Using data provided by grantmakers using the 360Giving Data Standard, we can explore the types of organisations that receive grant funding. For the purpose of this section we are only looking at grants to organisations with award dates between April 2023 and March 2024 available in the published data by April 2025. This totals almost 97,000 grants.

Note that grants identified as being awarded for further regranting have been excluded from this analysis as we do not have information on the eventual recipients, and the size of the initial awards for onward distribution may skew the grantmaking picture. We have also excluded government grants to statutory bodies or for statutory purposes. See methodology for more information.

Size of recipients

Where grant recipients are registered charities, we can use data from the charity regulator registers to look at the size of organisations that have received grants. The most common grant recipient size is charities with an annual income between £100k and £1m. This is larger than the profile of all charities on the register – as you might expect, unfunded organisations are smaller in profile.

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Communities served

Charities on the Charity Commission for England and Wales register are required to select ‘Who the charity helps’ from a list of eight different groups. Charities will often identify more than one group that they serve. As we cannot determine how each charity spends its money across different programmes or communities supported, there is no robust way of identifying how much of the grant amount supported each specific group, so the total value of a grant will appear in all groups they selected. This means that the totals will be over 100% as the groups are not mutually exclusive.   

Using this data about the communities served, the Government provides more grants to recipients serving the general public, and Trusts and Foundations provide more grants to recipients serving specific communities, in particular, “children and young people”, and “people with disabilities”.

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Themes

Charities on the Charity Commission for England and Wales register also select ‘What the charity does’ from a list of 17 themes. Charities will often identify more than one sector that they work in. As with the communities served we cannot determine how the charities allocate their money between these different themes, so the total value of a grant will appear in each theme they have selected.

Based on this data, when comparing all recipients of grants to all registered charities, there are proportionally more grants for most of the themes except religion, overseas aid, and animals, which are more commonly funded by individual donations and fundraising than grants. The Government provides a higher proportion of grants to recipients working on educational and environmental causes than other funders, with National Lottery distributors contributing a higher proportion to arts, culture, heritage, and sport than other funders.

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Grants

Thanks to grantmakers publishing data using the 360Giving Data Standard, we can also analyse the characteristics of grantmaking, by looking at the size and duration of awarded grants.

Grant duration

Grant duration is an optional field in the 360Giving Data Standard, so not all publishers have included it in their data. The duration of the grant is available in the structured data for around a third of grants. Looking at the grant descriptions, it is likely that the majority of those with no duration recorded are one-off or short-term grants.

Fundraising grantmakers, family foundations, and corporate foundations are more likely to offer longer grants of over 12 months, while small grantmakers and community foundations offer shorter-term grants.

The evidence for the benefits of multi-year funding are well documented⁽¹⁾ and charities have reported challenges in securing multi-year grants following the pandemic.

There is more to do to improve the volume and quality of data available on the duration of grants as this has a significant impact on our understanding of grantmaking patterns and on our interpretation of the amounts.

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Grant amount

The median size of published grants is £13,194. This varies between grantmaker segments, with central government generally making larger grants whilst small grantmakers and community foundations make smaller grants.

However, note that the grants included are not of a consistent duration so an award amount might be for a few months or over five years. It also may include capital grants where the duration is not as relevant. Information on grant duration is not consistently available enough for us to produce the yearly amount of grants received.

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Less than 2% of grants are for over £1m (this represents around 1,400 grants), but these account for nearly half of the amount granted. Most grants are small – nearly 40% of the grants made were for £10,000 or less – down from 50% for £10,000 or less in the previous year. This reflects the change of maximum amount of the National Lottery Community Fund (NLCF) ‘Awards for All’ programme from £10,000 before November 2023 and £20,000 after. In 2022-23, 10,370 NLCF grants were for £10,000 or less and in 2023-24 this dropped to 6,223 grants as organisations benefited from the increased grant size.

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These patterns are also reflected in the proportion of grants made that are worth more than £100,000. Central government and Arms Length Bodies gave out more larger grants while community foundations and Member/Traded Funded organisations tended to award more smaller grants.

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The size of grant mostly correlated to the size of organisation with larger organisations receiving a higher proportion of larger grants. If you switch the chart below from the number of grants to the grant amount, you will see the change in impact that these small grants make to the organisations’ overall grant income.

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