed to report it that way.

This article walks through exactly what the peer-reviewed literature and national registries do and don’t tell us about egg donor numbers in the U.S. We’ll cover the best available figures, explain why a simple annual count is harder to produce than it sounds, and lay out what the data gaps mean for anyone trying to understand the scale of egg donation in America. At Lucina Egg Bank, we think the fertility field deserves honest, cited data — not inflated estimates or vague industry claims.

The Short Answer: We Don’t Have a Precise Annual Number

The United States tracks assisted reproductive technology (ART) through two parallel systems: the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Both publish extensive national data on IVF cycle volumes, success rates, and clinic-level outcomes.

Neither one publishes a routinely updated annual count of unique egg donors.

That’s not an oversight — it reflects how the data systems are designed. SART and the CDC track ART cycles and their outcomes. Donor tracking, where it exists, lives in a separate layer of the same databases, and converting retrieval counts into unique donor headcounts requires donor-level identifiers that aren’t routinely made available in public summary tables.

This gap has been explicitly acknowledged in the peer-reviewed literature. A 2021 national SART CORS analysis noted directly that “unique donors per year” is not routinely published as a national statistic the way total ART cycle counts are.

The Best Available Estimate: What the 2021 SART Analysis Found

The most rigorous national estimate of unique U.S. egg donors comes from a peer-reviewed analysis published in 2021, using SART CORS data covering the years 2016 and 2017 — a two-year window during which SART began tracking donors with unique identifiers, making it possible to distinguish individual donors from individual cycles.

Two things are important to understand about what this number does and doesn’t tell us.

First, 17,099 is a two-year count, not an annual figure. Some of those donors may have donated once in 2016 and once in 2017, meaning they appear in the count once (correctly, as a unique donor) but contributed to two separate retrieval events. Converting this to a clean “per year” figure isn’t straightforward.

Second, the 2021 analysis covers SART member clinics only. SART membership is voluntary, though it covers the majority of U.S. fertility clinics. Egg donation activity at non-SART entities — including some egg banks and agencies — would not appear in this data.

Why Retrieval Counts Overstate the Number of Donors

When you search for egg donation statistics, you’ll often encounter cycle counts or retrieval figures rather than donor headcounts. These numbers are easier to pull from public registry tables — but they overstate donor participation significantly.

The 2021 SART analysis makes this concrete. Across 2016–2017, there were 49,193 donor oocyte retrievals but only 17,099 unique donors. That means each donor averaged 2.4 retrievals across the period.

The range was even wider: some donors underwent a single retrieval, while others underwent as many as 22. ASRM’s guidelines generally recommend a maximum of six donation cycles per donor — a limit based on safety considerations and consanguinity risk. But the data shows this limit isn’t uniformly observed.

This distinction matters a lot for how you interpret any statistic about egg donation scale. A source that says “50,000 egg retrievals per year” is not saying 50,000 women donate eggs each year. It may be describing the cycles of a much smaller group of women who donate multiple times.

What SART Does Track: Recipient Cycle Volumes

While unique donor counts aren’t publicly reported, SART’s National Summary Reports do publish detailed data on the number of donor egg recipient cycles each year. This is the demand side of the equation — the families using donor eggs — and it’s more consistently tracked than the supply side.

SART breaks donor egg recipient cycles into four categories: Fresh Donor Eggs, Frozen Donor Eggs, Thawed Embryos (frozen embryo transfers from donor eggs), and Donated Embryos (embryo adoption, a separate pathway). The largest and fastest-growing category is Thawed Embryos — reflecting the industry-wide shift from fresh egg donation toward frozen donor egg banks.

Donor egg IVF has grown steadily — roughly 1,000 additional recipient cycles per year from 2022 to 2024. It accounts for about 5% of all ART cycles nationally, a figure that has remained relatively stable even as total IVF volume has grown.

The composition within donor egg cycles has shifted sharply. In 2024, thawed embryo transfers (16,061 in 2022 to 17,882 in 2024) now vastly outnumber fresh donor egg transfers (960 in 2022 to just 516 in 2024). The frozen egg bank model — where eggs are vitrified, banked, and shipped to clinics on demand — has effectively displaced fresh egg donation as the dominant pathway.

Why the System Can’t Easily Count Donors Annually

Understanding why a precise annual donor count is so hard to produce requires understanding how the data infrastructure actually works.

• SART tracks cycles, not individuals. The primary unit of analysis in ART registries is the treatment cycle — a single stimulation-and-retrieval or stimulation-and-transfer event. Counting individual donors across cycles requires linking records by a unique donor identifier, which SART only began systematically implementing for donors in specific reporting windows.
• Donors can donate at multiple clinics. A donor who donates at two different SART member clinics in the same year may appear in two separate clinic-level reports. Without a universal donor ID linking records across institutions, those two cycles look like two different donors at the national level.
• Not all donor activity flows through SART. SART membership is voluntary and covers the majority — but not all — of U.S. fertility clinics. Egg banks and agencies that operate outside of SART-reporting clinical relationships may not have their donor activity captured in national summaries at all.
• Compensation data isn’t collected. ASRM explicitly notes that SART does not ask clinics to report donor compensation practices. So there is no national registry field from which to derive even indirect counts based on payment records.
• The CDC’s tracking system is parallel, not supplementary. The CDC’s ART surveillance system, required by the Fertility Clinic Success Rate and Certification Act of 1992, tracks clinical outcomes at the clinic level. It does not maintain a national donor registry or routinely report unique donor counts in its public-facing outputs.

