Insights from the top 50 fundraising charities
What this chart shows
The 57 charities in England and Wales that entered the top 50 by donations and legacies in any financial year from 2021 to 2024, the most recent available. Vertical position shows how far a charity leans on voluntary income; horizontal position shows what it spends to bring that income in. Bubbles are coloured by cause and sized either by total income or by donations alone, whichever is selected.
Each bubble is a charity. The higher it sits, the more of its income comes from donations and legacies. The further right it sits, the larger the share of its spending that goes on raising funds. Colour shows the cause it works in, and size shows either total income or donations alone, depending on which you select.
Drag the year slider to move between 2021 and 2024. Charities appear and disappear as their fortunes change, because the cohort is everyone who reached the top 50 in any one of those years rather than a fixed list. Select a cause in the key to hold it against the rest of the field.
What this chart tells us
The picture divides into three. A column at the far left contains endowed and family foundations, which receive large gifts and spend nothing to obtain them. A cluster along the bottom holds charities whose income is mostly contracts, fees or trading, so donations are a minor line. The diagonal between them is where the fundraising charities sit, and it is the part of the chart worth studying.
Across the four years, the group's income grew by 27 per cent in cash and donations by 23 per cent, which after inflation of around 20 per cent amounts to very little in real terms. Reliance on donations barely moved, from 57.2 per cent of income in 2021 to 55.6 per cent in 2024. What did move was the cost. Spending on raising funds rose by 54 per cent in cash, from 11.0 to 13.5 per cent of total spending.
Select a cause to hold it against the rest of the field, and select it again to release. Hover or tap a bubble for the underlying figures. A dashed outline marks a charity whose return needs a caveat, given in the tooltip.
What is counted
The vertical axis shows donations and legacies as the charity reports them under the SORP. Several bodies in this cohort book substantial government grant income on that line, which makes them look donation-funded when they are not: at Jisc the two figures are identical in every year, and the Royal Academy of Engineering's 2024 figure is the government's £150.7m Green Future Fellowships programme.
The second view subtracts the government grant income reported in Part A of the annual return. Part A gives one government grant total across all income lines, so the subtraction assumes that money sits in the donations line. Where a charity books it under charitable activities instead, as the RSPB does with agri-environment payments, the correction is too heavy and voluntary income is understated. Every tooltip shows both figures, and where reported grants exceed the donations line the result is held at zero rather than driven negative.
Reliance on donations is that figure as a share of total income and endowments. The cost of raising funds is the expenditure on raising funds reported under the SORP, less investment management costs, which the same line absorbs and which would otherwise show endowed foundations as heavy fundraisers.
Bubbles are sized by area. The two size settings share one scale, so switching from total income to donations shrinks every bubble by the share of its income that is not voluntary, which is the point of the switch. The British Council, United Learning and the National Trust, three of the four largest bubbles in the income setting, fall away to a tenth or a sixth of their income, while Cancer Research UK holds more than two thirds of its bulk and Motability four fifths. In the donations setting, a charity reporting none in a given year disappears rather than being drawn as a dot.
Who is in and who is out
Twenty-four pass-through bodies are excluded because their donations are money in transit to other charities: donor-advised funds (the Charities Aid Foundation and its American Donor Fund, Charities Trust, Prism the Gift Fund, both UBS funds, both National Philanthropic Trust entities, the Master Charitable Trust, Stewardship), giving platforms (Founders Pledge, the UK Online Giving Foundation), appeal and redistribution vehicles (the Disasters Emergency Committee, the Arts Council of England, the Football Foundation, the International Finance Facility for Immunisation), church transfer bodies (the Archbishops' Council, Church of England Central Services, the Parish Giving Scheme), Save the Children International, whose income comes from its own federation members, the Breakthrough Foundation, which grants onward to its American parents, Effective Ventures Foundation, Farmland Reserve UK, and Hospice UK, whose 2021 and 2022 income was the government's pandemic support package for hospices, 98 per cent of which it granted straight on; its own income in a normal year is under £10m.
Endowed and family foundations are kept, which is why a cluster sits at the top left: they take in large gifts and spend nothing on raising them.
How causes were assigned
The register's own classification cannot carry a colour. It is multi-coded and coarse: the Salvation Army is filed under nine headings, Unicef UK under eight, and Cancer Research UK appears under education as well as health. Each charity here has therefore been given a single primary cause by hand, checked against the register codes and its own description of what it does.
The rule is what the money does, not who founded the charity or how it describes itself. That is why Christian Aid, Tearfund, Islamic Relief and Human Appeal appear under international development, and why the Salvation Army, which spends £178m a year on its own charitable activity in Britain, appears under welfare. Only the Kingdom Hall Trust, which provides and maintains places of worship, and the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, whose expenditure is ministry, are classified by religion, because for them religion is the activity rather than the origin. A faith-founded marker cutting across the causes would be a different and probably interesting chart.
Other borders: Unicef UK and Sightsavers work with children and with disability respectively, and sit under international development because that is where the money goes. The RNLI sits under health and saving lives, following the register's own wording. Family and endowed foundations with genuinely general purposes are grouped together rather than given a cause they do not have, though the specialists among them, Quadrature on climate and the Michael Uren Foundation on medical research, are placed with their subject.
Limits worth knowing
Charities differ in where they book trading costs. The British Heart Foundation puts £223m under other expenditure while reporting £38m on raising funds, so its position understates what its shops cost to run; Oxfam books its trading costs inside raising funds and sits far to the right. Comparison across the horizontal axis is therefore only as consistent as the accounting behind it.
Figures are nominal and 2021 is a pandemic-affected base. Gross income double counts grants passing between charities. English universities and other exempt bodies never appear on this register at all.
Source
Charity Commission for England and Wales, register full data extract, annual return Part B table, downloaded 27 July 2026. Part B covers charities with income above £500,000. Four years are shown because the published extract retains only recent returns for live charities: for financial years ending 2011 to 2019 it holds 6,911 rows, of which 93 per cent belong to charities since removed from the register.
The Dogs Trust group filed through two registrations over the period, with operations moving between them in 2024; the two are shown here as a single series.
How this was made
The register extracts were downloaded, cleaned and analysed, and this chart written, in collaboration with Claude Opus 5 and SEEK, Firetail's AI scanning tool. Every figure comes from the Charity Commission files rather than from the model, and the exclusions and cause assignments are editorial judgements taken by Firetail.