Fifty-five years ago the rich world promised 0.7% of its income as aid. In 2024, of the 32 donors who reaffirm the target, four met it and 22 cut — and together they gave 0.34%, less than half the line

On 24 October 1970 the UN General Assembly wrote a number into Resolution 2626: the world's rich countries would give 0.7% of their national income as official development assistance. The donor community has reaffirmed it ever since — at Monterrey in 2002, in the European Union's 2005 promise to reach it by 2015, at Addis Ababa in 2015, and as Sustainable Development Goal target 17.2. We pulled the donors' own scorecard — the OECD's grant-equivalent ODA as a share of each donor's gross national income, the exact series the UN tracks as indicator 17.2.1 (SDG code DC_ODA_TOTGGE) — for all 32 members of the OECD Development Assistance Committee, the club that made the pledge. In 2024, the last final year, four of the 32 cleared 0.7%: Norway (1.02%), Luxembourg (1.00%), Sweden (0.79%) and Denmark (0.72%). A year earlier five did; Germany, at 0.82% in 2023, fell to 0.68% and dropped off the list. Read across the whole committee, 22 of the 32 cut their ratio between 2023 and 2024 and 10 raised it. Weighted together, the 32 gave 0.34% of their combined income — less than half the target — a total of $214.6 billion, down 6% in real terms and the first fall in six years. The OECD notes 2024 was the first year since 1995 that France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States all cut in the same year. The preliminary 2025 figures, released in April 2026, are worse. Total aid fell 23.1% in real terms — the steepest one-year drop ever recorded, back to the level of 2015. That 23.1% is the OECD's own like-for-like measure; the $174.3 billion headline behind it is the OECD's broader "DAC members and associates" aggregate, not the 32-donor sum shown above. The OECD attributes roughly three-quarters of the fall to the United States, which cut about 57% after shutting down USAID; five donors — the US, Germany, the UK, Japan and France — account for 95.7% of the decline. In our per-donor panel, 24 of the 32 fell; a 25th, Italy, sits essentially flat on figures that still shift at the margin. [preliminary]

The following is analysis, not fact. A single desk usually covers this as one headline number — "aid hit a record low" — or as one country's cut. Reading all 32 filings at once shows what the headline hides: the retreat is collective and synchronized. The pledge lives in communiqués; the filings move the other way, and they move together. Two structural cautions keep the ledger honest. A ratio can fall while a budget holds, because the denominator — national income — keeps growing; and grant-equivalent accounting counts some in-donor costs, such as hosting refugees, as aid that never leaves the donor. But in both 2024 and 2025 the dollar volumes fell too, so this is a real retreat, not an artifact of the yardstick. ^mmodeled The four who still clear the line are all small, wealthy northern-European states; every one of the largest economies sits below it. We did not model why any government cut — the pattern is what the record shows, not a cause these data isolate. ^sspeculative

The strongest counter is that the 0.7% line was never a promise every donor personally made. It is a collective UN and EU benchmark; the United States has said for decades that it never adopted it, and Switzerland's own target is lower. Measuring a government against a bar it never accepted overstates the gap. A second caveat cuts the other way: because grant-equivalent ODA and in-donor refugee and student costs inflate some ratios without money crossing a border, the headline can flatter donors even as it falls — the real transfer to poorer countries is smaller than 0.34% implies for several members. And some argue the number that matters is where aid goes and how well it works, not the share of income spent.

**View from the donor capitals cutting:** budgets are squeezed by higher defense spending, rising debt-service and the cost of hosting refugees at home — several European governments have openly moved money from aid lines toward those ends. ^mmodeled **View from the recipients and the OECD:** the aggregate is back where it stood in 2015, when the same governments signed the 2030 Agenda, and the OECD projects a further 5.8% fall in 2026 — a second consecutive decline before the decade's targets come due.