How to find a sperm donor: bank, known donor, or a platform match

• There are three real ways to find a sperm donor in 2026: a sperm bank, a private known donor, or an agreement-only donor found through a matching platform. Inside the bank route there are three levels of donor anonymity to choose between, and the routes themselves differ more in openness and legal exposure than in medical safety.

• Anonymous donation is essentially dead, whatever the label on the vial says. Consumer DNA databases are now dense enough that a search for a person of European descent returns a third-cousin-or-closer match about 60% of the time, and ordinary genealogical work turns that match into a name, so pretending a donor will stay unfindable only sets the child up for a jarring discovery later.

• Which option is right depends less on cost than on how open you want the arrangement to be with your child, and on how much say you want over the person who will one day appear in that child's genetic history.

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The three ways to find a sperm donor in 2026

Every route to a sperm donor is a variation on one of three options, and which one fits depends on how much openness you want with the donor, how much you want the child eventually to know, and how much of the process you are willing to run yourself.

A sperm bank (cryobank). You browse a bank's catalog: Fairfax, California Cryobank, Seattle Sperm Bank, Xytex, Cryobank America, and a growing set of newer entrants such as MySpermBank. The donors have passed the bank's medical and genetic screening; you buy vials, the bank ships them frozen to your clinic, and insemination happens in a clinical setting. You will almost certainly never meet or speak to the donor. What you do choose is how anonymous he stays, and banks sell three levels of that: fully anonymous, "open", where the bank never releases his identity but he has committed to at least one contact with a donor-conceived child who asks, and open-ID, where the child can request identifying information at 18. The three levels, and the swing toward the last of them, get a section of their own below.

Known donor (a person you already know). A friend, a relative of your partner, someone from your community. The medical and legal work falls on you: he needs a semen analysis and infectious disease testing on a schedule, and you need a written agreement that spells out what parental rights, if any, he holds. Many families use a fertility clinic anyway, both to run the insemination and to preserve the legal difference between a clinic-mediated donation and a personal one.

Agreement-only donor found through a matching platform (sometimes called a private sperm donor). You match with someone you did not know before, and everything about the arrangement, from how often you meet before conception to what the child will be told and when, is defined by the agreement the two of you sign. Some pairs write in that the child may learn the donor's identity at 18, or earlier at the parents' discretion, exchange medical history, and meet a few times first; others agree that there will be no ongoing relationship and no later contact with the child at all. That second version is the closest modern equivalent of the old "anonymous through a personal connection" route, and a no-contact clause is legally intact but functionally meaningless in 2026, because a child who wants to can still find the donor through 23andMe or Ancestry as an adult.

You can place the three routes on two axes: how much of the medical work is done for you, and how much openness you have with the donor and, later, with your child. The rest of this guide takes each route in turn, without dressing any of them up. If you are doing this alone, the full single-mother-by-choice path from decision to first attempt has its own guide; this one covers the donor half.

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Cryobank donors: when they make sense and when they don't

Cryobanks have been the default route for four decades, and they still make sense for many families, but the situations in which they are the right answer have narrowed as the other options have matured.

A cryobank is the right choice when:

• You want the pregnancy attempt to happen inside a fertility clinic, with the clinic handling the vial order, the thaw and the insemination. That is how the vast majority of clinician-led IUI and IVF cycles in the US work.

• You do not personally know anyone who would be a good donor, or you would strongly prefer not to use someone you know.

• You want the reassurance of an extensively screened donor pool. The banks publish large carrier panels, with Seattle Sperm Bank listing up to 515 conditions, Xytex up to 569 genes and Fairfax 500+, though those are commercial numbers rather than a standard: ASRM requires exactly three conditions on every gamete donor, cystic fibrosis, spinal muscular atrophy and thalassemia or another hemoglobinopathy, and names no panel size at all, while ACMG's own benchmark panel is 113 genes. The panel a particular donor was screened on also depends on the year he entered the program, so ask about him rather than about the bank. On top of the genetics, bank standards add psychological screening, an extensive family medical history and semen analysis. Known donors get the same infectious disease testing but only sometimes the same genetic panel.

