Before anything else, because this page was wrong about it for more than a year: Dr Jane Goodall died on 1 October 2025, aged 91. She was in California, on a speaking tour, and she died in her sleep.
The earlier version of this article described her in the present tense and gave her a net worth of $15 million. Both of those things were wrong, and I am sorry it took this long to put right.
Here is what the actual financial record says, because it turns out to be the most moving thing about her and almost nobody has bothered to look it up.
She took no salary. Not a reduced one. None at all.
What her own charity’s accounts say
The Jane Goodall Institute is a registered US charity, which means it files a public tax return every year listing what it earns and what it pays its people. Anyone can read it. I did.
This is from the return for the year ending 31 December 2024, filed in November 2025.
| Person | Role | Hours a week | Salary |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jane Goodall | Founder | 20 | $0 |
| Anna Rathmann | Executive Director | 40 | $402,086 |
| Susana Name | VP, Founder Relations | 40 | $201,666 |
| Rachel Strittmatter | VP, Finance | 40 | $193,472 |
Twenty hours a week, every week, at ninety years old, for nothing.
The only money that reached her was $22,039 in insurance costs the Institute paid on her behalf, and the return goes out of its way to explain why. In the plain-English notes at the back it says the benefits were worth less than the value of the services she provided, and that they had nothing to do with her sitting on the board.
The same note appears the year before at $20,635, and the year before that at $17,965.
Where the speaking money went
She travelled roughly 300 days a year, well into her nineties. That is the detail everyone quotes, usually to explain how she got rich.
The returns tell a different story. Lecture tour and honoraria income appears as revenue belonging to the Institute, not to her.
| Financial year | Lecture and honoraria income booked to the Institute |
|---|---|
| 2015 | $693,162 |
| 2023 | $1,218,733 |
| 2024 | $543,238 |
Royalties, too. The Institute booked $234,665 of them in 2024.
One honest caveat, because I would rather give you that than a tidy sentence. The filing does not say she personally signed every fee over to the charity. It says the charity books that income as its own. Those are slightly different claims and I am not going to blur them.
The one big sum that was definitely hers
In 2021 she won the Templeton Prize, which came with £1.1 million, about $1.56 million. That is the only substantial amount of money publicly and personally attached to her name.
She told an interviewer most of it was going into the Institute’s programmes, with some earmarked for Roots and Shoots groups in Greece and Nepal that were struggling through the pandemic. She mentioned setting a little aside, saying she supposed it would help her old age, and that her existing money had helped her grandchildren through college and helped young Tanzanians stay in high school.
In the same conversation she said she was not going to retire until she was senile.
She was 87 at the time, and she carried on for another four years.
The numbers other people print
| Figure | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| $5 million | One net worth site. Every other page quoting it, including several real news outlets, credits that one site |
| $15 million | This page, until today. No source. Removed |
| $180 million | A site that still has her alive, aged 92, living in London, and counting down to her next birthday |
The $5 million figure is the interesting one, because it never moved. It was $5 million in June 2023, $5 million in January 2025, and $5 million after she died in October 2025. The same number across two and a half years and across the end of her life.
There is one more thing worth knowing about it. The site that originated it has blocked the Internet Archive from keeping copies of its pages, so there is no way for anyone to check whether that number was ever anything else.
The mistake nearly everyone makes
This is the bit that genuinely bothered me, and this page was guilty of it too.
The old version of this article said the Institute is funded by grants, donations and partnerships, and that those contribute to her net worth. Another site lists donations to the Jane Goodall Institute in a box headed “source of wealth”.
They do not. A charity’s money is not its founder’s money. The Institute held $22.5 million in assets at the end of 2024 and paid her nothing, and its tax return reports no loans, no grants and no business dealings with her.
People gave that money to protect chimpanzees. Counting it as her personal fortune gets her exactly backwards.