What Else the Research Tells Us About Egg Donors

While the annual headcount remains elusive, the 2021 SART CORS analysis and a 2022 peer-reviewed cross-sectional study of U.S. donor egg bank profiles together fill in other parts of the picture.

Donor Demographics: What We Can Say

From the 2021 SART CORS analysis of 2016–2017 data, the average donor age was 26.3 years, with a range of 18 to 48. Donor retrievals were most common in the Western U.S. region. The study noted that many demographic characteristics — including race, ethnicity, and BMI — were not available in SART CORS for this analysis, limiting what can be said about donor demographics at the national registry level.

The 2022 bank profile study, which analyzed publicly available profile data from 12 U.S. donor egg banks (N=1,574 donors), added demographic depth that SART CORS couldn’t provide. In that dataset, donors had a median age of 26.0 years (IQR 23–29). Education level was most commonly “some college/associate/vocational” (49.4%), followed by college graduate or vocational graduate (27.9%), and high school or GED (14.5%).

Why Women Donate: What the Research Shows

The same 2022 bank profile study looked at stated donor motivations. Across 1,574 donor profiles, 80.5% cited “helping others” as a reason for donating. Financial reasons appeared in 5.4% of profiles — though the authors note these figures reflect what banks collect and display, not necessarily the full range of motivations donors hold privately.

ASRM’s Ethics Committee has addressed this directly in its published guidance on donor compensation. The Committee cites survey data showing that 88% of compensated donors — even those paid up to $5,000 — reported that helping someone was “the best thing” about their donation experience. ASRM’s position is that compensation is ethically justified as recognition of time, inconvenience, and discomfort, and that it does not displace altruistic motivation.

ASRM also specifies that compensation should not vary based on oocyte quantity or quality — guidelines that are professional standards, not legal requirements, meaning compliance is voluntary across the industry.

What We Still Don’t Know — The Documented Data Gaps

The peer-reviewed literature is explicit about what the current data infrastructure cannot answer. These aren’t matters of interpretation — they are documented limitations acknowledged directly in the research.

• Annual unique donor counts for 2018–2025. The 17,099 figure covers 2016–2017. No equivalent analysis using more recent data has been published as of this writing. The number has almost certainly changed — the field has grown — but by how much, and how the unique donor count compares to retrieval volume today, is not publicly documented.
• A national oocyte survival benchmark. SART and CDC do not publish a national average post-warming oocyte survival rate for donor eggs. ASRM’s 2021 evidence-based guideline on oocyte cryopreservation reviews the literature on vitrification outcomes but does not produce a single national benchmark figure. Survival rates are disclosed at the program level by some banks, but no aggregate national comparison exists.
• Recipient demographics by family type. Public registry tables do not provide a breakdown of donor egg IVF use by recipient family structure — heterosexual couples, LGBTQ+ families, single parents — for any year through 2024 in a form directly citable from public sources.
• A verified national compensation distribution. ASRM notes that SART does not collect compensation data. Advertised ranges vary widely. A 2025 peer-reviewed policy analysis noted that ASRM’s previous compensation guidance (commonly cited as $5,000–$10,000) was removed following the 2014 Kamakahi v. ASRM litigation, and that reported payments in some markets reach substantially higher figures. No audited national distribution of what donors actually receive exists in public data.
• A definitive current count of operating U.S. egg banks. The 2022 bank profile study identified 12 donor oocyte banks using Google search methods in 2019–2020. An earlier 2012 survey found only 7 banks. The number has likely grown further — but no formal licensing database tracks this, and the 2019–2020 figure is itself now several years old.

What Individual Banks Can Tell Us That National Data Can’t

Because no national benchmark exists for post-thaw egg survival, fertilization rates, or donor pool size, program-level data from individual banks becomes more meaningful, not less. In the absence of a national average to compare against, a bank’s own published outcomes are one of the few concrete data points available to intended parents, clinics, and researchers.

Lucina Egg Bank publishes its own clinical outcomes — one example of what program-level transparency looks like in a field with no national benchmark to compare against.

Families making decisions about donor egg IVF can’t compare their bank’s survival rate to a national average. They can only compare it to other banks’ disclosed figures, where those figures exist. That’s precisely the gap this article documents — and why published program-level data carries weight it wouldn’t need to carry if national benchmarks existed.

What This Means If You’re Considering Donating

If you’re reading this because you’re thinking about egg donation yourself, the data context is worth knowing.

The field is growing. Donor egg IVF recipient cycles grew by roughly 1,000 per year between 2022 and 2024, and frozen donor egg transfers now dominate a pathway that fresh donation once led. Demand for qualified donors — particularly from Black, South Asian, and East Asian communities where representation gaps are documented — continues to exceed supply in specific demographics.

The picture the data paints is of a field that has scaled substantially but whose workforce of donors remains undercounted, undertracked, and not fully understood at the national level. Individual women who donate are doing something meaningful in a space where good data is genuinely scarce.

At Lucina, we screen all donors to FDA and ASRM standards, cover all medical and travel costs, and compensate donors $8,000–$15,000+ per cycle. Donors can complete up to six cycles. If you’re in the 19–31 age range and want to understand whether you qualify, the application takes about 15 minutes and is the clearest way to get real answers about your specific eligibility.

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