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UKGrantmaking 2026

What is UKGrantmaking?

UKGrantmaking is the definitive annual publication on grant funding in the UK.

It provides a comprehensive overview of who makes grants across all funding sectors – Government, Trusts and Foundations, National Lottery distributors, Donor-Advised Funds, and Charities.

It’s a free, interactive platform that collates and analyses information about grantmakers and the grants they have made. For the current edition, published in June 2026, we’re looking at data from 2024-25. It also explores data published using the 360Giving Data Standard to understand the grants and recipients.

This allows funders, sector bodies, policymakers, researchers, fundraisers, and sector media to access valuable data about the state of UK grantmaking in one place.

UKGrantmaking is a collaborative project published by Funders Together. UKGrantmaking brings together a partnership of 360Giving, The Association of Charitable Foundations (ACF), The Association of Charitable Organisations (ACO), UK Community Foundations (UKCF), Pears Foundation, and London Funders.

Key findings

Over 14,000 UK grantmakers provided grants worth £24 billion in 2024-25. This represents a 4% increase from the previous year, slightly above inflation.

Although grantmaking increased overall in 2024-25, this isn’t a straightforward story. The funders we have identified represent a highly diverse sector, varying in size, structure, context, and strategy. We’ve seen large increases, significant drops, and many grantmakers maintaining their levels of giving. This variation reflects the breadth of the sector and aligns with what our research has shown in previous years.

While total grantmaking continues to increase and outpace inflation, it comes amid ongoing economic pressures on communities and civil society organisations. The Charity Commission for England & Wales reported that expenditure grew by 5.4%. Charities are facing increased costs, rising demand for services, and pressures on other income streams. While grantmaking has grown, demand for funding continues to increase, creating challenges in meeting funding needs

Highlights

Overall grantmaking trends

  • Overall, grantmaking is up: Total grantmaking increased by 4% compared to 2023-24 to over £24bn, marginally exceeding inflation.
  • Philanthropic grants continued to exceed those from the Government and National Lottery Distributors: Grants from Trusts & Foundations and DAFs totalled over £10bn, compared with Government and National Lottery funding of £9.5bn.
  • Trusts and Foundations grantmaking increases steadily: Grantmaking for Trusts and Foundations (excluding Wellcome Trust) remains the largest category and grew by 5% to £7.4bn.
  • The rise of Donor-Advised Funds (DAFs): DAFs are becoming a substantial part of the voluntary and community sector’s income with grantmaking in 2024-25 at £2.4bn, an 8% increase since 2023-24 and 29% increase since 2022-23.
  • The majority of grantmakers are small, distributing under £1 million a year.
  • Endowments remain flat: Endowment levels have remained relatively flat over the past five years, representing a decline in real terms since 2020-21.
  • England registered funders are supporting work across the UK: 89% of grantmaking by trusts and foundations registered in England is by funders that operate across England or the whole of the UK.

Grants and their recipients

  • Funding to London recipients doesn’t only fund London: Only 18% of the grant value to organisations registered in London was for delivery exclusively in London.
  • Funding reaches the most deprived areas: Grants are disproportionately awarded to organisations based in more deprived areas. 18% of grants to local or regional organisations are awarded to organisations based in the most deprived areas, while only 4% go to organisations in the least deprived areas. For grants to individuals and families, 55% of recipients were in the most deprived areas with less than 0.05% in the least deprived areas.
  • The majority of the grantmaking continues to be to organisations: Less than £1bn given directly to individuals and families.
  • Average grant size increased: The median size of published grants has increased from £13,194 in 2023-24 to £19,635 in 2024-25. This reflects changes by the National Lottery Community Fund, which raised its ‘Awards for All’ maximum limit to £20,000.

As well as being able to explore grantmaking data from 2024-25 interactively on the UKGrantmaking platform, you can read about what this data means for different groups of funders, charities, researchers, and policymakers in our blogs.

How to navigate and use the platform

The platform has been designed so that it can be read in different ways: 

  • As a report, with a button at the end of each section to view the next and previous pages. 
  • Using the chapter headings in the menu on the left of your screen to explore areas of specific interest.

