Charity finances 2021-2024: 4 in 10 charities now spend more than their income

Published on October 20, 2026 2:57 PM GMT Disclosure: I'm the founder of GiveRadar, a free charity lookup built on official government charity registers. This analysis uses the register filings GiveRadar holds. Nothing here is for sale; the aggregate data is CC-BY-4.0, and no individual charity is named or ranked. TL;DR I followed the same 396,252 charities through 4 years of official filings (FY2021 to FY2024) in 6 official registers: the United States, England and Wales, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland. The share of charities spending more than their income rose in all six. In England and Wales, it went from 31.1% to 43.9% of the same 75,225 charities. Among 183,681 US public charities filing the full Form 990, it went from 25.9% to 41.4%. FY2021 looks like an unusually low, not a normal baseline. In the two registers where I have 10 years of filings (New Zealand and Ireland), FY2021 was the decade's lowest-deficit year. Charity income is extremely concentrated. In FY2024, the largest 1% of filers report 57% to 75% of all reported income, and the smaller half report 0.28% to 1.21%. A deficit year is not wrongdoing. Charities spend down reserves on purpose, receive multi-year grants in one year, book depreciation, and absorb inflation. Full note: Charity finances 2021 to 2024. I'd really like critique on the method; see the questions at the end. Epistemic status: descriptive counts from official register data, not a causal analysis. The numbers are as solid as the filings that back them up. The explanation for why FY2021 was low is my interpretation, not something the filings show. FY2024 is still incomplete (late filers), so treat FY2024 as "filings published so far". Why I looked at this I'll start by telling you why I looked at this. A one-year snapshot of charity finances can't tell you whether things got worse for charities because the set of filing charities changes every year. GiveRadar holds several years of filed accounts per charity for a handful of registers. That made it possible to build a fixed panel: only charities that filed income and expenditure above zero in every year from FY2021 to FY2024. Every year in the table below describes exactly the same organizations. So the change can't come from different charities filing in different years. I also think this matters for this community specifically. "Did they run a deficit?" is one of the easiest financial signals to check in a charity's accounts, so I wanted to know how common it actually is. Finding 1: how many charities spend more than their income? About 4 in 10 charities in these registers spent more than their income in FY2024, up from about three in ten in FY2021. In most registers, the share peaked in FY2023 and eased slightly in FY2024. Register (panel size)FY2021FY2022FY2023FY2024Change (pts) England and Wales (75,225)31.1%40.7%45.7%43.9%+12.8 Scotland (16,006)38.4%44.7%47.9%47.5%+9.1 US, Form 990 (183,681 public charities)25.9%37.0%42.1%41.4%+15.5 US, Form 990-EZ (65,523 smaller public charities)35.2%41.5%44.6%44.5%+9.3 Australia (31,131)29.7%37.1% 36.9% 36.6%+6.9 New Zealand (19,399)31.4%37.6%38.8%37.8%+6.4 Ireland (5,287)30.5%38.5%39.9%38.0%+7.5 US private foundations, Form 990-PF (64,042), not in headline38.0%58.6%61.7%51.0%+12.9 Share of each panel whose total expenditure was higher than total income in that fiscal year. I show private foundations only for completeness: their income moves with investment results (FY2022 was a market-loss year), so they tell a different story from operating charities. Two more things from the same panels: Deeper deficits rose too. The share spending more than 110% of income went from 20.2% to 27.0% in England and Wales, and from 15.0% to 23.0% among US Form 990 filers. Two deficit years in a row are common. Between 19.1% (Australia, New Zealand) and 25.8% (Scotland) of panel charities spent more than their income in both FY2023 and FY2024. In England and Wales, it's 24.3%; among US Form 990 filers, 23.7%. 10-year context: FY2021 was the low point For New Zealand and Ireland, I have 10 consecutive years of filings, so I built a separate panel of charities that filed income and spending above zero every year from FY2015 to FY2024 (14,507 charities in New Zealand, 3,956 in Ireland). Fiscal yearNew ZealandIreland FY201535.4%41.4% FY201634.6%42.2% FY201735.9%37.2% FY201836.3%37.7% FY201935.3%37.3% FY202035.9%34.7% FY202132.5%29.8% FY202238.8%39.6% FY202339.0%41.0% FY202437.5%38.3% This changes how I read Finding 1. Part of the "rise since 2021" is a return from an unusual low, not a new record. Ireland was actually higher in FY2015 and FY2016 than today. New Zealand is above its pre-2021 range (34.6% to 36.3%), but not by a lot. Why was FY2021 low? My best guess is pandemic emergency support counted as income (for example, forgiven US Paycheck Protection Program loans) combined with reduced activity. The filings don't prove that, though. Finding 2: how concentrated is chari