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

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

This article walks through what the peer-reviewed research and national registries do and don’t tell us about egg donor statistics in the U.S. We’ll cover the best available figures, explain why a clean annual count is harder to produce than it sounds, and lay out what the gaps mean for anyone sizing up egg donation in America.

At Lucina Egg Bank, we think the fertility field deserves cited data, not inflated estimates or vague industry claims.

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

No U.S. registry reports how many unique women donate eggs each year. The country tracks assisted reproductive technology (ART) through two parallel systems: SART and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Both publish extensive 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 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 turning retrieval counts into unique donor headcounts needs donor-level identifiers that aren’t routinely published in public summary tables.

This gap is acknowledged in the research. In a 2021 SART CORS analysis, researchers noted that “unique donors per year” simply isn’t published as a national statistic the way total ART cycle counts are.

The Best Available Estimate: What the 2021 SART Analysis Found

The strongest national estimate of unique U.S. egg donors comes from a peer-reviewed analysis published in 2021, using SART CORS data for 2016 and 2017. During that window, SART tracked donors with unique identifiers, which made it possible to tell individual donors apart from individual cycles.

Two things matter about what this number does and doesn’t tell us.

First, 17,099 is a two-year count, not an annual figure. Some donors may have donated once in 2016 and again in 2017. 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 number isn’t simple.

Second, the analysis covers SART member clinics only. SART membership is voluntary, though it covers most U.S. fertility clinics. Egg donation activity at non-SART entities, including some egg banks and agencies, wouldn’t show up in this data.

Why Retrieval Counts Overstate the Number of Donors

Retrieval counts overstate donor participation by nearly 3x. When you search for egg donation statistics, you’ll usually find cycle counts or retrieval figures rather than donor headcounts. Those numbers are easier to pull from public registry tables, but they don’t tell you how many women were involved.

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

The range ran wider than the average suggests. Some donors underwent a single retrieval, while others underwent as many as 22. American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) guidelines generally recommend a maximum of six donation cycles per donor, a limit based on safety and consanguinity risk. The data shows that limit isn’t observed uniformly.

This distinction shapes how you read 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 more than once.

What SART Does Track: Recipient Cycle Volumes

SART tracks the demand side closely, even though it doesn’t publish unique donor counts. Its National Summary Reports publish detailed data on donor egg recipient cycles each year. That’s the families using donor eggs, and it’s tracked more consistently than the supply side.

SART splits 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, which reflects the shift from fresh egg donation toward frozen 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 share that has held fairly steady even as total IVF volume has grown.

The mix inside donor egg cycles has shifted sharply. 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.

This is the same model we run at Lucina. Our guide to frozen donor eggs walks through why availability and timing tend to favor banked eggs over fresh cycles.

Why the System Can’t Easily Count Donors Annually

A precise annual donor count is hard to produce because of how the data infrastructure works. Five structural reasons explain the gap.

• SART tracks cycles, not individuals. The primary unit in ART registries is the treatment cycle, a single stimulation-and-retrieval or stimulation-and-transfer event. Counting individual donors across cycles needs a unique donor identifier, which SART only began applying to donors in specific reporting windows.
• Donors can donate at multiple clinics. A donor who donates at two different SART member clinics in one year can appear in two separate clinic-level reports. Without a universal donor ID linking records across institutions, those two cycles look like two different donors nationally.
• Not all donor activity flows through SART. SART membership is voluntary and covers most, but not all, U.S. fertility clinics. Egg banks and agencies operating outside SART-reporting clinical relationships may not have their donor activity captured in national summaries at all.
• Compensation data isn’t collected. ASRM notes that SART doesn’t ask clinics to report donor compensation. So there’s no national registry field to derive even indirect counts from payment records.
• The CDC’s 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 doesn’t maintain a national donor registry or report unique donor counts in its public outputs.

What Else the Research Tells Us About Egg Donors

The annual headcount stays elusive, but two studies fill in the rest of the picture: the 2021 SART CORS analysis and a 2022 peer-reviewed cross-sectional study of U.S. donor egg bank profiles. Together they cover demographics and motivation.

Donor Demographics: What We Can Say

From the 2021 SART CORS analysis of 2016 and 2017 data, the average donor age was 26.3 years, range 18 to 48. Donor retrievals were most common in the Western U.S. The study noted that many traits, including race, ethnicity, and body mass index (BMI), weren’t available in SART CORS, which limits what can be said about donor demographics at the registry level.

The 2022 bank profile study analyzed public profile data from 12 U.S. donor egg banks (1,574 donors) and added depth SART CORS couldn’t. There, donors had a median age of 26.0 years (IQR 23–29). The most common occupation was student (27.4%), and most donors reported education at or above the level of some college.

Why Women Donate: What the Research Shows

The same 2022 bank profile study looked at stated motivations. Across 1,574 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 the full range of motivations donors hold privately.

The ASRM Ethics Committee has addressed this directly in its guidance on donor compensation. It cites survey data showing 88% of compensated donors, even those paid up to $5,000, reported that helping someone was “the best thing” about their experience. ASRM holds that compensation recognizes time, inconvenience, and discomfort, and that it doesn’t displace altruistic motivation.

ASRM also specifies that compensation shouldn’t vary based on oocyte quantity or quality. These are professional standards, not legal requirements, so compliance is voluntary across the industry.

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

The research is explicit about what the current infrastructure can’t answer. These aren’t matters of interpretation. They’re documented limitations acknowledged in the studies themselves.

• Annual unique donor counts for 2018 through 2025. The 17,099 figure covers 2016 and 2017. No equivalent analysis using more recent data has been published. The number has almost certainly changed as the field has grown, but by how much, and how it compares to retrieval volume today, isn’t documented publicly.
• A national oocyte survival benchmark. SART and the CDC don’t publish a national average post-warming survival rate for donor eggs. ASRM’s 2021 evidence-based guideline on oocyte cryopreservation reviews the vitrification literature but produces no single national benchmark. Some banks disclose survival rates at the program level; no aggregate national comparison exists.
• Recipient demographics by family type. Public registry tables don’t break down donor egg IVF use by recipient family structure (heterosexual couples, LGBTQ+ families, single parents) for any year through 2024 in a directly citable public form.
• A verified national compensation distribution. ASRM notes SART doesn’t collect compensation data, and advertised ranges vary widely. A 2025 peer-reviewed policy analysis noted that ASRM’s prior compensation guidance (often cited as $5,000 to $10,000) was removed after the 2014 Kamakahi v. ASRM litigation, and that reported payments in some markets reach far higher. No audited national distribution of actual donor pay 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 and 2020. An earlier 2012 survey found only 7. The number has likely grown, but no formal licensing database tracks it, and the 2019 to 2020 figure is itself several years old now.

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

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

We publish our own clinical outcomes at Lucina. It’s one example of what program-level transparency looks like in a field with no national benchmark to measure against. You can review the full methodology on our outcomes and credentials page.

Families weighing 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 the gap this article documents, and it’s why published program-level data carries weight it wouldn’t need if national benchmarks existed. Our success rate explainer breaks down how to read these numbers.

What These Egg Donor Statistics Mean If You’re Considering Donating

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

The field is growing. Donor egg IVF recipient cycles rose 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 outrun supply in specific demographics.

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

At Lucina, we screen all donors to Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and ASRM standards, cover every medical and travel cost, and pay Standard donors $8,000 to $15,000+ per cycle. Donors who attend or graduated from top-ranked universities may qualify for our Iconic tier, which pays up to $50,000 per cycle.

If you want to know if you qualify, start with the disqualification checklist or a direct application.

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