Data Sources and Methodology
Every figure on this site is either reproduced from the Charity Commission register or calculated from it. This page documents both.
Source
All charity records come from the Charity Commission for England and Wales, published as the weekly Register of Charities extract.
The data is licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0 (OGL-3.0). We re-publish it under the same terms; attribution is required for any derivative use.
Refresh cadence
The Commission publishes a fresh extract roughly once per week. We ingest it within 24 hours, validate every dataset, recompute derived metrics, and atomically swap the new data into the live site. There is no per-record live sync — what you see is always the most recent complete snapshot.
Derived metrics
Three efficiency ratios are computed from each charity's most recent annual return. All three use the same source fields, so they're internally consistent — but they're only as accurate as the underlying filing.
Program Ratio
Charitable activity per pound of total income. Useful for comparing charities at very different scales — a £1M charity with a 90% program ratio devotes more of what comes in to its mission than a £100M charity with 60%.
Program Ratio = (Charitable expenditure) / (Total income)
Administrative Ratio
Share of total spending that goes to overhead — both fundraising costs and governance. Lower is generally read as more efficient, but very low overhead can also signal under-investment in oversight.
Administrative Ratio = (Fundraising costs + Governance) / (Total expenditure)
Overall Efficiency
Share of total spending that goes to charitable activities, as opposed to fundraising or governance.
Overall Efficiency = (Charitable expenditure) / (Total expenditure)
Read these as indicators, not verdicts. A low Program Ratio can reflect heavy capital investment, a fundraising-heavy year, or genuine inefficiency — the figure alone doesn't tell you which.
Sector benchmarks
Where enough comparable charities exist, each metric on a profile page is accompanied by a sector benchmark — for example, "Higher than 78% of UK Animals charities with income £1M to £10M". Cohorts are matched on primary sector and income band; benchmarks are suppressed for cohorts smaller than 30 charities to keep the comparison statistically meaningful.
Known limitations
- Filing lag. Charities have up to 10 months after their financial year-end to file accounts with the Commission. The most recent year you see may be 12–18 months behind real time.
- Mergers and transfers of activities. When a charity merges with or absorbs another, income can jump dramatically year-on-year. We don't currently merge predecessor records into the successor's profile — both records remain separate as the Commission publishes them.
- Restated accounts. Charities occasionally re-file prior years with corrected figures. We use the latest version the Commission has published; older published values are not retained.
- Classification fields. The Commission's "what / who / how" and "areas of operation" fields are self-declared by trustees, not audited. Two similarly-purposed charities may classify themselves differently.
- Removed and excepted charities. We mirror the public register; charities that have been removed are excluded. Excepted charities (those legally exempt from registration, such as some religious bodies) are not in the register and therefore not on this site.
Report a data issue
If a record looks wrong, please email us with the charity name and registration number. We can fix presentation issues quickly; register-level errors are referred to the Commission.