• Your fertility timeline is tight and you cannot spend the six to twelve months a known-donor or platform-matched arrangement typically takes to set up.

• Your plan happens to cover the treatment side. Be clear that no US state requires an insurer to pay for the vial itself, and three say so expressly: Maryland (Ins. Art. § 15-810(f)), Maine (24-A M.R.S. § 4320-U(4)(B)) and New Jersey (N.J.A.C. 11:4-54.5). What several states do mandate is coverage of the treatment that uses donor gametes, which is a different thing: Delaware and New Hampshire reach the procedures, and California's SB 729 does for large-group plans from 1 January 2026. Budget the vial as out of pocket wherever you live, and read the plan document for the rest.

A cryobank is often not the right choice when:

• You want your child to grow up knowing the donor's identity and, ideally, the donor as a person. Open-ID at 18 is not the same thing.

• You want a specific person as the donor: a friend, a family member, or someone you meet and vet on your own terms.

• Cost matters a great deal and you cannot get insurance coverage. Published vial prices run from $897 to $2,500, and they track disclosure status more than preparation: at California Cryobank a Heritage ID-disclosure vial is $1,897 against $897 for an open or anonymous one, and its current releases, all ID disclosure, are $2,397. Seattle Sperm Bank publishes $1,395, Fairfax $1,300–$2,100, Xytex $1,725–$2,200, The Sperm Bank of California $2,500. The open-ID donor most families end up wanting sits at the top of that spread, not the bottom.

• You value knowing the donor as a person rather than as a profile. Bank profiles are extensive, but a profile is not a conversation.

The bank market has expanded a good deal in the last two years. Alongside the four established players (Fairfax, California Cryobank, Seattle Sperm Bank, Xytex), newer entrants such as MySpermBank, Cryobank America and Cryomate have made the process more transparent. What competition has not done is lower prices, and Fairfax's own fee schedules make the point: vials it listed at $830–$1,045 in January 2019 are $1,300–$2,100 today, domestic shipping went from $205–$260 a container to $340–$415, and a prepaid year of storage went from $395 to $530. The documentation on donors is better than it was; the prices are not, and the fundamental limit of "you will never meet this person" still applies.

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Bank donors: choosing the level of anonymity

A bank does not sell one kind of donor. It sells three levels of anonymity, and because the labels vary from bank to bank, check what a particular bank means by its own before you buy.

Fully anonymous. The donor is never identifiable to anyone: the bank holds his identity and does not release it to the family or to the child at any age. Some countries require exactly this by law; in Spain, for example, article 5.5 of Ley 14/2006 makes donation anonymous, so a bank there has nothing else to offer. In the US a family can still buy from anonymous donors at some banks, though, as the DNA numbers below show, what the bank withholds a genealogy website may not.

Open (anonymous, but willing to be contacted). The bank still does not release the donor's identity, but he has agreed to at least one contact with a donor-conceived child who asks for it. California Cryobank and Seattle Sperm Bank both call these "open" donors. It is a cheaper, separate category from the next level, and an easy one to buy by mistake.

Open-ID (identity at 18). The donor has consented, at the time of donation, to the release of his identifying information, typically his full name and last known contact details, to a donor-conceived child who requests it at 18. California Cryobank calls this tier "ID disclosure"; other banks run it as an "identity-release" program. Open-ID donors also tend to be more open to you now, not only to the child later: some banks offer adult photos and fuller profiles for this tier. What is released at 18 is information rather than a relationship, and identity-release programs generally do not promise that the donor will respond. Between the purchase and that birthday, the donor and the family typically have no contact. The child grows up knowing they were donor-conceived, and knowing they will have the option to learn who the donor is once they are old enough to decide what to do with that information.

