Highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation’s fiscal year 2024-2025 audit report

As part of our commitment to transparency, every year when the Wikimedia Foundation publishes our financial statements, we also publish additional context to help our audiences better understand what the numbers mean. We want community members, donors, readers, and partners to be able to see how we use our funds in support of our free knowledge mission. 

This post explains the highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation’s audited financial statements (“audit report”) for fiscal year 2024-2025, which ran from July 1, 2024 – June 30, 2025. The audit report is a key document that presents details on the financial balances and activities of an organization, in a format required by U.S. accounting standards. It is audited by a third party (in our case, the audit firm KPMG) in order to validate accuracy. The financial information found in the audit report is then used to build an organization’s Form 990, which is the form required by the United States government for organizations to maintain their nonprofit status. Each annual audit is an opportunity to evaluate the Foundation’s activities and credibility as a responsible steward of donor funds and other resources.

Key takeaways from the Foundation’s fiscal year 2024-2025 audit report

The Foundation’s 2024-2025 Annual Plan laid out a number of financial goals for the fiscal year. Below are key takeaways from the audit report related to those goals:

• Clean audit opinion: The external auditors, KPMG, issued their opinion that the Wikimedia Foundation’s financial statements for FY 2024-2025 are presented accurately, marking the 20th consecutive year of clean audits since the Foundation’s first audit in 2006.
• More funds devoted to supporting volunteers: Year over year, we work to efficiently deliver core fundraising and administrative needs in order to devote more funds to movement support – things like platform maintenance, community grants, feature developments, and more. This year, we devoted 77.4% of the budget to movement support, outperforming our goal of 76.9%. In real terms, this means that, during this fiscal year, we devoted $9.3M more in funding support to the movement compared to the previous fiscal year. Our percentage is well within the range of best practice for nonprofits, as Charity Navigator awards the highest score to nonprofits devoting 70% of the budget or more to programmatic work.

• Investments in Product and Technology: Product and technology is the largest investment we make year over year as an organization. This year we funded work on anticipated releases including Dark Mode to increase the accessibility of Wikimedia sites, the Chart Extension for adding data visualizations to Wikipedia articles, an expanded Collaboration List feature for the Campaign Events extension to centralize and increase visibility of Wikimedia events such as edit-a-thons, and Multiblocks to support admins in their anti-vandalism work by creating the ability to apply different blocks to the same user. We also invested in enhancing security and privacy on the wikis. Examples of that work include improvements to Single User Login (SUL3), Temporary Accounts, and Edge Uniques.
• Sustained growth in community grants: In fiscal year 2024-2025 we increased grants by $1.8M, of which $1.7M went to our grant programs and $100k went to Wikidata. This represented an increase of 9.2% in funding to grant programs from the previous fiscal year, and a 7.3% increase in granting overall, bringing the total to $26.3M. This is in line with our recurring Annual Plan goal to prioritize growing community funding. Throughout the year, this funding supported communities in organizing dozens of critical regional and thematic conferences, as well as in launching pilot hubs to facilitate support and coordination across topic areas, including the Volunteer Supporters Network and the ESEAP Hub, EduWiki, and the Language Diversity Hub. We also launched a small pilot project to fund resource requests, such as books, to help editors improve articles. For more information about grants, including grants broken down by region, see the Community Funds Distribution Report.

• Funding advocacy and awareness about Wikimedia: The Foundation continues to work with communities around the world to educate policymakers about Wikimedia’s volunteer-led model and why it is so valuable, with the aim of protecting it into the future. As part of this work, the Foundation co-hosted a side event at the UN General Assembly’s Summit of the Future together with Wikimedia EU, Wikimedia Poland, Wikimedia UK, Wikimedia Deutschland and Wikimedia Czech Republic. The event called on UN member states to protect public interest projects online as they set out to finalize the text of the Global Digital Compact – a guiding document for the future of digital governance. This event was part of a larger campaign that led to successfully influencing the final text of the Global Digital Compact and through it, the future of the internet. Also as a result of advocacy initiatives, Wikipedia was formally recognized as a Digital Public Good, affirming Wikipedia’s unique role in providing free, open, and trusted knowledge in the public interest.

• Limited internal expense growth; increased cost efficiency: For the second year in a row, we aimed to maintain a slower rate of expense growth. Our total expenses for the year grew by 7% or $12.4M, which represented a significant reduction in expense growth from the previous five-year period, wherein growth had averaged 15% per year. This brought total expenses to $190.9M. While growth in expenses was driven primarily by planned increases in funding to movement support and cost of living adjustments for personnel, expenses were also impacted by a larger than anticipated increase in legal defense costs, as we saw a rising need to provide legal defense for projects and communities and to protect Wikimedia’s model in courts around the world. We limited expenses on a number of fronts, including moving to a significantly smaller office space, which saved $1M in expense during the 2024-2025 fiscal year and will continue to result in savings going forward. 
• Revenue diversification on track: In recent years, the Foundation has anticipated a trend where fundraising through banners might not be sufficient to sustain the movement in the way it has in the past. To better safeguard the movement’s future financial sustainability, we have been working to diversify our revenue streams. During fiscal year 2024-2025, the Foundation’s total revenue was $208.6M, of which $189.5M came from donations. Of the total revenue, $62.4M or 30% came from banner donations, down slightly from 32% the previous year – an expected shift as other fundraising streams grow. Email donations contributed 15%, and recurring giving – an especially reliable, predictable form of income – increased by 18% to represent 21% of total donations. Additionally, Enterprise contributed meaningfully to revenue for the first time, marking an important step toward diversification.
  • Wikimedia Enterprise becomes profitable: Wikimedia Enterprise contributed meaningfully to the diversification of revenue streams for the first time this year. Its revenue increased 148% to $8.3M, which represented 4% of the Foundation’s total revenue. It also was its first year of profitability, with $3.9M in net profit to the Foundation. This means that, within just four years of its launch, Wikimedia Enterprise is now a net-contributor to the financial stability of the Wikimedia movement. More information about Enterprise is available in its financial report. 
  • Wikimedia Endowment continues long-term support: The Wikimedia Endowment provided $3.1M in support of the Foundation, consistent with the budget. Additionally, the Endowment reimbursed the Foundation for services rendered under its cost sharing agreement, bringing the total transferred from the Endowment to $5.2M. As it is now its own standalone 501(c)(3), the Endowment files its own audit report, highlights from which will be available here on Diff in the coming months.  

• Net positive operating results funding work in the current fiscal year: Due to strong performance across revenue streams, revenue came in at $208.6M –  11% above the fiscal year target of $188.7M. Any overage in net revenue is stored in the reserves, which can then be utilized for unforeseen expenses related to critical work. The overage from fiscal year 2024-2025 is being tapped to respond to rising threats to our mission (including legal and regulatory threats), as well subsidizing grants going to groups outside the United States—as the U.S. Dollar falls relative to some other currencies, the Foundation contributes more toward grants so that community groups do not receive less in local currency. It will also be utilized to support Wikipedia’s 25th birthday as a strategic, one-time, non-recurring event in the current fiscal year. The birthday activities will consist of community grants for events, a design system for community members to use, and opportunities to be part of partnerships and press work throughout the year, in order to build positive sentiment around the world for Wikipedia and the Wikipedia communities. As we look toward the future, with increased challenges coming from the regulatory sphere, as well as a decrease in reader traffic that amounts to fewer people on the site, it is even more critical to have a healthy reserve to maintain and protect the sustainability of the projects. 

You can read the full audit report on the Foundation’s website, review the frequently asked questions on Meta-Wiki, or ask any additional questions on the FAQ talk page.