Almost anyone can be an organ and tissue donor, regardless of age or medical history. There is no upper age limit, no single medical condition that automatically rules out every type of donation, and no requirement to be in perfect health. The determining factor is the condition of your organs and tissues at the time of donation, not a checklist of prerequisites. With more than 103,000 people currently on the national transplant waiting list, the pool of potential donors needs to be as wide as possible.
Age Is Not a Barrier
There is no minimum or maximum age for organ and tissue donation. Newborns have been donors, and the oldest organ donor in U.S. history was Cecil, a 95-year-old West Virginia coal miner who donated his liver in May 2021, saving one woman’s life and enhancing the lives of more than 20 others through tissue and skin donations.
What matters is how well your organs function, not how many birthdays you’ve had. A healthy 70-year-old’s kidneys may be far more viable than those of a younger person with chronic disease. Medical teams evaluate each potential donor individually at the time of death, so registering as a donor at any age is worth doing.
Living Donors
You don’t have to be deceased to donate. Living donors can give one of their two kidneys or a portion of their liver, since the liver regenerates to near-normal size within weeks. Kidney and liver transplants are the most common living-donor procedures. Living people can also donate bone marrow, blood-forming cells, and skin.
The evaluation process for living donors is thorough. Transplant centers run a full medical workup and also assess your psychological readiness, your support network for recovery, and how you might cope emotionally if the transplant doesn’t go well for the recipient. You’ll be informed of every potential risk and outcome before giving consent. Maintaining a healthy lifestyle before and after surgery is emphasized throughout the process.
Deceased Donors: Brain Death and Circulatory Death
Most organ donations happen after death, and there are two recognized pathways. Donation after brain death occurs when all brain and brainstem function has permanently ceased, even though a ventilator may still be keeping the heart beating and blood flowing. This artificial support gives medical teams time to evaluate organs and coordinate transplant logistics.
Donation after circulatory death happens when the heart stops beating irreversibly and is not restarted. In controlled settings, organ recovery begins after a waiting period of 2 to 5 minutes of pulselessness, with 5 minutes being the most widely accepted minimum. Because organs lose viability quickly once blood flow stops, rapid ground or air transport is arranged immediately.
What Tissues Can Be Donated
Tissue donation has a broader reach than most people realize. Transplantable tissues include corneas, bone, cartilage, tendons, heart valves, blood vessels, and skin. A single tissue donor can improve the lives of dozens of recipients: burn patients receiving skin grafts, people regaining mobility through tendon or bone transplants, or someone recovering sight through a corneal transplant.
Tissue recovery has a slightly wider time window than organ recovery, but it still needs to happen quickly after death. Inflammatory processes begin damaging tissues soon after the heart stops, so procurement teams work within hours rather than days.
Medical Conditions That May Affect Eligibility
Very few conditions rule out donation entirely. The medical team evaluates each organ and tissue independently, so even if one organ isn’t viable, others may be. That said, certain conditions can disqualify you from specific types of donation:
- Active or recent cancer can prevent organ donation, depending on the type and how recently it was treated.
- Uncontrolled high blood pressure or diabetes may disqualify you from kidney donation specifically, since these conditions damage the kidneys over time.
- Serious heart or lung disease can make the surgical risk too high for living donation and may affect the viability of those organs in deceased donation.
Conditions like hepatitis C, which once ruled donors out, are now manageable thanks to advances in treatment. The same is true for HIV.
Donors Living With HIV
Since the passage of the HIV Organ Policy Equity (HOPE) Act in 2013, people living with HIV can donate organs to recipients who also have HIV. For years, these transplants were only allowed under strict research protocols. That changed significantly in late 2024, when federal regulations were amended to allow kidney and liver transplants from HIV-positive donors to HIV-positive recipients as standard clinical practice, no longer requiring research oversight.
Starting in June 2025, all living and deceased kidney and liver transplant programs in the U.S. will be approved to perform these transplants. Safety measures remain in place: a transplant physician must verify and document both the donor’s and candidate’s HIV status, and the candidate must give informed consent specifically acknowledging they are receiving an organ from a donor with HIV.
How Registration Works Legally
When you register as an organ donor, whether through your driver’s license, a state registry, or a donor card, you are making a legally binding decision. Under U.S. law, this is called first-person authorization, and only you can revoke it while you are alive. Your family cannot legally override your decision after your death.
In practice, organ procurement organizations inform families of the donor’s wishes rather than asking for permission. About 80% of procurement organizations in the U.S. report that they proceed with donation even when a family objects, as long as the deceased had registered. Family objections that persist to the point of trying to stop donation occur in fewer than 10% of cases involving registered donors. Courts have consistently upheld first-person authorization when challenged.
Still, telling your family about your decision matters. When families understand and support your choice ahead of time, the process moves more smoothly and with far less emotional conflict during an already difficult moment.
The Gap Between Supply and Need
More than 48,000 transplants were performed in 2024, a record number. Yet over 103,000 people remain on the waiting list. The gap persists partly because many people who could donate never register, often because they assume a medical condition or their age disqualifies them. In reality, the decision about which organs and tissues are viable is made by medical professionals at the time of donation, not at the time of registration. Signing up simply ensures you’ll be considered.