Using data provided by grantmakers using the 360Giving Data Standard, we can explore the types of recipients that receive grant funding.

Grants to organisations

For the purpose of this section, we are only looking at grants to organisations with award dates between April 2024 and March 2025 available in the published data by April 2026. This totals nearly 83,000 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.

Type of recipients

Looking at the legal form of recipients, not all can be identified. There are around 17,000 grants where the type of recipient is unknown. This could mean that the organisation is too small to have a registered charity number or other registration, they are exempt from registration, or the funder has not recorded or published their registration number.

Most of the figures on this page relate to registered charities, who are the recipients of 48% of grants in our 2024-25 dataset and received 40% of the total grant amount. Nearly 22,000 unique registered charities have been identified as receiving a grant in 2024-25. The second largest group is universities, or university research departments, who were the recipients of 18% of grants but a third of the total grant amount. The charts show how the mix varies by grantmaker category.

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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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Geographical scope

Using the “area of operation” recorded in the regulator data, we explored the geographical scope of the organisations funded. Reflecting that the profile of the funded organisations was slightly larger than all registered charities, we see that a higher proportion of organisations funded were operating at a regional and national level. This is to be anticipated, as a proportion of local charities will be grassroots community groups and campaigns that might not require grants to deliver their activities, whereas many of the national organisations funded are likely to have received grants from multiple funders.

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Grants by deprivation

Using the English indices of deprivation 2025, we can examine the level of deprivation of areas in which grant recipients are based. This is not a perfect measure – the Indices of Deprivation have drawbacks, and the measures below are based on the registered office of grant recipients, and may not represent the context in which they operate. The deprivation measure used here is IMD Deciles, which put each local neighbourhood in England into one of ten groups based on the level of deprivation. Decile 1 includes the 10% most deprived neighbourhoods while Decile 10 includes the 10% of areas with the least deprivation.

The data suggests that grants by these funders are disproportionately targeted at organisations that are based in more deprived areas. 18% of grants to local or regional organisations are received by organisations based in the most deprived areas, while only 4% of grants go to organisations in the least deprived areas. A similar pattern holds true when looking at the grant amount, and when looking at all grant recipients.

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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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Multiple grants

Number of grants awarded

The available data allows us to explore the number of grants awarded to each recipient. It should be noted that many will have received more than shown if they received instalments of multi-year grants awarded in previous years or received grants from organisations that do not yet publish their data, including local authorities.

Recipients with a large number of grants received tend to be universities, housing associations, and other large institutions.

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Who funds with who – recipients in common

There is an ecosystem of funding between different funder segments. Where official organisation identifiers have been published in the data using the 360Giving Data Standard, we are able to identify common recipients between funders. In the diagram below, the thicker the chord, the more recipients the funders in that segment have in common.

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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 40% 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 and family 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.

While there has been some progress since the last edition, 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 has increased from £13,194 in 2023-24 to  £19,635 in 2024-25, reflecting the changes made by the National Lottery Community Fund, increasing the maximum award amount for its ‘Awards for all’ programme to £20,000 in late 2023. The median 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 1,500 grants), but these account for over half of the amount granted. Most grants are small – around one third of the grants made were for £10,000 or less. A growing percentage of grants, nearly half,  are now in the £10-£100k band, reflecting the change of maximum amount of the National Lottery Community Fund  ‘Awards for All’ programme from £10,000 to £20,000.

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These patterns are also reflected in the proportion of grants made that are worth more than £100,000. The majority of Wellcome Trust’s grants were over £100k. Government Bodies gave out 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 (the selection box under the title), you will see the change in impact that these small grants make to the organisations’ overall grant income.

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Grants to individuals

In 2023, 360Giving implemented changes to the 360Giving Data Standard to support the publication of grants to individuals. By April 2026, 28 grantmakers had shared data on grants to individuals for the 2024-25 financial year.

There isn’t enough data to be able to draw conclusions or interpret the information on 2024-25 in any meaningful way, as it is skewed by the organisations which had published their data at that time, but looking at the overall grantmaking in 2023-24 and 2024-25 together does provide an illustration of grantmaking patterns for this group.

The most common grant amounts were between £200 and £500, reflecting that grants were often to cover the costs of household appliances and furniture in this price range.

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Grants were most commonly awarded to individuals or families affected by poor mental health and/or financial hardship – although the largest amount of money was awarded based on financial hardship alone, due to a funder in the group with a higher average grant rate recording nearly all their grants under the financial hardship category.

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The most common purpose of grants awarded in the period was for furniture and appliances.

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Where geographical data on the location of the recipient by ward is available, the majority of the individuals and families are in the most deprived areas by the [TOOL TIP] index of multiple deprivation decile.

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Explore the data further

Learn more about grants to individuals by visiting the 360Giving Grants to Individuals Dashboard where you can see reports by individual funders and use different filters.

You can also read more on 360Giving’s website about why Buttle UK and Masonic Charitable Foundation published their grants data, and find out more about how to publish ‘grants to individuals’ data for your own organisation.