For people waiting on a kidney
The person who saves your life is probably someone you haven't met yet.
Most living kidney donors come forward because they heard one specific person's story. My Kidney Story gives you a page worth sharing, and sends everyone who reads it to a confidential questionnaire — so the right match can find you.
Free to use. No payments ever change hands on My Kidney Story.
I need a kidney
Tell your story and get a page worth sharing.
Start your campaignI might be able to donate
What it involves, what it costs, and what happens next — at your own pace.
Open the donor guideI'm looking for a transplant center
What each center publishes about its living donor program.
Browse centersLiving kidney donation is growing, and it works
Every number here is published by the national transplant network. Follow any of them back to the source.
- 6,521
- living donor kidney transplants in 2025
- Each one is a person who found a living donor. Living donation was the only part of the transplant system that grew in 2025 — deceased donation fell for the first time in over a decade.
- UNOS, 2025 full year
- 1 in 4
- living kidney donors give through an exchange
- 23.4% of living donor kidney transplants ran through a paired exchange or a chain. Someone willing but not a match still gets their person a kidney — they donate to a stranger, and a stranger's donor gives to them.
- OPTN/SRTR Annual Data Report, 2024 data, published 2026
- 0.9
- donor deaths per 10,000 surgeries
- Across 164,593 US living kidney donors, deaths around the operation fell from 3.0 per 10,000 in the 1990s to 0.9 per 10,000 in 2013–2022. More than 98% of donor operations are now keyhole surgery.
- JAMA — Massie et al., 2024, 1993–2022 donor cohort
- 92,000+
- people are waiting for a kidney
- The wait for a deceased donor kidney is typically three to five years. A living donor is the one route that does not depend on waiting for a phone call.
- American Kidney Fund, reviewed March 2026
Three steps, about ten minutes
- 1
Tell your story
Write it the way you would tell a friend. Add photos. Say what a transplant would change. You do not need to be a writer — you need to be honest.
- 2
Share it everywhere
You get a link, social share buttons, and a QR code for flyers and posters. Every share puts your story in front of a network you could never reach alone.
- 3
We hand off the medical part
Anyone who wants to help clicks one button and goes to a confidential questionnaire run by transplant professionals. My Kidney Story never sees or stores medical information.
Stories worth reading
Reporting and first-hand accounts from across the transplant community. Each one opens at its original publisher.
TribLive
Patients share their stories in hope of finding living donors
Reporting on people doing exactly what My Kidney Story is built for — telling their story publicly and waiting to see who answers.
Read at TribLive
Donate Life America
Susan, living kidney donor
One donor's account of the decision, the screening process, and what came after, in her own words.
Read at Donate Life America
UNOS
What's behind the rise in living donation?
Living donation grew again in 2025. UNOS looks at what is driving it and what still holds people back.
Read at UNOSWhy one person's story matters so much
A kidney from a living donor generally lasts longer than one from a deceased donor, and it can be scheduled — which means months instead of years, and surgery on a date you can plan around, rather than an unpredictable call.
Almost nobody volunteers to donate to a stranger in the abstract. They volunteer after reading about a particular person: a name, a face, a reason. That is the entire gap My Kidney Story exists to close.
Getting screened costs a potential donor nothing, is confidential, and can be stopped at any point for any reason. Most people who start learn they are not a match, and that is a normal outcome rather than a failure.
- 2 in 3
- living kidney donors are women
- 64.9% of the people who donated a kidney in 2024 were women. 8.0% were Black — a share that has fallen by about a third since 2013, while Black Americans remained more than four times as likely as White Americans to reach kidney failure.
- OPTN/SRTR Annual Data Report, 2024 data, published 2026
- 86.6%
- of US adults would consider donating a kidney
- Only thousands a year actually do. The gap is not willingness — it is that almost nobody is ever asked, because the person who needs the kidney can rarely bring themselves to ask. Closing that gap is the entire reason this platform exists.
- Kidney Medicine — national survey, 802 US adults, surveyed 2021, published 2024
Your story is the part only you can write.
Everything after that — the sharing, the screening, the matching — is what we and the transplant centers are here for.
Start your campaign