How much does it cost to set up a charity, and how long does it take?

Applies in: England and Wales · Scotland · Northern Ireland. All three regulators’ published fees and performance figures have been read. What none of them publishes is a refusal rate — that is an absence in the source material, not a gap in this research, and this page says so rather than filling it.

What it costs

The cost to register a charity with the Charity Commission, OSCR or CCNI is nothing. The table shows where founders do pay, structure by structure. It assumes you have already decided when you choose your legal structure.

	To the charity regulator	To Companies House	Every year after
CIO (England and Wales)	£0	Nothing — a CIO is not a registered company	Nothing. One filing, no fee
Charitable company	£0	£100 online, £124 on paper, £156 same day by software	Confirmation statement, £50 online
Trust or unincorporated association	£0	Not applicable	Nothing
Scotland	£0	The Companies House fees above if a company; a SCIO pays nothing	The confirmation statement fee if a company
Northern Ireland	£0	The Companies House fees above if a company	The confirmation statement fee if a company
CIC, for comparison	£115 online		£15 for the CIC34 report, even if dormant, plus the confirmation statement

Three qualifications apply. Paper costs more than online on every Companies House line. Founders sometimes choose paper by default because the documents feel formal. The step to incorporate at Companies House covers the filing itself.

OSCR states outright that it is free to apply and to register. For England and Wales and Northern Ireland, the evidence is that no fee appears anywhere.

The Commission’s guidance and its application service state no fee. In Northern Ireland the power to charge a fee was found and read, and no regulations have ever been made under it. That is good evidence, but it is not a regulator saying “this is free”.

A Northern Irish fee could not appear quietly. Under s.172(3), the Assembly must approve a draft of the regulations before any new fee can be imposed. So the thing to watch is the Assembly, not the price list.

This page cannot tell you the cost of professional help. What a solicitor charges to draft or check purposes and a governing document is [no fact — not established]. Nothing in the research supports a figure, so none is given here.

Time: what the published figures actually measure

This is where almost everything written on the subject goes wrong. England and Wales has four published numbers. Not one of them is “how long registration takes”.

• The service standard is 30 working days, and the Commission met it in 80% of cases in 2025-26. But the standard and the percentage cover “registration, permission and advice requests” together. The Commission does not publish a timeliness figure for registration alone. So no source supports a claim that “X% of registration applications are decided within the standard”. The law also sets no time limit on a registration decision at all. The Commission set this standard for itself.
• The 45-working-day figure is not a decision time. The Commission says it “may take up to” that long “to ask you for more information or clarification”. It is the longest wait before the first query. After that the clock in effect starts again. The realistic worst case is that period, plus your response time, plus a further assessment. The Commission also presents it as a short-term effect of high volumes. So it is a snapshot, not a standard. Applicants need this number most, and it is the one published least clearly.
• The two fast figures bracket the process and say nothing about the middle. The Commission checks a submitted application for completeness and trustee eligibility within 48 hours. A successful register entry appears in public within 48 hours of the applicant being told. All the time goes in between. Do not let two fast numbers imply a fast process.
• Volumes are rising and performance is falling. Applications received reached 11759 in 2025-26. In July 2025 the Commission received more than a thousand applications in a single month for the first time in its history. It says itself that timeliness “has not been where we want them to be despite improvements to productivity achieved”. Among the named drivers is CICs converting to charities.

Nobody counts one further wait. If your charity must register, HMRC will not consider you for recognition as a charity for tax purposes until you are registered. The two applications run one after the other, not side by side.

HMRC publishes no service standard for recognition. So published sources cannot tell you the total time from application to first Gift Aid claim.

Scotland and Northern Ireland

Scotland. OSCR runs two registration standards, and people often mix them up. The headline one is completion within 6 months of receiving the application. OSCR reported meeting it in 96.1% of cases in 2025-26.

The second, shorter standard applies only to applications that are “clearly charitable” and ready to register. OSCR’s performance against that one fell sharply in the same year. The 2005 Act sets no decision deadline.

