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Money raised by National Lottery players is donated to good causes through the twelve distributors listed below. The grantmaking figures are for the total distributed by these organisations across all income sources and programmes, which can include public money in the form of grant-in-aid from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the National Lottery, as well as funding from other sources.
Since 1994 when the National Lottery was established, it and the organisations distributing funds on its behalf, have become a vital part of the sector’s income.
It should be noted that there are different accounting policies for the government funds and the National Lottery funds, and some of the changes between the years relate to these accounting differences. For this reason, any increases or decreases in figures between the years should not be read as changes to funds received by charities.
For example, these accounting differences help to explain the 25% drop in Arts Council England’s reported grantmaking spend between 2022-23 and 2023-24. Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation (NPO) grants are awarded for three years, with the latest awards covering the 2023-26 period and totalling over £400m. The National Lottery funded contribution to these awards was recognised in their 2022-23 accounts for the full three year amount. In the 2023-24 statutory accounts, spending from National Lottery funds decreased by over £250m, because the distributions made to NPO organisations during the period had been recognised in the previous year. However, the grant-in-aid government funding contribution to these National Portfolio Organisations awards is recognised annually. This means that the distributions to NPOs for each year appear in the grant spend for 2022-23 and 2023-24 and so there is no equivalent drop to that seen in the National Lottery accounts. This creates an accounting reduction in grants that may not reflect the amounts distributed to new and existing grant holders in any one year.
Grant recipients
Using data provided by National Lottery distributors using the 360Giving Data Standard and grants data published by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), we can explore the types of recipients that receive grant funding from the National Lottery. For the purpose of this section, we are only looking at grants with award dates between April 2023 and March 2024 available in the published data by April 2025. This totals around 40,000 grants. The quality of the data was inconsistent, with particular difficulties from those not publishing their grants using the 360Giving Data Standard. This made it challenging to analyse collectively.
The majority of grants were awarded to organisations, with some of the arts and sports distributors also awarding grants to individuals. We also identified a small number of grants for regranting that were awarded to organisations for the purpose of onward grantmaking by that organisation.
Recipient organisation type
Looking only at the grants awarded to organisations, where official organisation identifiers such as charity numbers or company numbers have been used, we can further explore the types of organisations that received grants.
Overall, charities were the largest group followed by other non-profit organisations. This varied by good cause type with sports distributors awarding a higher proportion of grants to other non-profit organisations, which include sports clubs.
Charity recipient organisation size
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 from the National Lottery distributors.
The most common size of recipients was between £100k to £1m, receiving 48% of the grants. However, large grants made to larger organisations meant 30% of the amount awarded was received by organisations with an income over £10m. Select the arrow next to “Number of grants” to switch to viewing the chart by “Grant amount”.
Charity recipient location
Based on their registered addresses and data from the DCMS National Lottery database, around 79% of charity recipients were based in England – although geographical analysis was impacted by the limited data from several of the distributors based outside England.
This is indicative rather than absolute differences. Some funding recorded to recipients in England is to organisations operating UK-wide, which slightly skews the overall picture. Similarly, some under-represented countries above reflect the lower data availability, rather than lower levels of funding.
Communities served
Charities registered with the Charity Commission for England and Wales 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 group. The total amount of the grant will, therefore, appear in all groups they selected. The totals will be more than 100% as the groups are not mutually exclusive.
When compared to the organisations funded by the National Lottery distributors as a whole, and the profile of all registered charities, arts and heritage funders awarded proportionately more grants to support the general public, while sport funders awarded proportionately more grants to support children and young people.
Themes
Charities registered with the Charity Commission for England and Wales 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 amount of grants will appear in each theme they have selected.
As you would expect, the good cause area is largely reflected in the themes the recipients support.
Grants
Grant size
The median size of grants made by National Lottery distributors is £10,000.
However, note that the grants included are not of a consistent duration or type. Award amounts include capital grants and also include the full amount of multi-year awards. Information on grant type or duration is not sufficiently available in the data to analyse the annual amount of grants awarded.
Across all distributors, less than 1% of grants are for over £1 million, but they represent nearly one-third of the total amount awarded.
Note that the proportion of grants awarded for £10,000 or less has decreased in 2023-24 compared to previous years. This reflects the change of maximum amount of the National Lottery Community Fund (NLCF) ‘Awards for All’ programme, from £10,000 before November 2023 to £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 in this popular programme.
Who funds with who
Where official organisation identifiers have been published in the data we are able to identify common recipients between the distributors. In the diagram below, the thicker the chord, the more recipients the segment funders have in common.
As you can see, there are a number of grantees in common between the different distributors and even between the different cause areas, reflecting the intersecting nature of programmes.
The view from The National Lottery Promotions Unit
We welcome the spotlight on The National Lottery, offering an independent analysis. We’re struck by both the scale and nuance of National Lottery funding, and how it is present in many areas of the grantmaking landscape beyond National Lottery distributors themselves.
