Starting a charity
From deciding whether a charity is the right vehicle to a registered organisation with a bank account.
2 steps, in the order you meet them.
The decisions in this part are the expensive ones to reverse. Choosing a legal form, writing your purposes, deciding whether you have to register at all — each one constrains everything that follows, and some are very hard to undo. There is no statutory route to convert a CIO into another legal form: leaving means transferring the undertaking to a new body and dissolving the old one, with none of the automatic vesting. Changing structure later is possible, but it is a project in itself.
The order matters more than it looks. Purposes before structure, structure before the bank account, and the bank account before you apply to register — because the application form asks for the account details, so the account has to exist first.
Understand
Explainers for this part are not published yet.
Look up
Glossary
- Charitable incorporated organisation (CIO)
- Grant
- Board of trustees
- Governing document
- Annual return
- Minutes
- Gross income
- HMRC
- Public benefit
- Safeguarding
- Accounting reference date
- Charitable purpose
- Connected person
- OSCR
- Charitable company
Tools
- Am I required to register? — Tool: planned
- Legal structure chooser — Tool: planned
- Purpose checker — Tool: planned
- Should I start a charity? — Tool: planned
- Trustee eligibility checker — Tool: planned
- Which regulator? — Tool: planned
- Charity bank account comparison — Tool: planned
Templates
Do
legal-structure
- Step 6 · Should my charity be a CIO, a company, a trust or an unincorporated association? · legal risk: personal-liability