How much of your donation actually reaches the cause? Charity by charity

Short answer: anywhere from 57p to 98p in every £1 spent, depending on the charity — and the gap is mostly about what kind of charity it is, not how well-run it is. Every figure below is sourced directly from each charity's own published accounts or their entry on the Charity Commission register, not a generic sector average.

The figures

Most recent published figures, mainly accounts to 31 March 2025 (Sue Ryder's is their latest published "how we spend your donations" figure, undated by financial year on their own site). Four charities publish their own headline figure, linked directly: British Heart Foundation, Oxfam, Shelter and Sue Ryder. For everyone else — including Cancer Research UK, whose own marketing page doesn't state a comparable figure — the number is computed directly from that charity's own Charity Commission filing (charitable activities spend ÷ total expenditure, nothing excluded).

Why these numbers aren't a fair ranking

It would be easy to read this list as "Animal SOS Sri Lanka is the best charity and The Children's Society is the worst," and that would be a genuinely unfair conclusion. A few real reasons the numbers differ that have nothing to do with how well-run a charity is:

• Different accounting methods. The big charities that publish their own "how we spend your money" figure sometimes explicitly exclude certain costs (Oxfam's 79p, for example, excludes their retail operations entirely). The smaller charities here don't have a polished version of this stat published anywhere, so I calculated theirs directly from their Charity Commission accounts — charitable activities spend divided by total expenditure, with nothing excluded. Comparing an exclusive figure to an inclusive one isn't quite apples to apples.
• What the charity actually does changes the shape of its spending. A charity like Animal SOS Sri Lanka runs lean, with very little fundraising or governance overhead relative to its size, which is why its figure is so high. A large national charity running big fundraising campaigns, complex regulated care services, and government contracts (like The Children's Society) will always show more of its spending in "raising funds" and "governance" categories, even when that spending is entirely necessary and well managed.
• Spending money to raise money isn't waste. Fundraising costs exist because charities generally can't do charitable work without first raising the money to do it. A charity that spent 100p in every £1 directly on the cause, with nothing on fundraising, would eventually run out of money to spend.

Why I'm publishing this anyway

Because it's still useful, real information, and because "cause clarity" is one of the five things I actually rate every shop on. Knowing broadly where your donation ends up — and that it's a genuine, working charity with real oversight, not just a name on a shopfront — is part of donating with confidence, even if the exact percentage isn't the whole story.

You'll see each of these figures on the relevant shop listings in the directory too. I'll review them annually as charities publish new accounts.