Do Charity Trustees Get Paid? Rules & Exceptions

The short answer

Get trustee payment wrong and the charity may have to recover the money, with the trustee personally liable; get it right and a charity can lawfully buy skills it genuinely needs at a fair price. I write as a trustee of a small charity myself, so here is the default straight: do trustees get paid? Generally, no — charity trustees do not get paid for carrying out their trustee duties, because trusteeship is a voluntary role in UK charity law. However, five lawful exceptions exist, ranging from reasonable expenses to Charity Commission-authorised payment for services, and the rules differ depending on your charity’s structure and governing document.

This default exists to protect public trust: donors and the public expect charitable funds to go towards the charity’s purposes, not to those governing it. The Charity Commission’s register lists 185,360 charities in England and Wales and 921,770 trustee positions — and the legal default for all of them is unpaid. The Charity Commission’s guidance for charity trustees sets this out as a foundational principle of trusteeship, alongside the duty to act in the charity’s best interests. Payment is one strand of the role — our charity governance handbook covers the rest.

Expenses trustees can always claim

Every charity trustee can claim reasonable, documented expenses incurred while carrying out their duties, regardless of what the governing document says, because reimbursing genuine costs is not the same as paying someone for their time. This is the one payment route that needs no special authority at all.

Typical reimbursable expenses include:

• Travel to and from trustee meetings, and reasonable subsistence while attending them.
• Childcare or carer costs incurred specifically to attend charity business.
• Postage, stationery and phone costs incurred on the charity’s behalf.
• Reasonable costs of relevant training undertaken as a trustee.

Good practice is to have a written expenses policy, require receipts, and record all trustee expense payments so they can be reported accurately — this matters for the volunteer and trustee disclosure requirements under SORP discussed below. I keep my own charity’s policies short enough to get read — for expenses, one page: receipts required, every claim recorded.

The five lawful ways a trustee can be paid

Beyond expenses, a trustee can lawfully be paid through one of five routes: a specific power in the governing document, Charity Commission authority, a statutory power under charity law, an order of the court, or in narrow circumstances allowed without prior authority such as reasonable payment for necessary goods or services under statute. Each route has different conditions attached.

1. An express power in the governing document. Some constitutions explicitly permit paying a trustee for services (for example, professional or specialist skills) to the charity. This must be used carefully, and the payment must still be reasonable and in the charity’s interest.
2. Charity Commission authority. Where the governing document has no such power, trustees can apply to the Commission for specific authority to make a payment. This is common where a trustee has skills the charity genuinely needs (e.g. legal or building work) and the payment represents good value.
3. Statutory power to pay for services. Charity law contains a limited statutory power allowing trustee boards to authorise payment to a trustee for supplying services to the charity, subject to conditions including that a majority of trustees remain unpaid and the arrangement is in writing.
4. Court order. In rarer cases, the court can authorise a payment where neither the governing document nor statute provides for it.
5. Statutory power to pay for goods (Charities Act 2022). A new power, discussed below, extending the existing statutory route to cover goods supplied by a trustee, not only services.

In every case, the payment must be reasonable, properly recorded, and the trustee being paid should not take part in the board’s decision to approve it — a basic conflict-of-interest safeguard that also ties into your charity’s wider financial controls under CC8. Our conflicts of interest policy template writes that safeguard down so nobody is improvising mid-meeting.

From experience: Trustee payment questions at a small charity are usually conflict-of-interest questions in disguise. The rule at my own board is simple: any interest is declared before the agenda item starts, the conflicted trustee sits out the discussion and the vote, and the minutes record both. If a payment is ever challenged, that minute is your evidence the process was clean. A one-page conflicts policy that is actually followed beats a ten-page one nobody opens.

When you need Charity Commission authority

You need Charity Commission authority to pay a trustee whenever your governing document does not already contain a specific power allowing it, and the payment does not fall within one of the narrow statutory exceptions. Acting without this authority, when it is required, puts both the charity and the individual trustee at risk.

Common situations requiring Commission authority include paying a trustee a salary for taking on a staff role (for example, becoming the charity’s part-time administrator) or paying a trustee’s business for specialist services where the statutory power does not cleanly apply. The Commission’s guidance on paying trustees for work they do for their charity sets out the application process and what evidence is expected, including why the payment is in the charity’s best interests and why an unpaid trustee could not do the work instead.

Charities Act 2022: payment for goods

The Charities Act 2022 introduced a new statutory power allowing charities to pay a trustee for goods supplied to the charity, closing a long-standing gap where the existing statutory power only covered services. Before this change, a trustee who, say, ran a printing business could not straightforwardly be paid for supplying printed materials to the charity without separate authority.

The new power sits alongside the same safeguards as the existing services power: the arrangement should be reasonable, in the charity’s best interests, and a majority of trustees must remain unpaid.

Charities should check the current Charities Act 2022 guidance for trustees before relying on this power, as implementation has been staged.

Disclosing payments under SORP

Any payment to a trustee, or to a person or business connected to a trustee, must be disclosed in the charity’s annual accounts as a related-party transaction under the Charities SORP, regardless of how small the payment is or which lawful route authorised it. This disclosure requirement exists precisely because trustee payments carry higher public-interest scrutiny.

Disclosure typically needs to include the nature of the relationship, the amount paid, the authority relied upon (governing document power, Commission consent, or statute), and confirmation that the trustee did not participate in the decision — exactly what a well-kept minute proves; our trustee meeting agenda and minutes template treats declared interests as a standing item. This sits within the same reporting discipline covered in our guide to volunteer disclosure under SORP and the broader duty of transparent reporting expected under the Commission’s CC8 guidance on internal financial controls. Getting this wrong is one of the more common findings in Charity Commission compliance casework. I file my own charity’s annual return, and the related-party note is far easier to write at the time of the payment than to reconstruct at year end.

What to do next

Check your governing document for any existing power to pay trustees before assuming you need Commission authority — it’s the first thing I’d check; many charities are surprised to find the power is already there but unused. Then review your last set of accounts to confirm trustee expenses and any related-party payments were disclosed correctly, and put a written expenses policy in place if you do not already have one.

If you are unsure whether a proposed payment needs authority, treat that uncertainty itself as a governance risk worth resolving before money changes hands, not afterwards. This is exactly the kind of judgement call our compliance tooling is built to flag early, alongside the wider work covered in our guide to trustee duties and what a trustee actually does.

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