Contribution Limits Compared: What One Donor Can Legally Give

Data as of November 11, 2026.

One individual, writing one cheque, can legally move about $923,000 into a single American party's ecosystem in one cycle. The same individual, sending the same money to a Canadian party, is capped at $1,775 a year. In Britain and Germany there is no ceiling at all, and in India there is no ceiling but there is a trace threshold. The gap between those answers is not a detail of tax law. It is the whole of the campaign finance argument, expressed as a number.

The four funding models set out in who pays for an election explain the architecture behind each country's choice. This piece takes the architecture apart at the donor level, because the ceiling on a single giver is the rule most likely to be reformed and the easiest to compare across borders.

The American ladder

The Federal Election Commission publishes a contribution table that is re-indexed for inflation in odd-numbered years, and the 2025 to 2026 figures are the current ones. An individual may give $3,500 to a candidate committee per election. Because a primary and a general election are separate elections under American law, the same donor can give twice to the same candidate for the same office, which is $7,000 per cycle.

The ladder continues sideways. A political action committee may take $5,000 a year from one individual, which is $10,000 across a two-year cycle. State, district and local party committees may take $10,000 a year combined from one donor, which is $20,000 per cycle. A national party committee may take $44,300 a year, which is $88,600 per cycle.

Then comes the channel most donors never hear about. National party committees keep three separate accounts: one for the presidential nominating convention, one for election recounts and legal proceedings, and one for party headquarters buildings. An individual may give $132,900 to each account each year. Three accounts, two years, and the total is $797,400.

Add the five channels and one person, acting entirely within the law, directs $923,000 into a single party's coordinated system in one cycle. Nothing about that is hidden. Every figure appears on the commission's own table, and each is inflation-indexed so the real value stays roughly constant across cycles.

None of it applies to independent expenditure. A super PAC may accept unlimited contributions, including corporate and union money, provided it does not coordinate with the campaign it supports. The ceiling exists on the coordinated side of American law and disappears on the independent side. That asymmetry is the structural fact that matters more than any single number in the table, because it means the effective ceiling on political money in the United States is set by the definition of coordination, not by the contribution limit.

Canada: one number that fits in a wallet

Elections Canada sets the 2026 limit at $1,775 per year for an individual giving to each registered party. The same $1,775 ceiling applies in total across all of a party's registered associations, nomination contestants and candidates, and again to leadership contestants in a given contest. The limit rises by $25 every January 1, which is a slow indexation rather than a policy choice revisited by parliament.

The Canadian rules also restrict the instrument and the person. Only citizens and permanent residents may contribute. Cash contributions above $20 cannot be accepted, and cryptoassets, money orders and prepaid cards cannot be used at all. Those restrictions are why the Canadian number is comparable to the American one only in the arithmetic: the administration is tighter, the count of permissible donors is narrower, and there is no equivalent of the uncapped independent channel in federal law.

Set the two ceilings side by side and the ratio is 520 to 1. A Canadian donor at the absolute legal maximum gives one five hundred and twentieth of what an American donor at the legal maximum can route through party committees alone.

Britain: no ceiling on giving

Britain places no statutory limit on how much an individual may donate to a political party. What the law constrains is the source of the money and the visibility of it. Donations are accepted only from permissible donors, which for an individual means someone on the electoral register, and donations above a threshold must be reported to the Electoral Commission and published.

The central party reporting threshold has been £11,180 since January 1, 2024, when it rose from £7,500. The threshold for other regulated entities, including constituency associations and individual politicians, is £2,230. Below those levels the donation is lawful and invisible; above them it becomes a public record with the donor's identity attached.

The cap in the British system sits on spending, not on giving. National and constituency campaign spending is limited and policed by the commission, which is the inheritance of the Corrupt and Illegal Practices Act of 1883. A party that can raise without limit but spend only to a ceiling puts money into organization, research and message discipline rather than into the final week of advertising. The constraint is on saturation. It is not on fundraising.

Germany: disclosure instead of a cap

German law takes the same view of the ceiling and a stricter view of the record. Under section 25 of the Party Act, parties may accept donations and there is no upper limit on the amount. Cash is permitted up to €1,000, and a donation above €500 whose donor cannot be identified may not be accepted at all.

Disclosure does the work a cap does elsewhere. Donations, membership dues and mandate-holder contributions whose combined value exceeds €10,000 in a calendar year must be entered in the party's published accounts with the donor's name and address. A single donation above €35,000 must be reported immediately to the President of the Bundestag, who publishes it as a parliamentary printed paper naming the donor.

