How We Invested in Rust in 2025 — and What Comes Next
Today, the Rust Foundation has published two closely connected pieces of work:
Together, they show where the Rust Foundation has made an impact for Rust over the past year and how we’re preparing to support its next phase of growth.
Annual Report: Reflecting On a Year of Shared Investment in Rust
In 2025, Rust continued to become more secure, more reliable, and more widely trusted — especially in industries where safety and long-term stability matter most. Maintainers strengthened core systems, community leaders connected Rustaceans worldwide, and many organizations that depend on Rust invested in the ecosystem that makes it possible, in part through Rust Foundation membership.
The Rust Foundation’s 2025 Annual Report focuses on the financial side of this shared work last year.
As a high-level summary, last year, the Rust Foundation raised $5.1M and invested $2.7M directly into Rust Project and community support — including $2.0M in total costs, tools, and expenses related to funding full-time Rust maintenance work, and funding for infrastructure, grants, and ecosystem events. The remaining funding supported the governance, security, financial, and operational systems required to steward Rust responsibly at a global scale — from non-engineering staff salaries, to audits and compliance, to contracts, payments, and events that bring the ecosystem together.
If you’ve seen our reports in previous years, you might notice that this year’s publication is shorter. We opted to refresh our annual reporting to ensure it answers the following questions: 1) What was the Rust Foundation’s overall financial posture in 2025, and 2) How did the Rust Foundation’s spending in 2025 support the Rust Project and community? For our 2025 annual report, we also opted to move information about program progress and staff focus areas in 2025 to rustfoundation.org/2025 (published in December) to ensure the annual report was more digestible and focused on impact rather than granular activity.
2026-2028 Strategy: The Next Chapter of Support
Alongside the annual report, we have also published the Rust Foundation Strategy for 2026-2028, developed with input from the Rust Project Leadership Council and shaped by feedback from across the ecosystem.
The Rust Foundation’s new strategy focuses on five priorities:
- Stable, secure infrastructure
- Sustainable support for maintainers
- Responsible growth in adoption
- Meaningful engagement from organizations that rely on Rust
- Strong, connected global communities
These priorities reflect a simple position held by the Rust Foundation: as Rust’s role in the world grows, the ecosystem that sustains it should grow stronger too.
Read More
The investments captured in our 2025 annual report are not an endpoint; they are the foundation for the commitments we’re making in our 2026–2028 strategy. Read side-by-side, these documents tell the story of a transition—from what the Rust Foundation has built so far to how we’re ready to support Rust’s continued impact and growth in its next chapter.
Sustaining Rust, Together
The Rust Foundation is entering the next strategic cycle from a position of financial and organizational strength, while knowing that sustained industry support will be essential to continuing our important work. We invite companies that rely on Rust to consider Rust Foundation membership or a donation as we support its continued growth:
