Charity funding statistics
This page draws on open grants data published by UK funders through 360Giving to show what charity grant funding actually looks like — typical award sizes, which causes and regions receive funding, and when funders give. It is most useful when you understand what the data can and cannot tell you, which is set out in full below.
As of 10 July 2026, 360Giving’s GrantNav held 1,484,570 published grants from 349 UK funders, awarded to 451,005 recipient organisations, plus 197,830 grants to individuals (Source: 360Giving GrantNav, accessed 10 July 2026, CC-BY 4.0; individual funder datasets within GrantNav may carry other compatible open licences).
What this data is — and what it isn’t
Read this before the numbers. 360Giving data is a large, high-quality sample of UK grant-making, not a complete record. Funders publish voluntarily, so not every funder is included; some publish only part of their giving, or only from a certain date. The data records grants that were awarded — never applications or rejections — so it can tell you what funders gave, but not your chances of success. Treat every figure below as “of the published data”, not “of all UK funding”.
- Awarded grants only: no applications, no rejections. Success rates cannot be truly calculated from this data.
- Voluntary and partial: 349 funders publish, out of many thousands of UK grant-makers; coverage varies by cause and region.
- Location ≠ delivery: a grant’s recorded location is often where the recipient is based, not where the work happens, which can make funding look more city-concentrated than it is.
- Publishing lags: some funders publish once a year, so the most recent months always look emptier than they will once data catches up.
Key statistics at a glance
The scale figures are taken directly from GrantNav. The typical-award figures are computed by CharityIQ from the open data; the method is in the Methodology section (GrantNav export + Charity Commission register join, 10 July 2026).
- 1,484,570 published grants in GrantNav (360Giving, 10 July 2026).
- 349 UK funders publishing open grants data (360Giving, 10 July 2026).
- 451,005 recipient organisations (360Giving, 10 July 2026).
- 197,830 grants to individuals (360Giving, 10 July 2026).
- £10,000 — the median (typical) grant to organisations across all published grants; the middle 50% run £3,800–£56,630 (CharityIQ analysis of GrantNav, 1,286,740 grants to organisations, 10 July 2026).
- ~£14,400 — the typical grant has grown over time: the median grant to organisations awarded 2021–2025 was about £14,400 (CharityIQ analysis of GrantNav, 10 July 2026).
Typical grant size
The typical grant is best described by the median, not the average, because a small number of very large grants pull the mean upwards and make it unrepresentative of what most charities receive. Below, we report the median and the interquartile range (the middle 50% of grants) computed from the published 360Giving data. Averages are shown alongside only for completeness.
Chart 1 (for Ivan to build): distribution of grant sizes across the published data, with the median marked. Free to reuse with attribution to CharityIQ and 360Giving (CC-BY-SA 4.0).
Typical grant size (computed from published 360Giving data)
| Measure | Value |
|---|---|
| Median grant (all published grants) | £10,000 |
| Middle 50% of grants (25th–75th percentile) | £3,800 – £56,630 |
| Mean grant (shown for contrast only) | ~£262,000 (skewed upward by a few very large public grants — see note) |
Source: CharityIQ analysis of the 360Giving GrantNav export (1,286,740 grants to organisations, GBP, accessed 10 July 2026; CC-BY-SA 4.0). The median is used because the data includes a small number of very large public grants (up to several billion pounds) and 4,780 negative entries (corrections/repayments) that distort the mean. Figures cover grants to organisations only; grants to individuals are excluded.
Typical award by cause, region and charity size
Award sizes vary widely by what a grant is for, where the recipient is, and how large they are. Below we report the median grant by cause, by UK region, and by recipient income band, computed from the published data. These reflect the funders who publish, so a cause or region where major funders do not publish will be under-represented — read them as indicative, not definitive.
Chart 2 (for Ivan to build): median grant by UK region. Chart 3: median grant by cause. Free to reuse with attribution.