While we are here, a few other things listed as her income which were never income at all. She was a United Nations Messenger of Peace from 2002, which is an unpaid honorary role. She was made a Dame in 2003 and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in January 2025, nine months before she died. Honours do not come with cheques.
What she actually built
If you want to measure her in numbers, measure these instead.
| The Institute, 2024 | Figure |
|---|---|
| Total revenue | $30,550,365 |
| Total expenses | $29,675,282 |
| Net assets at year end | $18,683,616 |
| Employees | 43 |
And Roots and Shoots, the youth programme she started in 1991 on her back porch in Dar es Salaam with twelve local teenagers. The Institute’s own fact sheet, revised in April 2026, puts it at 75 countries, more than 11,300 groups and over 12 million people reached.
A note for anyone updating an old article: you will see “more than 100 countries” quoted a lot. That figure is from around 2010 and the Institute’s current number is 75.
Timeline
- 3 April 1934. Born in Hampstead, London. Raised in Bournemouth
- 1957. Travels to Kenya and meets the palaeoanthropologist Louis Leakey, working as his secretary
- 14 July 1960. Arrives at Gombe, in what is now Tanzania, with no degree and no formal training
- 1961. Receives her first grant from the National Geographic Society
- 1964. Marries the wildlife photographer Hugo van Lawick
- 1966. Awarded a PhD in ethology by Cambridge, having never taken an undergraduate degree
- 4 March 1967. Her son Hugo, known as Grub, is born in Nairobi
- 1971. In the Shadow of Man is published
- 1977. Founds the Jane Goodall Institute
- 1991. Starts Roots and Shoots with twelve teenagers in Dar es Salaam
- 2002. Appointed a United Nations Messenger of Peace
- 2003. Made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire
- 2021. Wins the Templeton Prize and its £1.1 million
- 4 January 2025. Receives the US Presidential Medal of Freedom
- 1 October 2025. Dies in California, aged 91, while on a speaking tour
- 12 November 2025. A celebration of her life is held at Washington National Cathedral
So what was she worth
I cannot tell you, and neither can anybody else.
More than a year after her death there is still no reported will, no probate record and no estate valuation anywhere. She had book royalties across fifty years and seventeen adult titles, and she had whatever she kept of the Templeton money. That is the honest extent of it.
What can be said with certainty is the thing the net worth pages all missed. She worked twenty hours a week for her own charity for nothing, her lecture fees were booked to that charity rather than to her, and she said out loud that the biggest prize of her life was mostly going to the work.
Frequently asked questions
Is Jane Goodall still alive?
No. She died on 1 October 2025, aged 91, in California while on a US speaking tour. The Institute announced the cause as natural causes. Her death certificate later recorded cardiopulmonary arrest.
What was Jane Goodall’s net worth?
There is no verified figure and no estate has been publicly reported. The $5 million widely quoted traces to a single net worth site that shows no working, and it never changed across two and a half years.
Did she take a salary from the Jane Goodall Institute?
No. Its public tax returns record her salary as $0 every year she appears, against 20 hours a week. The only money was $22,039 of insurance costs in 2024, which the return explains was worth less than the services she gave.
Is the Jane Goodall Institute’s money part of her wealth?
No, and this is the most common error in articles about her. The Institute is a separate charity. Its $18.7 million of net assets at the end of 2024 belong to the charity and its work, not to her family.
Who survives her?
Her son Hugo, known as Grub, three grandchildren, and her sister Judy.
A last thought
She arrived at Gombe in 1960 with a notebook, a pair of binoculars and no qualifications, and changed what we understand about animals and about ourselves.
Sixty-five years later the internet’s main question about her is how much she was worth, answered by sites that could not be bothered to notice she had died.
The answer, as far as any public record shows, is that she gave it away and kept working. That seems worth saying properly.
Last reviewed 27 October 2026. Financial figures are taken from the Jane Goodall Institute’s published US tax returns and from the Institute’s own statements. If you spot something wrong here, please tell me and I will fix it.