No one can tell you how fast open-ID is growing in the US, because there is no registry that could: federal surveillance of assisted reproduction explicitly excludes treatments in which only sperm are handled, and that means intrauterine insemination, the dominant route for donor sperm. What has been measured is the composition of the donor pool, and it has turned over. Open-identity donors were 11.9% of US sperm donors in 2006 and 65% in 2024, while the pool itself stayed flat at roughly 1,700 donors (Valido, Harbour and Scheib, 2025). That is a change in who donates rather than growth in donation, and four things pushed it there.

The child gets a real answer, eventually. The research that exists is about the timing of disclosure rather than about access to the donor. In families followed from the child's first year, adolescents told about their biological origins before age 7 had more positive family relationships and higher wellbeing at 14 than those told later (Ilioi et al., 2017), and at 20 the same cohort was as well adjusted as its unassisted-conception comparison group (Golombok et al., 2023). The one longitudinal study that tested the access question head-on, following donor-conceived people through four waves into their thirties, found that donor type and contact did not significantly affect behavioral outcomes (Carone et al., 2025). Open-ID, then, is a way of leaving the choice with the child rather than a treatment that improves outcomes, and we would rather say so than sell it as one.

The parents don't have to manage an active relationship with a stranger for eighteen years. A known-donor arrangement means ongoing negotiation of birthdays, holidays and whether the donor comes to the school play. Open-ID takes those questions off the table for the childhood years and puts them in the child's hands as an adult.

The donor's family stays out of it. Known donors have parents, siblings and often a spouse and children of their own, all of whom form opinions about their relationship to the donor-conceived child. Open-ID keeps the donor's family entirely out of the child's early life.

DNA testing already forced the issue. With consumer DNA testing near-universal in the 2020s, "anonymous" donation stopped being functionally anonymous. About 60% of long-range familial searches for a person of European descent return a third-cousin-or-closer match, and a database covering just 2% of a population is enough to give nearly everyone in it one (Erlich et al., Science, 2018), without the donor ever taking a test himself. It is not a notification, though: only 15% of searches turn up a second cousin or closer, and getting from a distant match to a name is deliberate genealogical work. Choosing open-ID is choosing to structure the eventual disclosure rather than leaving it to a genealogy website and a shocked email at nineteen.

Open-ID is available at all major US cryobanks, and most now default to it, though a family can still buy from anonymous donors at some. On a matching platform there is no bank label to choose; what the child may learn, and when, is one of the clauses the two of you write, and "you can know each other now, and the child can know you at 18" is the usual starting point there rather than a special feature.

For a longer treatment of what open-ID means for the child specifically, see Open-ID vs anonymous sperm donor: what the difference means for the child.

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Known donor: what a known sperm donor arrangement actually means

A known sperm donor is the option families most often romanticize and most often mishandle. In the romanticized version your best friend from college donates, you have the baby, everyone stays close, and the child grows up knowing exactly where they came from. That does happen. What also happens is that the donor changes his mind about parental rights three years in; or his spouse decides they want a relationship with "their" child; or his mother starts introducing herself as the grandmother; or child support litigation lands on him when he never expected it, or lands on the family, from a state that does not recognize the agreement they signed.