Median grant by cause (computed)
| Cause area | Median grant | Number of grants |
|---|---|---|
| Education & training | £13,500 | 144,958 |
| Community & social welfare | £9,000 | 120,326 |
| Environment | £13,305 | 104,024 |
| Arts, culture & heritage | £12,000 | 103,823 |
| Mental health | £9,995 | 92,197 |
| Sport & recreation | £8,793 | 66,481 |
| Youth & children | £9,310 | 60,701 |
| Disability | £9,721 | 47,689 |
| Homelessness & housing | £49,999 | 41,321 |
| Health & medical | £19,239 | 39,686 |
| Women & girls | £10,000 | 31,596 |
| Older people | £7,500 | 23,885 |
| Poverty & food | £4,910 | 21,816 |
| Refugees & migration | £25,500 | 20,315 |
| Animal welfare | £10,200 | 7,413 |
| Uncategorised | £11,340 | 358,756 |
How the cause split is made: GrantNav has no cause field, so CharityIQ classifies each grant by keywords in its programme name, title and description, assigning it to a single best-match cause. About 28% of grants carry too little text to classify and are shown as “Uncategorised”. Treat this as an indicative picture, not an official breakdown. Homelessness & housing shows a much higher median because it includes capital and housing grants; poverty & food is lower because it is dominated by small emergency grants. CharityIQ analysis of GrantNav (grants to organisations), 10 July 2026.
Median grant by UK region (computed)
| Region | Median grant | Number of grants |
|---|---|---|
| London | £19,998 | 178,811 |
| South East | £10,000 | 129,834 |
| North West | £10,000 | 126,124 |
| South West | £9,430 | 119,963 |
| Scotland | £8,107 | 109,450 |
| East of England | £10,000 | 99,025 |
| Yorkshire and the Humber | £9,994 | 95,631 |
| West Midlands | £10,000 | 94,188 |
| East Midlands | £10,000 | 74,352 |
| North East | £9,802 | 71,078 |
| Wales | £8,000 | 44,019 |
| Northern Ireland | £9,900 | 25,231 |
Median grant by recipient income band (computed)
| Recipient income band | Median grant | Number of grants |
|---|---|---|
| Under £10k | £5,652 | 32,160 |
| £10k–£100k | £6,248 | 73,785 |
| £100k–£500k | £9,933 | 116,343 |
| £500k–£1m | £13,931 | 48,537 |
| £1m+ | £20,000 | 103,472 |
Recipient income from the Charity Commission register (England & Wales), joined to GrantNav by charity number. Based on the 374,297 grants whose recipient is a registered E&W charity with a filed income — grants to non-charities, CICs, Scottish (OSCR) or NI (CCNI) charities and unmatched recipients are excluded, and filing lag means income can be 1–2 years behind the grant. Bigger charities tend to receive bigger grants. CharityIQ analysis, 10 July 2026.
When funders give: grant seasonality
Grant-making has seasonal rhythms — some funders run fixed application rounds with decisions clustered in certain months, while others award year-round. Below we show the share of grants by the month they were awarded, across the published data. Two cautions: the award date is when a grant was decided, not a guide to when you should apply; and because some funders publish late, the most recent months are always understated.
Chart 4 (for Ivan to build): share of grants awarded by calendar month. Free to reuse with attribution.
Grants by award month (computed)
| Award month | Share of grants |
|---|---|
| January | 5.2% |
| February | 5.4% |
| March | 7.7% |
| April | 29.9% |
| May | 6.4% |
| June | 7.0% |
| July | 6.6% |
| August | 5.0% |
| September | 5.9% |
| October | 8.3% |
| November | 7.0% |
| December | 5.5% |
Nearly a third of grants are dated to April — the start of the financial year — because many funders record annual or block awards on 1 April rather than spreading them. This is an accounting artefact, not a signal of when to apply. Share of grants by award month, CharityIQ analysis of GrantNav (grants to organisations), 10 July 2026.
Success rates — read this carefully
You cannot calculate a true grant success rate from this data, and you should distrust anyone who claims a precise one. 360Giving records grants that were awarded, not the applications that were made, so the denominator — how many people applied — simply is not there. What can be shown are rough proxies: how many recipients a funder supports, or how concentrated a funder’s grants are. These describe outcomes, not your odds, and they carry heavy caveats.
