How do I check if my charity's income is too dependent on one source?

England and Wales: This page sets out the position in full. Scotland: the same position, with no difference in principle — the funder data behind it was checked and is UK-wide, and nothing here turns on national law. Northern Ireland: the same position again, for the same reason. The one thing that does change by nation is the name and the ceiling of the large lottery programme, and that is covered in Step 6.

Income concentration risk: why the end date matters more than the amount

Income concentration risk is the exposure a charity carries when a large share of its income depends on one source. The trustees and the treasurer measure it the same way in England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. No regulator, whether the Charity Commission, OSCR or CCNI, sets a method or a limit. The size of the largest share matters, but the date it ends matters more.

The map is built from the accounts. If your books do not yet split income by source and by fund, build your chart of accounts first.

The mistake that costs charities most is counting a multi-year grant as secure income for its whole term. The award letter feels like certainty, so the board stops looking at it.

It is not certainty. It is a fixed term with a known last day. A grant in its final year is a cliff, and the charity has usually spent that year running the project rather than replacing the money.

Every large funder caps how long it will fund you for. The National Lottery Community Fund’s large programme in England runs to a maximum of 60 months. That is the longest term on offer from the biggest open programme in the country, and it still ends.

So when you build the map, put the end date in the second column, not the last one. A source worth a lot and ending inside the year is a more urgent problem than a larger source with no end date at all.

What the income map has to show

One row per source. For each row, four things:

• What it is — the funder, the contract, the fundraising activity or the trading line, named specifically. Not “grants”.
• What it is worth this year, and in each remaining year of any award.
• When it ends — a month, not “ongoing”. Write “no end date” only where there genuinely is none.
• Which fund it belongs to — restricted or unrestricted.

Then a share column: that source as a proportion of total income. The arithmetic is the source divided by the total. Nothing more.

There is no threshold here. No regulator publishes a figure above which a share is too high, and this page will not invent one. The share is a fact about your charity that the board should be able to say out loud.

Why restricted income cannot cover the gap

This is where the fund column earns its place. Two charities can have identical income and quite different exposure.

Restricted income can only be spent on what it was given for; the rules are set out in restricted, designated and endowment funds. If a large unrestricted source stops, restricted money cannot be pulled across to keep the lights on. The gap has to be filled from unrestricted funds or from new income.

So run the share calculation twice: once on total income, and once on unrestricted income alone. The second number is usually the uncomfortable one. Recording a restricted grant correctly is where the accounting side of this lives. The funder side is restricted fund tracking for an award.

Can you find out your chances with a replacement funder?

Mostly, you cannot. You will want to know your chances with the funder that would replace a lost source, and almost none of them say.

Only two of the eleven biggest UK funders publish anything at all about success rates or reasons for refusal. The other eight publish neither. They are the National Lottery Community Fund, the Heritage Fund, Comic Relief, Lloyds Bank Foundation, the Wolfson Foundation, Tudor Trust, UK Community Foundations and Henry Smith. Any site quoting a sector-wide success rate is quoting something nobody measured.

The one full picture that is published belongs to Esmée Fairbairn, and its shape is worth knowing. Of eligible expressions of interest, 11% reach an assessment call. Of those that reach a full proposal, 91% are funded. Compounded, roughly 5% of eligible expressions of interest end in money.

That is one funder, and the funder requires nothing of you by publishing it. But it tells you where applications die: at the first screen, not the last. It also tells you why the map matters. Replacement income takes longer to win than most boards assume, so the end date needs to be visible long before it arrives.

Minute the income map and set the next review

The map is not the deliverable on its own. The minute is.

Take it to a board meeting. Record the largest share, the earliest significant end date, and what the board decided to do about both. Then set the date you will redo it — annually at least, and again whenever a large award is won or lost.

The next step turns that into a target you can justify: what mix of income should a charity aim for?

Common mistake: counting a multi-year grant as secure income for its whole term

The award letter feels like certainty, so the full term goes into the plan as though it were permanent. It is not. Every major funder in this guide’s records caps its maximum duration, so every multi-year award has a last day. The final year is the one in which the charity has least time to replace it.

Worked example

Saltmarsh Trust wins a multi-year award from the National Lottery Community Fund’s large England programme, at around the 2025 average of £319,000. Its other income — local giving, collections and a small trading surplus — comes to roughly an eighth of that.

The map makes the position plain. Divide the grant by total income and the share is slightly under nine-tenths. Saltmarsh does not have a funding problem this year. It has one in year four.

That is the value of doing this now. The board can see the cliff while there is still time to walk away from it, rather than in the final quarter of the award.