As of December 2025, 94,015 people are waiting for a kidney transplant in the United States. Kidneys account for the vast majority of the national organ transplant waiting list, and the gap between supply and demand continues to grow despite record-breaking transplant numbers in recent years.
The Waitlist at a Glance
The 94,000-plus candidates on the kidney waitlist represent a snapshot in time. People are constantly being added, removed, or transplanted, so the number shifts daily. On average, 11 people die every day while waiting for a kidney. Others are removed because they become too sick to safely undergo surgery. In 2014 alone, more than 3,600 candidates were taken off the list for being too sick, a number that exceeded the total living-donor kidney transplants performed that year.
Meanwhile, the true scale of kidney disease dwarfs the waitlist itself. Nearly 800,000 Americans are living with end-stage kidney disease, the point at which the kidneys can no longer sustain life without dialysis or a transplant. Only about 1 in 8 of those patients ever makes it onto the transplant waiting list. That ratio has actually gotten worse over time: in 2013, roughly 17.7% of people with end-stage kidney disease had access to the waitlist, compared with just 12.3% by 2021.
How Many Transplants Happen Each Year
In 2024, 22,916 kidney transplants were performed among people on dialysis. That’s a significant increase from 14,036 a decade earlier, reflecting better organ recovery practices and policy changes. Still, with nearly 94,000 people waiting, transplant volume covers only about a quarter of current demand in any given year.
The share of kidneys coming from deceased donors has grown steadily, rising from 73% of all kidney transplants in 2014 to 80% in 2024. Living donation, where a healthy person donates one kidney, remains critically important but makes up a shrinking proportion of the total.
What Affects Your Wait Time
There is no single answer to “how long will I wait.” The median wait varies enormously depending on blood type, antibody levels, geography, and whether you have a living donor willing to go through a paired exchange.
Blood type is one of the biggest factors. Candidates with blood type O face the longest waits, often exceeding a year even in paired kidney exchange programs, because type O kidneys are compatible with all recipients and therefore in the highest demand. Candidates with blood type A paired with a type AB donor can see median wait times as short as two to three months. Highly sensitized patients, those whose immune systems have developed antibodies against a wide range of donor tissue, also face waits that stretch well beyond a year regardless of blood type.
Children on the Waitlist
Over 1,000 pediatric candidates are added to the kidney waitlist every year. Children do receive priority under current allocation policy, and their median wait times tend to be shorter than those for adults. In a study covering 2014 through 2020, the median time on the waitlist for pediatric candidates ranged from roughly 200 to 340 days depending on age group, with younger children (ages 5 to 14) generally waiting fewer days than toddlers under 1 or teenagers approaching 18.
Who Gets Waitlisted and Who Doesn’t
Getting on the transplant list is itself a significant hurdle. Patients must complete an extensive medical evaluation, secure insurance coverage for the surgery and post-transplant medications, and often demonstrate social support systems and the ability to adhere to a lifelong medication regimen. These requirements create disparities.
Age plays a large role. Among patients starting dialysis, 55% of those aged 18 to 29 eventually get waitlisted, while only about 9% of those between 65 and 80 do. Race also matters. After adjusting for other factors, Black patients are 14% less likely to be placed on the waitlist than white patients. That gap is most pronounced among younger adults aged 18 to 29, where Black patients are 27% less likely to be waitlisted, and among older adults 65 to 80, where they are 20% less likely. The disparity narrows somewhat for patients in their 30s and 40s but does not disappear.
These numbers mean the 94,000 people currently on the list represent a filtered subset of the much larger population who could benefit from a transplant. For every person actively waiting, several more with end-stage kidney disease never reach the list at all.