Where we show any proxy, it is labelled as such, with its limits stated. The honest headline is that open grants data is excellent for understanding who funds what, and poor for predicting whether you personally will be funded. For that, read each funder’s own guidance on what they fund and how competitive they are.
Methodology and sources
This section is the point of the page. Every figure above either comes straight from 360Giving or is computed by CharityIQ using the method described here.
- Source: open grants data published by UK funders in the 360Giving Data Standard, accessed via GrantNav (grantnav.threesixtygiving.org). Scale figures (grants, funders, recipients, grants to individuals) are read directly from GrantNav on the access date. GrantNav’s own footer states this instance of the data is licensed CC-BY 4.0 (confirmed directly on grantnav.threesixtygiving.org, accessed 10 July 2026); however, GrantNav aggregates many funders’ individual datasets, and its datasets page (grantnav.threesixtygiving.org/datasets/) shows that while most funders publish under CC-BY 4.0, a minority publish under CC-BY-SA 4.0 or the Open Government Licence v3.0 (for public-sector funders). Attribute to GrantNav / 360Giving as CC-BY 4.0 for the aggregate figures on this page, and check the specific funder’s licence before reusing a funder-level extract.
- CharityIQ computations: median, interquartile range and cause/region/size breakdowns are computed by CharityIQ from a dated snapshot of the 360Giving datastore. We state the snapshot date, exclude grants to individuals from organisation-level figures, and exclude zero and negative-value grants (used by some funders for accounting or refunds) from award-size statistics, noting where this changes counts.
- Cause classification: GrantNav has no cause field, so CharityIQ assigns each grant to a single best-match cause by an ordered keyword search over its programme name, title and description (specific causes such as mental health or homelessness matched before general ones such as community). About 28% of grants carry too little text to classify and are shown as “Uncategorised”. This is an indicative heuristic, not an official taxonomy.
- Region: derived from GrantNav location data. We note that recipient location is not the same as delivery location — 360Giving’s own research (UKGrantmaking 2024) found only about a third of the money received by London-based organisations was for delivery in London only — so regional figures describe where recipients are based, not necessarily where the work happens.
- Recipient income band: matched from GrantNav recipient organisation identifiers (charity/company numbers) to Charity Commission register income bands; unmatched recipients (small unregistered groups, individuals) are excluded from that cut.
- Regranting: grants flagged “for regrant” are handled to avoid double-counting; we state whether they are included or excluded in each figure.
- Recency: because funders publish at different frequencies, recent months are incomplete; seasonality uses a multi-year subset via the Award Date field and states the years covered.
- Key limitation: the data covers only funders who publish and only the grants they choose to share, so all figures are “of the published data”, not of all UK grant funding. This is stated on every table.
Cite this page
Free to reuse with attribution. Suggested citation:
CharityIQ (2026), “Charity grant funding statistics”, computed from open grants data published in the 360Giving Data Standard. Contains data from GrantNav, a 360Giving application, released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence (CC-BY 4.0); some individual funder datasets within GrantNav carry other compatible open licences (CC-BY-SA 4.0 or OGL v3.0) — check the source funder’s licence before reusing a funder-level extract. Available at: https://charityiq.co.uk/data/charity-funding-statistics/ (accessed [date]).
Changelog
- 10 July 2026: first published. GrantNav scale figures dated 10 July 2026 (1,484,570 grants; 349 funders; 451,005 recipients; 197,830 grants to individuals). Licence confirmed directly on grantnav.threesixtygiving.org as CC-BY 4.0 for the GrantNav instance, with a minority of individual funder datasets under CC-BY-SA 4.0 or OGL v3.0 (resolves the CC-BY vs CC-BY-SA discrepancy flagged at draft). Computed figures to be populated from CharityIQ’s dated 360Giving ingest at publication.
CharityIQ ingests this open 360Giving data and matches it to your charity’s registration and history, so the free Grant Finder can point you to real, published UK funders — and cite the source for each.