Public mistrust drives first drop in US kidney transplants in over a decade

More than 100,000 people in the U.S. are on the organ transplant waiting list, with the vast majority needing a kidney, and thousands die each year while waiting. Federal regulators are developing additional safeguards after the incidents shook public confidence and prompted some registered donors to remove their names from lists.

Organ donations from the recently deceased fell in 2025 for the first time in more than a decade, resulting in 116 fewer kidney transplants, according to an analysis released Wednesday by the nonprofit Kidney Transplant Collaborative. The organization analyzed federal data and attributed the decline to public mistrust following rare reports of patients prepared for organ retrieval while still showing signs of life.

Those planned retrievals were stopped, and federal regulators are developing additional safeguards for a system that saves tens of thousands of lives each year. The incidents nonetheless shook public confidence, prompting some people to remove their names from donor registration lists, according to the analysis.

More than 100,000 people in the U.S. are on the organ transplant waiting list. The vast majority need a kidney, and thousands die each year while waiting.

Dr. Andrew Howard, who leads the Kidney Transplant Collaborative, said the 2025 drop in kidney transplants would have been larger except for a small increase — about 100 — in living donor transplants, in which a healthy person donates one of their kidneys to someone in need. The collaborative advocates for increasing living donations, which make up a fraction of the roughly 28,000 kidney transplants performed each year.

The 2025 decline in deceased donors did not reduce overall transplant numbers. Just over 49,000 transplants were performed last year, compared with 48,150 in 2024, as heart, liver, and lung transplants continued to see gains, according to federal data. Howard said the kidney-specific decline was likely due to differences in how various organs are evaluated and allocated.

With the exception of 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic was raging, organ transplants had risen year over year for more than a decade before last year’s reversal.

The Association of Organ Procurement Organizations, which was not involved in Wednesday’s analysis, said it was alarmed by the findings and called on its members, hospitals, and federal regulators “to unite in restoring public trust and strengthening this critical system.”