The medical part is straightforward. Your donor gets a semen analysis, and the FDA's donor-testing rule, 21 CFR § 1271.85, requires HIV-1 and HIV-2, hepatitis B, hepatitis C and syphilis from every donor; HTLV-I, HTLV-II and CMV from donors of viable, leukocyte-rich cells, which the preamble to the rule itself confirms includes semen (Federal Register document 04-11245); and chlamydia and gonorrhea specifically from semen donors. A CMV-reactive donor is not automatically disqualified, which surprises people; the bank needs a written procedure and has to notify the physician. Zika is not on the list at all and never was a test: the FDA withdrew its Zika guidance on 20 May 2024 and de-listed the virus as a relevant communicable disease agent, and even before that it was risk-factor screening rather than a lab test. The six-month rule people quote is narrower than it sounds. Section 1271.85(d) requires a new specimen and a repeat test at least six months after donation from anonymous donors, and § 1271.60(a) keeps that sperm quarantined until the retest clears, which is why bank sperm sits frozen for that long. A directed donor, meaning one the recipient already knew before the donation, is excepted from the retest by name: he is still screened and tested at donation, and his sample is quarantined only until his eligibility determination is complete, which is days rather than months. Home insemination with a known donor skips the freeze altogether, and whether that is wise is a call to make with your doctor.

The legal part is where most known-donor arrangements go wrong, because parental rights are not decided by intention. They are decided by state law, by whether the insemination happened at a clinic or at home, by whether you were married at the time, and by whether a written agreement exists that a court would actually enforce.

The eight things to agree on in writing before conception, at minimum:

1. Parental rights and financial obligation. The donor waives them; the intended parent or parents are the legal parents; the donor is not financially responsible for the child, the intended parents never seek support, and the donor never seeks visitation. What makes that hold is state law, and in the states with the strongest donor statutes it is not the clinic that does the work. California's Fam. Code § 7613(b) has run two routes since AB 960 in 2015, and what changes between them is the default rather than the protection: semen provided to a licensed physician or sperm bank means the donor is not a parent unless a signed writing says he is, while semen that never went to a physician or bank means he is not a parent provided he and the woman signed a written agreement before conception. Washington's RCW 26.26A.605 says flatly that a donor is not a parent of a child conceived by assisted reproduction, with no condition of any kind, and its definition of assisted reproduction covers intrauterine and intracervical insemination. New York's Fam. Ct. Act § 581-302 asks for proof of donative intent, and § 581-202(d) accepts a record signed before a notary public, before two witnesses who are not the intended parents, or before a health care practitioner, so the clinic is one of three routes rather than the only one. Where a state has no donor statute, or where the statute's conditions are not met, the exposure is real, and that is the first question for a lawyer in your own state.

2. Contact schedule. How often, if at all, the donor and the child will interact, and what role he plays: none, "cool family friend", or "one of the parents", which is a co-parent arrangement rather than a donor one.

3. Disclosure to the child. When and how the child learns who the donor is: whether they grow up knowing, or are told at a specific age.

4. Medical updates. The donor commits to telling the parents about any new significant diagnosis in himself or a first-degree relative, an obligation that matters for decades.

5. Future siblings. Whether the donor commits to donating to your family again, whether he will donate to other families, and whether you will be told if he does.

6. Insemination method. Whether conception happens at a fertility clinic or at home, written down rather than left implied. If at a clinic, which clinic, and confirmation that its donor consent process was completed; if at home, a written record that both sides were told what that means legally in your state and chose to proceed anyway. Which category your state falls into is the first thing to ask the attorney.

7. Dispute resolution and jurisdiction. A mediation clause, an arbitration clause, the chosen state law and the chosen venue.

8. Termination and modification. The agreement can be changed only in a writing signed by both sides, with no unilateral exit, and it should name the contingencies in advance: the donor moving, the intended parents separating, a death, an incapacity. It should also say plainly that the parental-rights waiver survives every modification and the end of the agreement itself. The contact schedule can move; that cannot.

None of this replaces a family-formation lawyer, but an intended parent who walks into a lawyer's office having already thought through these eight questions saves several thousand dollars of billable time and comes out with a much stronger agreement.

Nearly all of it applies to a platform-matched donor as well. Once the two of you have met and exchanged names before the donation, the same medical questions arise and the same paperwork answers them; the difference is that you are building trust from zero rather than drawing on years of it.

We break each clause down further in Known sperm donor agreement: the 8 clauses that decide everything.

