The 1% of Charity
The UK has 171,573 registered charities. They reported a combined £91 billion of income in their most recent accounts. Sixty-three pence of every pound of it goes to the top 1% of them. The bottom 90% share less than ten pence.
Published 23 May 2026 · based on the May 2026 Charity Commission register
The Charity Commission's register is one of the more open public datasets in the UK. Every registered charity reports its income each year. We took the May 2026 bulk extract, filtered to currently-registered charities with a positive latest income (148,618 of them), and asked the simplest question we could: what does the distribution look like?
The answer, near-perfectly, is a power law.
| Income rank | Charities | Income (£m) | % of total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Top 1% | 1,487 | 57,164 | 62.92% |
| 2nd percentile | 1,487 | 9,390 | 10.33% |
| 3rd percentile | 1,487 | 4,853 | 5.34% |
| 4th | 1,487 | 3,118 | 3.43% |
| 5th | 1,487 | 2,227 | 2.45% |
| 6th | 1,487 | 1,665 | 1.83% |
| 7th | 1,487 | 1,329 | 1.46% |
| 8th | 1,487 | 1,084 | 1.19% |
| 9th | 1,487 | 911 | 1.00% |
| 10th | 1,487 | 776 | 0.85% |
| 11th to 100th | 133,757 | 8,334 | 9.16% |
The median UK charity has an annual income of £20,000
Half of all registered charities turning over money report less than £20,604 a year. That covers small village trusts, single-school PTAs, parish funds, one-off memorial grants. The 75th-percentile charity reports £108,746. To break into the top 5% you need £1.15 million; to break into the top 1% you need £8.77 million.
| Percentile | Annual income (£) |
|---|---|
| Median (p50) | £21k |
| 75th | £109k |
| 90th | £434k |
| 95th | £1.15M |
| 99th | £8.77M |
The biggest charities aren't the ones people picture
When people picture a charity they picture a donation tin, a TV appeal, a high-street charity shop. The list of the biggest UK charities by reported income looks nothing like that. The top is a hospital chain (Nuffield Health, £1.45 billion), a donor-advised giving vehicle (Charities Aid Foundation, £1.39 billion), a government-funded culture quango (the British Council, £1.01 billion), and universities (Cardiff at £634 million, Canterbury Christ Church at £354 million). Wellcome Trust, the household name for medical research, comes in eighth at £569 million. British Heart Foundation, the highest-ranked public-donation charity in the list, is ninth.
The pattern matters because of how the sector is debated. "Charity" in the public mind is donation-led, voluntary, small-scale. Most of the sector's income is none of those things. It is institutional money (NHS-adjacent providers, universities, arts councils, foundations sat on endowments) flowing through structures that happen to be charitable in law.
| # | Charity | Latest income |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Nuffield Health | £1.45B |
| 2 | The Charities Aid Foundation | £1.39B |
| 3 | Save the Children International | £1.10B |
| 4 | The British Council | £1.01B |
| 5 | The Arts Council of England | £843M |
| 6 | Lloyd's Register Foundation | £692M |
| 7 | Cardiff University | £634M |
| 8 | Wellcome Trust | £570M |
| 9 | British Heart Foundation | £411M |
| 10 | Canterbury Christ Church University | £354M |
| 11 | Oxfam | £339M |
| 12 | The Ormiston Trust | £339M |
What this isn't saying
A 63% top-1% income share is a fact about distribution, not a moral claim. Large charities are not necessarily wasteful or unworthy: many of them are doing the most ambitious work in the sector, and economies of scale matter for international relief, medical research and large-scale healthcare. Small charities are not necessarily more virtuous either. A village PTA and an endowed grant-maker live in the same data table but solve very different problems.
What the distribution does show is that the "average UK charity" is not a meaningful unit. The mean charity income (£564,000) is statistically true and economically useless: pulled upward by a long, fat tail of nine- and ten-figure organisations. The median (£20,604) is what most charities actually look like. Both numbers should be quoted whenever someone reaches for "UK charity sector income" as a single figure.
Methodology
Source: the Charity Commission of England and Wales bulk register (May 2026 daily JSON extract), loaded into Postgres. We restrict to records where charity_registration_status = 'Registered' and latest_income is non-null and strictly positive, leaving 148,618 charities reporting £90.85 billion of combined income. Income is taken from the most recent annual return on file at the time of the snapshot, so financial year-ends differ between organisations.
Percentile buckets are computed with Postgres ntile(100) over latest_income descending. The "11th to 100th" row aggregates every charity outside the top 10 percentiles. The published register also includes around 184,937 historically removed charities and a further 22,953 currently-registered records with missing or zero income data; both groups are excluded from the share calculation. Charity Commission data is published under the Open Government Licence.
Check any of these for yourself: browse causes, see notable charities, or search a specific charity.