Two practical details are worth knowing. OSCR’s application system deletes applications after three months with no activity. And s.5(2) sets grounds on which OSCR must refuse. One is where it considers regulation inappropriate because the applicant has, or will have, no or negligible connection to Scotland.

Northern Ireland. CCNI’s standard is also 6 months, but its target is much lower than OSCR’s. It reports two figures, each measured against a different base:

• applications received that were processed within six months
• complete applications processed within six months

On the complete-application measure it reported 93% in 2025-26. That large jump is put down to a change in its scheme of delegation, which let staff rather than a committee decide. Quoting either figure without its base misleads.

None of that is the main point for a Northern Irish founder. Registration there is by invitation. CCNI invites groups to register in stages and issues a password. At the retrieval date it had paused invitations while it upgrades its systems.

So no one can say how long registration takes in Northern Ireland. The wait before you can apply is not published. It may run to years, and it is not in your control. This is time-sensitive and must be re-checked.

What is not published, in any jurisdiction

No UK charity regulator publishes a refusal rate. Not the Charity Commission, not OSCR, not CCNI. That is worth stating plainly, because people keep filling the gap with numbers that were never published.

Here is what does exist and what each figure will and will not bear:

• The Commission published 11759 applications received and 4650 organisations registered in 2025-26. Do not compute a refusal rate from those two numbers. Applications received and registrations completed are different groups in the same period. The difference includes applications that were returned, withdrawn, found not to need registration or still open, as well as refused. A “rate” built from them would be arithmetic dressed as data.
• An approval figure of 53% exists for 2024-25, and it is the only one the Commission has ever issued. It appeared in a named-author blog post on a government website, not in a statistical release. Its base is not defined. It does not match the annual report arithmetic, which suggests it counts applications decided rather than received. It does not mean that the rest were refused.
• The only visible trace of refusals is the internal review data. In 2025-26, 102 reviews of Commission decisions were requested. Roughly a quarter of those concerned a decision about registering a new charity and were changed on review. Report the counts, not the percentages. The source’s own percentages use different bases and do not add up.
• Scotland and Northern Ireland publish volumes and timeliness only. CCNI does not split registration outcomes at all, so it reports no separate refusals or withdrawals. One registration decision review was requested in the year. That suggests refusals are rare, but it is an inference and must not be presented as data.

To close any of this gap would need a freedom of information request to the regulator. Or the regulator could add an outcome breakdown to a release it already publishes. It is a real and material gap in UK charity-sector data, and the right response is to say so.

What actually causes delay

The Commission publishes six named reasons an application is delayed or returned. It publishes no others. In summary, they are:

1. not answering the questions fully
2. not using a model or approved governing document
3. not writing the purposes clearly and explaining how they will be carried out
4. not explaining public benefit on both limbs
5. generic text
6. purposes that are new or unusual

The fifth is worth quoting exactly. It is new, and it matters to anyone drafting with a language model. It reads: “you or a third-party adviser(s) have used generic text, including text generated through AI tools, which is not specific to the charity you want to register.”

The Commission’s Head of Registration has put it more bluntly still. AI-generated content, the Head said, is often too generic to reflect what the applicant does, and leads to more rejections. A bid writer’s boilerplate is caught by exactly the same rule. The advice is not “do not use AI”. It is that generic text fails, whatever produced it.

People often mix up three outcomes that are not the same thing. A query is a request for more information.

A return happens when the application is unclear or incomplete and it comes back to you to resubmit. A refusal is a decision, confirmed in writing with reasons. After a refusal you may deal with the reasons and reapply, ask for a decision review, or appeal to the Charity Tribunal.

A refusal by the Commission is also not the end of charitable tax status. A body refused registration may still apply to HMRC directly, because HMRC forms its own view.

What to do about it

Budget nothing for registration. Budget the incorporation fee if you chose a company. Expect the wait to be longer than the fastest published figure and shorter than the worst case. Then remove the causes of delay you control, which is most of them. If you are still weighing a CIC against a charity, CIC or charity? compares the two.

Next: apply to register in England and Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland. If a query has already arrived, respond to regulator queries. While you wait, What you can do while your application is pending sets out what you can and cannot do.