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Cost comparison across the three routes

Sperm donor cost varies wildly across the three routes, and the sticker price hides a lot of downstream cost. Two things are worth knowing before you read the numbers. Almost every figure below is a bank's or a clinic's own published self-pay price; the one exception is the legal line, which is labelled as our estimate, because ART attorneys quote privately and no firm publishes a schedule. And the totals are per successful pregnancy rather than per attempt, which matters more than it sounds, because three donor-insemination cycles is the standard first course rather than a finish line. The largest donor-specific dataset published, a retrospective analysis of 16,850 donor insemination cycles in China, puts cumulative live birth at 20.6% after one cycle, 28.8% after two and 32.4% after three, and finds no meaningful gain beyond the third, which means about two thirds of patients are still going after the course most clinics recommend. Age moves it hard: a second Chinese cohort of 10,415 cycles reports cumulative live birth of 61.5% under 35 against 11.8% at 40 and over. Both of those are Chinese series, and donor-sperm practice is not identical across health systems, so read them as the shape of the curve rather than as your personal odds. The shape itself is not China-specific. At two US centers, an older 408-cycle series from UCLA reported 13.5% per cycle and a plateau after the seventh, and a 2,912-cycle analysis from the Mayo Clinic reported 9.4% per cycle with effectively no live births above age 43.

Bank donor:

• Vials: $897–$2,500 each at the banks that publish prices, and the price differs by anonymity level: ID-disclosure donors are usually the more expensive ones. Seattle Sperm Bank's own family-planning guidance puts the national average at three to four IUI cycles per successful pregnancy, one to two vials per insemination, and at least four vials bought per pregnancy, and it frames the extra vials as sibling planning rather than as a spare. Four vials is $3,600–$10,000, or $5,600–$10,000 if you want an ID-disclosure donor. IVF needs less: Fairfax's own specimen standards call for one ART vial per IVF cycle, though it notes that some providers combine two ART vials for a single insemination.

• Storage and shipping: $180–$425 per shipment depending on the bank and the speed (Seattle Sperm Bank $180–$280, Xytex $255–$280, Fairfax $340–$415, The Sperm Bank of California $375–$425), and $500–$600 for a year of storage. One shipment plus a year of storage is $680–$1,025, and more if you ship again for each cycle. Volume changes it: Seattle Sperm Bank ships standard free on orders of five vials or more.

• Clinic fees for IUI: $1,700–$3,500 per monitored cycle. Nine US clinics publish self-pay prices and not one of them has a monitored cycle under $1,700; the cheapest in the country is $1,710 at a deliberate low-cost outlier, and high-cost markets reach $4,305. What the cycle price buys is the monitoring ultrasounds, the sperm wash and the insemination; what it never includes is medication, the trigger shot at $100–$300, the vial, and shipping. IVF: $11,760–$18,000 for a base cycle without medication at the clinics that publish one, which typically bundles monitoring, anesthesia, retrieval, insemination, embryo culture, freezing and a year of storage. Medication adds $4,000–$6,000, embryo genetic testing $2,000–$4,250, and a later frozen transfer $3,500–$7,000; packages that already fold in the testing run to $22,250, and published all-in totals at high-cost clinics reach $28,900 and $30,780.

• Total, IUI path: $9,400–$25,000 per successful pregnancy, on the three-to-four-cycle assumption above. If the first cycle works, that same path is $3,300–$7,000. Total, IVF path, one cycle: $17,300–$34,300, taking the cheapest published base cycle plus medication at the low end and the highest published all-in total at the high end.

Agreement-only donor via a matching platform:

• Matching: the platform is often free or low-cost. Creating a profile and browsing profiles on To Be Parents are free.

