What does the UK Fundraising Market look like in 2026?
By Tobin Aldrich
For most of my career I've wanted one thing that didn't exist. A single, consistent picture of the UK fundraising market. How big it is, where the money comes from, which parts are growing and which are quietly falling away.
The data has always been there in pieces. It's collected in different ways by different people, the definitions don't match, and so most of the sector runs on myth and habit. I've lost count of the times I've sat in a meeting where a confident claim about fundraising turned out to rest on nothing at all.
So we built the picture. Today we're publishing the AAW UK Fundraising Market Report 2026, the most complete single view of the market we've been able to put together, across every major channel, drawing on our own benchmarks and every credible public source we could find.
Some of it isn't comfortable. Here are my key takeaways.
The donor base is (almost certainly) shrinking
We need to remember that all our sources of data on the fundraising market are imperfect. So we don't know for certain, but the best available sources show a consistent decline in participation in giving. According to CAF, individual giving fell to £14bn in 2025, down from £15.4bn. That's the first fall since 2021. Donor numbers have been steadily declining for years. Half of UK adults gave to charity last year. In 2019 it was 58%.
The people who still give are giving more. The average given per month has climbed to £65, from £46 in 2019. A smaller, older, wealthier group is carrying more and more of the total.
The decline is worst among the young. Just 36% of 16 to 24-year-olds gave last year, against 52% in 2019. We're not seeing that decline hit income because the young have never contributed all that much of the sector's revenue. But it's the next decade's donor base deciding not to start.
Legacies are holding the whole thing up
With donations under pressure, legacies are doing most of the heavy lifting. Legacy income hit a record £4.5bn in 2024, and it's on course for something like £10.6bn by 2050 as the baby boomers pass their wealth on. The sector has achieved one real success over the past two decades: increasing the proportion of people leaving gifts in their wills. For most large charities it's now the most valuable income they have, and by some distance the most cost-effective.
One finding struck me. At the National Trust for Scotland, supporters who'd pledged a legacy were more than six times as likely to have played the charity's lottery. Think about what that means. The same loyal, long-term supporters turn up in both, yet most charities run legacies and lotteries as separate teams and never join them up.
The biggest gifts go to a tiny number of places
We tracked £2.6bn of major gifts of a million pounds or more since 2019. They're extraordinarily concentrated. Higher education is responsible for over half of all gifts by value, while Oxford and Cambridge between them take 61% of all the philanthropy going to HE.
If you run a charity outside universities and the arts, the lesson isn't to build a big major gifts operation and wait for a transformational cheque. It's to be very clear about the one thing you do that nobody else can, and take that to a small number of people who'll care.
We don't talk enough about faith givers
Faith communities are the most generous and least understood part of the giving market. Committed Christians give around four and a half times the national average. More than nine in ten British Jews give to charity. British Muslims give roughly four times the average per head.
Here's the part secular charities should sit up for. About half of British Muslims are open to giving to causes they trust that aren't faith-based. Only 14% currently do.
Faith is what drives the giving, but the destination is very often a mainstream cause. While the overall pool is shrinking, this one is growing, and almost nobody is in the conversation.
Costs are rising faster than income
Underneath all of it sits a squeeze that ties the rest together. The top 100 charities spend 26p of every pound of voluntary income to raise it, and that share is still climbing while the income itself is static or falling. Recruiting donors is getting more expensive and less effective at the same time. Record legacy income hides the impact of that for a while. It won't for long.
What it adds up to
Put it together and you have a market propped up by legacies and a shrinking core of committed donors. That's not a foundation for the next decade, and pretending otherwise helps no one.
It isn't all bad news, though. While only legacies are really definitely growing, most voluntary income streams are resilient. The people who are giving are giving more.
The money hasn't gone anywhere. What we've never had is a clear, shared view of where it is. Now we do.
That's what the report is for. And for telling us where the insight gaps still are, because I for one still don't think we understand giving in the UK as well as we need to.