How do I find grant funders for my charity?

England and Wales: This page sets out the position in full, and the difference between the two is part of the point — the National Lottery’s large programme is called one thing in England and two other things in Wales. Scotland: covered in full, with its own programme name and a much lower ceiling on the largest lottery programme — see the section below. Northern Ireland: covered in full, with its own programme name again, and with one funder in the table below, Lloyds Bank Foundation, that does not operate there at all.

Which funding programmes have closed?

Of the 11 biggest UK funders in this guide’s records, four have shut or rebuilt their best-known route in since most published guidance was written. Whoever builds the charity’s shortlist should start here when looking for charity grants, because it saves the most time. The search starts from the target you set when you decided your income mix. That target tells you what you are looking for; without it, the search produces a long list and no shortlist.

• Henry Smith — the charity has rebranded, and its Improving Lives and Strengthening Communities programme closed on 28 June 2024. Its holiday grants route remains: Holiday Grants remains open on a rolling window basis, £500–£3,000 per trip, for organisations under £2m income.
• Lloyds Bank Foundation for England and Wales — Enable and Invest, the two programmes most often named in older guidance, closed in 2019. Its current position: one open call, deadline 9 September 2026; otherwise invitation-only
• Comic Relief — no live funding opportunities at all. It is a household name and people assume a standing application form exists. No such form exists. It runs themed, time-limited calls instead.
• Tudor Trust — no written application process of any kind. The funder requires a relationship built through conversation, and it invites applications rather than accepting them. There is no route in from outside.

A charity working from an older directory would spend weeks on those four. That is why the first rule of this step is to open the funder’s own site and read what is there today.

National Lottery grant programmes by nation

The National Lottery Community Fund’s large-grant programme has a different name in every nation. Searching the wrong name returns nothing, which looks like proof that the funding does not exist. The table shows each nation’s programme, maximum and decision time.

Look at the ceilings rather than the names. Two charities of identical size, one in England and one in Scotland, face wildly different limits from the same funder’s largest programme. The England average award in 2025 was £319,000, which is a more useful planning figure than the ceiling for almost every charity reading this.

The small-grants programme is the opposite case. It is called Awards for All in all four nations and runs from £300 to £20,000 everywhere, with only the decision times differing. That consistency is exactly what makes the large-grant divergence so easy to miss.

So write the nation into the sentence every time. Not “apply to Reaching Communities” but “apply to Reaching Communities, in England”. A note to yourself that leaves the nation out is how a Scottish charity ends up searching for a programme that has never existed there.

Which funders are worth reading first

Once you know the nation and the size, the rest is reading. A few positions worth knowing before you spend an afternoon on a site:

• Esmée Fairbairn will not consider applicants below an annual turnover of £100,000. If your charity is small, read that eligibility line before anything else on the site.
• The Wolfson Foundation funds capital only. Its usual ranges are: historic buildings and landscapes usually £15,000–£100,000; universities and research institutions usually £250,000–£1,000,000.
• The National Lottery Heritage Fund is open, rolling, no deadline, from £10,000 to £250,000.
• BBC Children in Need runs from £1,000 to £40,000, and the funder requires a pre-application advice session before an expression of interest.
• UK Community Foundations is a network of 40+ independently governed local foundations, not a single funder. 2024-25: £183m+ distributed across 38,000+ grants, average £5,500. Find your local foundation by postcode, then apply to it directly.

What each funder will pay for is a separate question, answered when you calculate the project’s full cost, including core costs.

Why check more than one page on a funder’s site?

Because a funder’s own pages can contradict each other. The Wolfson Foundation’s landing page carries a notice from 2020 saying funding is paused. Its own sub-pages show open programmes with two rounds a year. Both pages are on the same site, and only one of them is current.

That is not unusual. Funder sites accumulate announcements, and the page that ranks in a search is often not the page that is maintained. Before a programme goes on your shortlist, open at least two pages on that funder’s own site. Read the programme page, and the eligibility or “who can apply” page. If they disagree, ask the funder.

The date you checked each funder

Every funder figure in this step was read on the funder’s own site on 7 August 2026. Funder information goes out of date faster than anything else in this guide — programmes close, ceilings move, whole foundations rebrand.

A grant programme is a single funding scheme with its own eligibility, range and deadline. One funder may run several, so the shortlist records programmes rather than funders. That is also why it has a date column.

For each funder, record:

• the programme name, with its nation
• the range
• the deadline, or whether it takes applications at any time
• the date you last looked

A shortlist without that last column tells you nothing about whether it is still true.

Re-check anything more than a few months old before you write. With a dated shortlist of programmes in hand, the next step is to check eligibility properly before writing anything.

Common mistake: searching for “Reaching Communities” outside England

It is treated as a UK-wide brand and it is not. Scotland’s equivalent is Community Action, Wales has People and Places and Supporting Great Ideas, and Northern Ireland has Strengthening Communities. Searching the wrong name returns nothing at all, which reads as “this funding does not exist here” rather than “you searched for the wrong programme”.

Common mistake: applying to programmes that no longer exist

Directories and sector guides lag by years. Henry Smith’s Improving Lives and Strengthening Communities closed in June 2024 and the charity renamed. Lloyds’ Enable and Invest closed in 2019. Comic Relief has no live opportunities, and Tudor Trust has no application process.

Four of the 11 biggest funders in this guide’s records, all still listed as open in content written before those changes.

Worked example

Saltmarsh Trust has premises in both England and Scotland, and wants capital work done at the Scottish site.

Its first search is for Reaching Communities, because that is the programme it has applied to before. In Scotland there is no such thing.

The programme it needs is Community Action, and the ceiling there is £250,000. That is far below the English ceiling, though comfortably above what this project costs. Had Saltmarsh stopped at the failed search, it would have concluded the funding was not available.

The nation changes the shortlist in another way too. Lloyds Bank Foundation, which Saltmarsh has used for its English work, covers England and Wales only. The Scottish shortlist has to be built separately, not adapted.

Each row Saltmarsh writes down carries four things. They are the programme name with its nation attached, the range, the deadline, and the date somebody looked at the page.