What is an excepted or exempt charity?

Applies in: England and Wales, and only partly. This page sets out the excepted charity regime in England and Wales. The exempt charity regime is a gap, and this page says where it stops rather than guessing. Scotland has no equivalent excepted regime recorded — that is a gap here too, not a finding that none exists. Northern Ireland’s position is established as to statute — there is a power to exempt, in force and unused — and not as to practice.

Two conditions, not one — and income alone is never enough

This is where most summaries, and most founders, go wrong. Being small does not make a charity excepted. Charities Act 2011 s.30(2)(b) and (c) require all of the following:

1. the charity is excepted by an order of the Commission or by regulations
2. its gross income does not exceed £100,000
3. it complies with any conditions attached to the exception

A charity that meets the second condition but not the first is an ordinary charity. It has the general duty to register above £5,000, as do you have to register your charity? explains. The classes the Commission names as excepted are narrow:

• churches and chapels of some Christian denominations, and funds connected with them
• charitable funds of the armed forces
• Scout and Guide groups

Look also at which way the threshold cuts. Growing past £100,000 is not a penalty for success. It moves the charity into the general duty to register. An excepted charity that grows becomes a registering charity.

The threshold that cannot go up

Both thresholds were consulted on and kept in the 2026 reforms. The reason given for keeping the excepted threshold is unusual enough to be worth setting out.

DCMS said it is “legally unable” to increase it. Any change to the regime must increase the number of registered charities, and raising the threshold would do the opposite. That is a limit on the direction of travel, not a policy choice. So readers should not expect this figure to rise.

The excepted class is also shrinking by design. All excepted Christian denomination churches and chapels are expected to be registered by the early 2030s. If you are advising a church that has always relied on the exception, the planning question is when it registers, not whether.

The general registration threshold was kept too. ICAEW and the Charity Law Association both argued it should be abolished so that every charity registers. DCMS consulted and kept it. That is worth saying, because readers searching for a change that did not happen find nothing reliable either way.

Exempt charities: where this page stops

The exempt charity regime is [no fact — not established]. That covers which bodies are exempt, the Schedule 3 list, what a principal regulator is and does, and what an exempt charity owes the Commission. This site has nothing on it and will not rebuild it from memory.

Universities, some museums, and certain education and housing bodies are the types usually named here. But that sentence is exactly the kind of unsourced memory this site exists to avoid. Treat it as a lead for research, not as an answer.

Three things touching exempt status are established, and all are side issues:

• An exempt or excepted organisation may apply to HMRC directly for recognition as a charity for tax purposes, without first registering with a charity regulator. Everyone else who must register has to register first, because the two applications run one after the other.
• A CIC cannot convert to a CIO if the resulting charity would be an exempt charity — a company-law blocker in the 2017 Conversion Regulations. It is a small point that matters only if you are on that route. But it shows exempt status is a live category in the conversion rules.
• Funders recognise the category. Garfield Weston Foundation, for example, funds only UK registered charities, CIOs, and “exempt or excepted organisations”. So with that funder at least, being excepted or exempt does not shut you out. See The National Lottery Community Fund (Awards for All England): CICs eligible, limited by guarantee OR by shares. Garfield Weston Foundation: NOT eligible — only UK registered charities, CIOs, and exempt or excepted organisations. Esmée Fairbairn Foundation: eligible if the work is legally charitable — 'we support constituted organisations, including charities and non-charities doing charitable work'..

Scotland and Northern Ireland

Scotland. No matching excepted-charity regime is recorded here. The position is unknown, not known to be absent. What is established is that Scotland has no income threshold for registration at all. That is because registration is what makes a body a charity. In a system like that, an “excepted charity” in the English sense has nothing to be excepted from.

Northern Ireland. No threshold and no exemption is in use. The duty in s.16(2) applies to every charity, without exception. But the power to exempt is in force.

Sections 16(2A) and 16A were inserted on 30 March 2022 and have been law ever since. An exemption applies only if the Department makes regulations under s.16A, and it has not. In 2025 ministers approved a threshold set as an income figure plus an asset figure, and regulations were being drafted. But nothing has been made, and CCNI states plainly that the law is unchanged.

So two statements about Northern Ireland are both wrong. One is that it has no power to exempt. The other is that it has a registration threshold. The accurate statement is that the power exists and has not been used.

One drafting parallel is worth noticing, because it links this page to an open question elsewhere. s.16(2B) says a charity exempted under s.16A “must, if it so requests, be registered in the register”. That is the same mandatory wording as Charities Act 2011 s.30(3) in England and Wales.

This site records that section as contested. The Commission treats voluntary registration as exceptional, although the wording seems mandatory. Whatever the right reading of s.30(3) is, it probably applies in Northern Ireland too.

What to do about it

If you think you are excepted, check all three conditions, not only the income one. Find the order or regulations that except your class. Without one, you are not excepted. If you think you are exempt, this guide cannot help you yet. Go to the Commission’s own guidance and to your principal regulator.

Next: decide which jurisdictions to register in. That step ends in a recorded decision about which regulator or regulators you will apply to. That is where an exception or an exemption changes what you do. If you conclude you must register in England or Wales, go on to apply to register in England and Wales.