All visualisations and tables are interactive, so you can dig into the detail of what interests you. You can explore the tables, charts and visualisations in Flourish. You can also download data for use outside the platform – go to the bottom of each table for a summary, or download the full dataset via our methodology and data page.

In the tables, a 360Giving logo ( ) appears next to the names of grantmakers who publish open data about the grants they award. You can explore these grants in detail on GrantNav.

For inspiration about how you could use the information shared in UKGrantmaking, please visit our FAQs.

Next steps

Use grants data

After exploring the data here, you can dive deeper into specific grants in the 360Giving search engine, GrantNav. Throughout UKGrantmaking, funders who publish their data using the 360Giving Data Standard are marked with the 360Giving logo so you can see where more data is available – including grants awarded after 2024-25..

Inspired by this analysis and want to find out how you can use 360Giving data in your work?

Find out more about exploring the data on the 360Giving website.

Publish grants data

This is the third edition of UK Grantmaking. As our understanding of grantmaking grows, so do questions about specific areas and themes.

We plan to repeat this analysis annually and build on these insights. To do so, we need your support to improve the availability and quality of grants data. This includes publishing comprehensive, timely grants data using the 360Giving Data Standard and encouraging others in your area, sector, or funding network to do the same.

If you are a funder who has not published before and would like your grants to be included in the next edition, 360Giving offers a range of free support, including introductory workshops, online guidance, and one-to-one calls. Find out more about publishing your data.

Tell us what you think

To support future editions of UKGrantmaking, please share your feedback on the approach, content, and how it could be improved, and submit your questions to our FAQs.

Approach

Analysis from the current edition, published in June 2026, is based on grants made in 2024-25, which is the most recent year for which statutory reports are available. Sector partners have shared commentary and insight to complement the data and support a wider understanding of the overall picture.

Direct comparisons cannot be made to previous editions, due to greater availability of data this year and changes to previous categorisation based on feedback. Our year-on-year comparisons use restated numbers for previous years which means accurate comparisons can be made in the current edition.

The analysis, conducted by 360Giving, is based on information from regulators and statutory accounts. It also uses data published using the 360Giving Data Standard to understand the grants and recipients. All sources had limitations and needed some level of manual intervention due to the quality of the data. We have taken a proportionate approach to this, and continue to learn lessons that can be applied in future years.

You can read more about this on our methodology and data page.

Our partners

  • 360Giving

    360Giving helps funders publish open data about their grants and supports people to use this data to improve charitable giving. The vision is for grantmaking in the UK to become more informed, effective and strategic.

    360Giving’s aim is for more money to go to where it is needed most to support communities and causes through a more informed understanding of the grantmaking picture. It helps people to access and use the data by creating the tools to make it easy to explore, download and visualise, as well as providing training, support and research to help people get the most out of it.

    360Giving is the lead for this collaboration and manages the platform and data.

  • Association of Charitable Foundations

    The Association of Charitable Foundations (ACF) is the leading membership organisation for foundations and independent grantmakers in the UK. We believe that the foundation model of philanthropy plays a vital role in addressing societal challenges and fostering positive change.

    ACF is the lead contributor on the Trusts and Foundations section.

  • Association of Charitable Organisations

    The Association of Charitable Organisations (ACO) is the membership body for charities that provide financial and wellbeing support to individuals. They encourage knowledge sharing, collaboration and best practice across their network. ACO enables members to benefit from collective expertise, experience, and resources to address common issues and develop shared solutions.

  • UK Community Foundations

    UK Community Foundations (UKCF) works with community foundations to inspire place-based philanthropy, bring communities together and fund vital work in neighbourhoods across the UK. Each community foundation is deeply rooted in place, drawing on decades of knowledge, relationships and expertise in the areas where they operate. At the national level, UKCF works with strategic partners to pilot new neighbourhood ideas and scale existing solutions, making sure resources reach people and communities where they are needed the most.

    UKCF is the lead contributor on the community foundations section.

