A ticketing company has sent US$13.8 million in profits to charity instead of shareholders; Hugh Jackman joined Humanitix in 2026 to help expand the model | World News

Representative Image of the Humanitix logo symbolizing charitable contributions through ticket bookings ( AI Generrated Image)

A ticket booking fee can help fund more than an event. Humanitix, a not-for-profit ticketing platform, says it has directed US$13.8 million in profits to charitable causes, supporting work in education, healthcare, poverty alleviation and other areas. The company’s current 2026 Impact Report puts the detailed total at US$13,822,038. Actor Hugh Jackman joined Humanitix as its Head of Impact in April 2026, several years after the organisation began directing profits to charity. In his own announcement, Jackman said he wanted to “help build” the organisation rather than support it from the sidelines. Humanitix says its model dedicates 100% of the profits from its booking fees to charity, while the fees themselves help cover the costs of running the ticketing platform.

How Humanitix turns booking fees into charitable giving

Humanitix charges a booking fee on paid tickets sold through its platform. According to its current fee guidance, the fee covers payment-processing and merchant costs when an event uses Humanitix’s own payment gateway, as well as the company’s staff, servers and other tools used to operate the platform. The company says 100% of the profit generated from those fees is donated. The payment-processing arrangement is not identical for every event. Humanitix says its own payment gateway covers payment-processing costs within the booking fee, while events that use Stripe as their payment gateway incur Stripe’s processing fees separately. The company also says booking fees are normally passed on to ticket buyers, although event organisers can choose to absorb them.Humanitix describes itself as a registered charity and not-for-profit organisation. It says it has no shareholders and does not pay dividends to investors. Its 2025 explanation of its donation model says revenue from booking fees is pooled with operating costs to determine how much can be donated to partner charities. That means the amount generated by an individual event cannot simply be equated with a fixed portion of its booking fees.

Where the US$13.8 million has gone

Humanitix’s 2026 Impact Report provides a breakdown of the profits it says it has distributed. Poverty alleviation accounts for 39.74%, or US$5,492,240.57, while education accounts for 36.97%, or US$5,109,863.55. Healthcare represents 17.18%, or US$2,375,092.19. A further 4.2%, or US$580,708.13, is listed under support for Indigenous groups. The remaining 1.91%, or US$264,133.56, is categorised as other giving, including environmental and human-rights causes. The figures are published directly in Humanitix’s 2026 Impact Report.The report lists a broader set of areas supported through Humanitix’s charitable programme, including food security, safety and dignity, the environment, children and youth services and what the company calls life’s basic necessities. Its listed charity partners include The Life You Can Save, GiveDirectly, Room to Read, Educate Girls, Food 4 Education, Healthy Learners and other organisations working in education, healthcare and poverty alleviation. Humanitix’s descriptions of individual partners give examples of the work supported. Food 4 Education, for example, provides school meals in Kenya, while Healthy Learners works with the Zambian government on school-based healthcare. Educate Girls works in rural India to support girls’ education, and Room to Read focuses on literacy and girls’ education in low-income communities. These descriptions come from Humanitix’s own partner listings rather than independent assessments of the organisations’ overall effectiveness.

Hugh Jackman’s role at Humanitix

In a letter dated April 21, 2026, Jackman announced his appointment as Humanitix’s Head of Impact. In his letter published by Humanitix, he explained that the more he learned about the organisation, the more he wanted to become involved in building it. Jackman also described Humanitix’s model as different from a conventional company that makes money and later donates a portion to charity. He wrote that the organisation directs its profits towards its mission and said the model was the reason he wanted to take an active role.At the time of his appointment, Jackman wrote that Humanitix had collectively directed more than A$20 million towards projects addressing global poverty and education. Humanitix’s current Australian-facing pages display a more precise Australian-dollar figure of A$20,796,400, while the US impact materials give the detailed total as US$13,822,038. The figures are different currency expressions of the reported donation total, not separate amounts that should be added together. Jackman’s appointment therefore came after the organisation had already accumulated most of the reported giving. His stated role is to help build Humanitix’s impact as the organisation continues its work.

Humanitix also reports discounted support for non-profits

The company’s charitable model extends beyond direct donations. Humanitix offers eligible charities, schools and other non-profit organisations a discounted booking-fee rate. Its 2026 Impact Report says eligible organisations have used the discounted rate to run more than 300,000 events. The US version of the report puts the value of these discounted services at US$10.33 million and describes them as in-kind donations. Because Humanitix publishes different currency figures on different regional versions of its site, this article uses the US report’s figure rather than attempting to convert or reconcile the regional amounts independently.The report also says Humanitix employees received a portion of the company’s profit pool over the past 3 years and were able to direct those funds to charities of their choice. Humanitix puts the total of these staff-directed donations at US$991,853. The report does not separately state whether that amount is included within or additional to the US$13.8 million headline donation figure, so the two figures should not be combined.

A ticketing business built around its profits

Humanitix’s model is ultimately based on using a commercial ticketing service to generate profits for charitable giving. The company says its booking fees contribute towards operating the platform, while all profit generated from those fees is directed towards its charitable mission. Its current impact report says more than US$13.8 million has been donated to charity and identifies education, poverty alleviation and healthcare as its largest reported areas of giving. The report also identifies food security, environmental protection, support for Indigenous groups, safety and dignity, and children’s services among the causes it supports.Jackman joined the organisation in 2026 with the stated aim of helping build that model. His appointment came after years of charitable giving by Humanitix, meaning the US$13.8 million figure reflects the organisation’s accumulated impact rather than donations generated during Jackman’s tenure. For ticket buyers, the company’s proposition is straightforward: the booking fee attached to an event can contribute to a business whose profits are directed towards charitable causes rather than shareholders.