About Charity Finder

Why Charity Finder exists

The Charity Commission register is the authoritative record of every charity registered in England and Wales. It's open data, but the official search experience is built for regulatory use rather than for the general public, journalists, grant-makers, or trustees doing diligence on peer organisations.

Charity Finder takes the same source data, refreshes it weekly, and presents it with the context most people actually want: derived efficiency ratios, sector aggregates, comparable peer groupings, and clean profile pages.

What makes it different

• Derived metrics: Program Ratio, Administrative Ratio, and Overall Efficiency calculated consistently across every charity that files financials with the Commission. Methodology documented on the Data Sources page.
• Sector and location hubs: Browse by what a charity does or where it operates, with aggregate income and headcount on display.
• Honest about limitations: We flag when figures look unusual (mergers, restated accounts), and we never claim to surface data the Commission doesn't publish.
• Open API: The same data we render is available via a REST API under the same Open Government Licence.

Who runs it

Charity Finder is run by an independent software developer based in the UK. It started as a personal project to learn the shape of the UK charity sector and has grown into a public-facing reference site.

It's not affiliated with the Charity Commission or with any specific charity, foundation, or grant-maker. There are no display ads and no paid placements.

How the data is kept current

The Charity Commission publishes the register as a fresh snapshot weekly. We ingest it, validate it, recompute every derived metric, and atomically swap the new dataset into the live site — usually within 24 hours of Commission publication.

Records can be 12–18 months behind a charity's most recent activity, because charities have up to 10 months after their financial year-end to file with the Commission. This is a register-wide constraint, not a Charity Finder one.