  • London Funders

    London Funders is the only cross-sector membership network for funders and investors in London’s civil society. Their membership ranges from trust and foundations to corporates, from hyper-local to national funders. Their purpose is to bring funders together to build a better London by taking action on what matters to our city and our communities. They do this through: enabling a movement of members to have strong and trusted connections, based on shared values and ambitions; facilitating and leading collaborative programmes where only working together can achieve the change that’s needed; and by driving a learning culture, where shared data, intelligence and insight leads to better decision-making and action.

    London Funders is the lead contributor on the London focus section.

About our partners

Our supporters

  • Pears Foundation

    Pears Foundation is an independent family foundation rooted in Jewish values, investing over £20 million each year in a wide range of charitable organisations and causes. Led by the Pears family, the Foundation’s activities are focused on understanding complex issues, engaging people in achieving social progress and promoting wellbeing. 

    Pears Foundation has supported this project to build on the previous Family Foundation Philanthropy and Foundation Giving Trends analysis which it has funded and contributed to since 2008.

  • CCLA

    We are the UK’s largest charity fund manager*, looking after more than 30,000 charities and not-for-profit organisations. Founded in 1958, we are independently owned by our clients and staff with £14.5 billion of assets under management as at 31 March 2024.

    All of our charitable clients are established to do some good in the world. Our purpose is to help them maximise their impact on society by harnessing the power of investment markets.

    We are working with our clients and the investment industry towards a new era of sustainable investment – pushing for change on the climate crisis, addressing modern slavery and other human rights injustices, and engaging with companies regarding the mental health of their Workforces.

    CCLA Investment Management Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.

    *Charity Finance named CCLA as the number one asset manager for charities in the UK in 2021, 2022 and 2023.

About our supporters

Acknowledgements

This project would not have been possible without the contributions and support of many people, including:

The 360Giving team, especially David Kane and Ruth Jolley, the lead analysts for the project, and Tania Cohen, for her ongoing support and contribution to this year’s publication.

Leads at partner organisations, especially:

  • Bridget Kohner (Pears Foundation)
  • Catherine Seymour (Association of Charitable Foundations)
  • Donal Watkin (Association of Charitable Organisations)
  • Grace Perry and Helen Mathie (London Funders)
  • Sam Grimmett-Batt (UK Community Foundations)

The UKGrantmaking advisory group members, including:

  • Adam Lopardo, Community Foundation North East
  • Alexandra Parker, IVAR
  • Anoushka Kenley, PBE
  • Cara Cinnamon, Mission 44
  • Elaine Wilson, Corra Foundation
  • Emma Horrigan, City Bridge Foundation
  • Gareth Hughes, The National Lottery Community Foundation  / Wales Funder Forum
  • Hikmat Olatinwo, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation
  • Karl Wilding, University of Kent
  • Nick Addington, William Grant Foundation
  • Nitya Teagarajan, Homeless Link
  • Rhodri Davies, Why Philanthropy Matters
  • Sharika Sharma, CCLA
  • Sufina Ahmad, John Ellerman Foundation
  • Tom Steinberg & Gemma Bull, Modern Grantmaking

History

This work builds on the vision and previous research supported by the Pears Foundation which started with Family Foundation Philanthropy in 2008, and later became the Foundation Giving Trends series. These reports were published by the Centre for Charitable Giving and Philanthropy, Bayes Business School, City St George’s University of London, (formerly Cass Business School, City University) until 2013 and subsequently the Association of Charitable Foundations (2014 to 2022). Previous reports are available from the Pears Foundation and ACF.

There were a variety of authors between 2008 and 2022, with the core methodology developed by Cathy Pharoah (Honorary Visiting Professor, Bayes Business School) who was the lead author, supported and implemented in the latter years by Dr Cat Walker (The Researchery).

UKGrantmaking, now in its third year, builds on this foundation and was developed through the work of the team at 360Giving, in particular Tania Cohen, who lead on increasing the scope of the research to cover all grantmaking sectors and establishing the partnership and platform that underpins the resource today.