Country-by-country deceased and living donation rates for 2024 — with the dashboard, the article, and the full bibliography.
From the 2024 report
Main conclusion & key findings.
A record year for Spain, all the growth carried by DCD, and family consent emerging as the cleanest proximate variable.
Main conclusion
A record year — and the same lesson, now visible across three consecutive cycles.
Global transplant activity rose to 173,727 procedures in 2024, with 47,180 deceased donors. All of the growth in deceased donation came from DCD: DCD donors rose 17% while DBD donors fell 2%. Spain set the highest deceased-donor rate ever submitted to GODT at 53.9 per million.
The 2024 cycle reaffirms what the 2022 and 2023 cycles already suggested: legal change without infrastructural reinforcement does not move donation rates. The countries that gained ground in 2024 had already invested in coordinators and DCD pathways. The countries that legislated and stopped there did not.
Headline 2024
DCD now contributes nearly three in ten deceased donors worldwide. The Netherlands runs the world’s most DCD-led major program at 66.2%; the United States led on absolute volume with 16,989 donors (7,283 of them DCD); and Spain remained the only country routinely transplanting all five major organs — kidney, liver, heart, lung, pancreas — from DCD donors.