• Donor compensation: many known and platform donations are uncompensated, and for the ones that are not, there is no published market rate to quote. Private arrangements do not publish, and ASRM sets no figure at all, saying only that payment should not become the donor's primary motivation. Bank donor programs are a different market with published numbers: banks pay their own donors $35–$200 per approved donation, which comes to $720–$2,400 a month on a weekly clinic commitment. That is a bank paying a donor on a donation schedule; it is not a per-cycle rate a recipient pays a private donor, and nothing published supports one. Agree a number in writing, or agree in writing that there is none.

• Medical screening for the donor: about $650 if it runs through a clinic, which is the common case for a fresh donation. One fertility group publishes the FDA-required panel at $350, and self-pay expanded carrier screening covering 260+ conditions, counselling included, is $298. Screening him through a licensed sperm bank instead, so that you end up with FDA-compliant frozen vials, is a different product at a different price: The Sperm Bank of California publishes $3,350 for a known donor's initial appointment and $3,050 for a directed donor, plus $900 for every repeat STI panel.

• Legal agreement: our estimate, $1,500–$4,000 for a family-formation lawyer to draft the agreement with each side separately represented. This is the one line here we cannot source. No ART attorney publishes a fee schedule; the only published dollar figure we found anywhere is one San Diego firm's characterisation of the market at $500–$2,000, which is below our estimate and is not that firm quoting its own fee. Ask for a written estimate on the first call.

• Clinic fees for IUI or IVF: the same as the bank path.

• Total, IUI path: $7,250–$18,650 per successful pregnancy on three to four cycles. Total, IVF path, one cycle: $17,900–$35,400. Both assume clinic-route screening; going through a licensed bank adds roughly $2,400–$2,700 to the screening line. A no-contact clause does not change this arithmetic: the savings of "no ongoing relationship" are marginal, and the risk of legal or emotional complications later is higher.

Known sperm donor:

• Matching: not applicable, since you already know him.

• Compensation: varies, and is often zero.

• Medical screening: about $650 through a clinic, or $3,050–$3,350 plus $900 per repeat panel through a licensed bank, exactly as above.

• Legal agreement: our estimate, $1,500–$4,000. Consider budgeting extra for a second-parent adoption if you are in a state where the intended non-genetic parent is not automatically recognized.

• Clinic fees: the same as above, unless you are doing home insemination, which changes the legal picture significantly (see below).

• Total, IUI path: $7,250–$18,650 per successful pregnancy on three to four cycles. Total, home insemination path: $2,150–$4,650, which is the legal line plus clinic-route screening and no clinic fee.

Home insemination cuts thousands off the total, and the legal picture is more nuanced than the usual warning suggests, because there are really two families of donor statute. The modern ones, following the 2002 and 2017 Uniform Parentage Acts, say a donor is not a parent and usually attach no conditions: Washington is the clean example (RCW 26.26A.605), and its definition of assisted reproduction reaches intracervical insemination done at home. Not every state in this family is that clean. Texas calls its chapter the Uniform Parentage Act (Family Code § 160.101) but defines a donor as someone who provides sperm "to a licensed physician" (§ 160.102(6)), so a man who hands his sperm straight to the recipient for insemination at home is not a donor under it. The older ones, descended from the 1973 Act, protect the donor only where a licensed physician performed the insemination, and a few still carry that Act's original wording, which also required the recipient to be married. California and New York sit between the two: California protects a non-clinic donor who signed a written agreement before conception (Fam. Code § 7613(b)(2)), while New York accepts a witnessed record of donative intent (Fam. Ct. Act §§ 581-302 and 581-202(d)). So the honest version of the advice is not "a clinic is required" but this: a clinic plus an agreement signed before conception is the combination that satisfies the largest number of states, because it meets the physician statutes and the intent statutes alike, and costs you nothing where the rule is unconditional. Where a state has no donor statute, or where its conditions are not met, the exposure is real, and those are the cases in which courts have held a known donor liable for support. Talk to a family-formation lawyer in your state before choosing home insemination with a known or platform-matched donor.

For a fuller treatment of a specific sub-question, see Free vs paid sperm donor: the trade-offs nobody spells out.