The statute also draws hard lines around who may give. Donations from public-law bodies and parliamentary groups are barred. Donations from companies that are wholly or partly publicly owned, where the public stake exceeds 25 percent, are barred. Donations from outside the law's territorial scope are largely barred, with narrow exceptions for German and EU citizens and EU-headquartered firms. A party that depends on this structure, as Germany's fiscal trade-off shows, is funded partly by the state and disciplined by the publication of its accounts.

Brazil: the treasury replaces the donor

Brazil answered the donor question by removing the largest donor. Corporate donations to campaigns were banned in 2015 in a Supreme Court ruling, and Congress built the replacement in 2017 as a special campaign financing fund filled from the budget. The fund for the 2026 elections sits near R$4.96 billion, distributed by the electoral court among 30 parties.

Individual giving survived with a proportional ceiling: a person may give up to 10 percent of the previous year's declared gross income. A donor who declared R$300,000 of income may therefore give R$30,000, and a donor who declared R$30,000 may give R$3,000. The rule ties political influence to declared earnings rather than to wealth held in assets, which is a different test from a flat ceiling.

The fund also sits inside a budget that has other claimants, and a budget line is exposed to the same pressure visible in global bond pricing. The public fund moves the fight rather than ending it. Dividing R$4.96 billion across 30 parties gives an average of about R$165 million per party, and the distribution formula becomes the object of contention in the way donor access is contested in Washington. The contest over money does not disappear, it relocates into a budget line, and a budget line is exposed to the same fiscal pressure that shows up in Brazil's market pricing.

India: the cap a court removed

Indian law sets no ceiling on what an individual may give to a political party. Cash contributions above 20,000 rupees may not be accepted, and contributions above that level must be recorded and reported by the party to the Election Commission, so the trace threshold sits where the amount becomes large enough to matter.

Corporate giving is where the constraint was and now is again. The Finance Act of 2017 removed the previous cap of 7.5 percent of average net profits over the preceding three years and removed the requirement that companies name the parties they funded. In February 2024 the Supreme Court struck down the electoral bond scheme on the ground that donor anonymity violated the right to information, and in the same judgment held the 2017 amendment to the Companies Act manifestly arbitrary for treating corporate and individual giving alike. With the amendment voided, the earlier position governs: a company may give up to 7.5 percent of average net profits, and the contribution must be disclosed.

The sequence matters for how reform actually happens. India tried an undated, unlimited, anonymous channel and lost it in court, which leaves the country with unlimited individual giving, a restored corporate percentage cap, and a disclosure regime rebuilt under judicial supervision. The retail investor base that grew over the same period is now a constituency with its own interest in how party funding is disclosed.

What the comparison settles

Three conclusions follow from the numbers rather than from doctrine.

First, a contribution limit is only as strong as the definition of a donor. The American table is precise about individuals and silent about the vehicles they use, so the binding constraint is coordination doctrine. Germany's €10,000 record threshold is precise about the recipient and leaves the amount open. The same word, limit, describes two different instruments.

Second, the countries without a cap have not left the question unanswered. Britain and Germany and India each substitute disclosure for a ceiling, and the disclosure threshold is the number that decides how much of the system is visible. £11,180, €10,000 and 20,000 rupees are the operative limits in those systems, in the sense that they are the points above which a donation becomes a political fact rather than a private one.

Third, the treasury-funded model is not the absence of a money problem. Brazil's R$4.96 billion fund is roughly a hundred and eighty times the coordinated total one American donor can legally supply, and it is allocated by formula. A system that removes the donor creates a distribution question, and distribution questions are settled politically.

The effect question hands forward from here. A country that changes who may fund a campaign changes whose claim a winning government inherits, and that claim becomes a policy choice with a price attached, which is where The 219 Basis Point begins. The cause lane documents the funding rule. The effect lane prices it.

The forward test is which of the three mechanisms the next round of reform reaches for. Watch Brazil's fund level in the 2026 budget cycle, India's replacement rules for corporate giving now that the bonds are gone, and the 2027 election cluster in France, Finland, Nigeria and El Salvador, where campaign finance bills tend to move in the eighteen months before a vote. A country that raises its disclosure threshold is loosening its system as surely as one that raises a cap, and the figure to compare across borders is not the ceiling on a donation but the level at which the public learns who gave it.