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What to check before you say yes to any donor

Whether the donor is a bank profile, a friend or a platform match, the same questions should be answered before you use his sperm. A bank handles some of them for you; the rest you handle yourself.

Medical

• Infectious disease testing within the last six months (HIV, hepatitis B and C, syphilis, gonorrhea, chlamydia, CMV, HTLV).

• Semen analysis (motility, morphology, count).

• Genetic carrier screening. ASRM's 2024 guidance requires cystic fibrosis, spinal muscular atrophy and thalassemia or another hemoglobinopathy on every donor, and recommends pan-ethnic expanded screening rather than ancestry-based panels. Ask that the donor and whoever is carrying the pregnancy be screened on the same panel; ASRM notes that they often are not, which is how a shared carrier state gets missed.

• Family medical history at least two generations deep, and ideally three.

Legal

• A written agreement, signed before insemination.

• An agreement drafted or reviewed by a family-formation lawyer in your jurisdiction.

• Execution that matches your state's statute: notarized or witnessed where that is the standard, clinic-mediated where the statute makes that the trigger.

• If you are not the biological carrier, a second-parent adoption or a court order confirming parentage, even in states where marriage supposedly does this automatically. Post-2015 case law has been inconsistent enough that lawyers recommend belt and suspenders here.

Personal

• A meeting, or several conversations, before you commit, even if the arrangement is agreement-only; you cannot screen for character on a profile.

• An explicit conversation about the donor's expectations for future contact with the child, his willingness to answer the questions the child may have at 18, and his expectations of contact between now and then.

• If you are both open to it, a meeting with the donor's spouse or long-term partner, whose opinion will shape this arrangement whether or not they sign anything.

Values and openness

• You agree on what the child will be told, and when.

• You agree on whether the donor donates to other families, and whether you will be told.

• You agree on future siblings: is the donor willing to donate again if you want a second child from the same donor? Bank family limits are private policy rather than law, and they count families rather than children: Fairfax and Seattle Sperm Bank stop at 25 US families per donor, The Sperm Bank of California at 10. ASRM's 2024 guidance suggests no more than 25 births from a single donor, which is a suggestion rather than a rule and counts births where the banks count families. The exception is Colorado, where SB 22-224 made it law (codified at C.R.S. Title 25, Article 57): a donor is capped at 25 families in or outside the state, and a bank must release identifying information when a donor-conceived person turns 18. Read the date carefully, because it is the part everyone gets wrong: those duties attach only to gametes collected or matched from 1 January 2025, so the first Colorado disclosure right does not mature until roughly 2043. Known and platform donors are limited only by the agreement, and California Cryobank states plainly that it cannot stop a donor from donating at another bank.

• You agree on the timing of identity disclosure: at 18, earlier, or by mutual consent.

The mistake most intended parents make is to treat this as a checklist to run through at the end, and it isn't one. These conversations, spread over weeks or months, are what tell you whether this is the right person; the medical and legal parts only confirm what you have already decided.

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Next step

Once you have picked which of the three routes fits your family, the next document to prepare is the agreement itself. Even if you are going through a bank, the intake paperwork is a version of what we cover in Known sperm donor agreement: the 8 clauses that decide everything; for platform-matched or known donors, the agreement is the legal spine of the entire arrangement.

If you want to see sperm donor profiles, from donors who want no contact after donation to those offering open identity at 18 or an ongoing relationship, you can browse donor profiles on To Be Parents for free.

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This article is educational, not legal or medical advice. Before you inseminate or sign any donor arrangement, consult a licensed family-formation attorney in your state and a licensed reproductive endocrinologist. State-level differences in donor parental-rights law are substantial and change more often than most families realize. Every price above is a bank's or a clinic's own published self-pay figure as of August 2026, except the legal line, which is labelled as our estimate because no attorney in this field publishes one. All of them will change.